While the Messiah Tarries: Stories (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)
The mundane and the mystical collide in these remarkable, offbeat stories that use a Jewish-American milieu to pose universal moral and metaphysical puzzles. In "Gematria," a Manhattan jewelry dealer encounters a mysterious woman who wants a square emerald; a series of murders follows, accompanied by cryptic messages that reveal the murderer's familiarity with gematria, the kabbalistic discipline of calculating the numerical value of words in order to reveal "the secret truths evident beneath the surface of the language." In "The Big Metzia," a New York garment manufacturer copes with a ghost as he teams up in business with two shady Russian emigre brothers who lead him through the entrepreneurial minefields of glasnost-era Moscow. Bukiet (Sandman's Dust) creates memorable, maverick characters who live on the edge, treading a dangerous path between the sacred and the profane: a Columbia archeologist on a dig in the Near East believes he has unearthed the birthplace of the eternal monotheistic God ("Old Words for New"); a New Jersey real-estate lawyer tracks down a crackpot German refugee peddling a rare Nazi home movie ("Himmler's Chickens"); a dishonest Kosher butcher is a closet vegetarian ("The Golden Calf and the Red Heifer"); an upstate New York rabbi tries to outwit the devil ("The Devil and the Dutchman"). Bukiet is a gifted, inventive writer whose fine sense of contrast is evident not only in his eerie juxtapositions but also in moments of perfect comic timing.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.