The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories
Stern manages to be both ebullient and caustic, even within perfectly stitched sentences, throughout his cunning and transporting tales of Jewish life. This vital collection of new and previously published works spans a quarter of a century of Stern’s shape-shifting and loving stories of families and enclaves, most notably the Jewish neighborhood in WWI–era Memphis called the Pinch. Here the pragmatic old hands focused on assimilation shun those among them who pursue mystical revelations and run the Neighborhood House, where the greenhorns were taught how to box-step and brush their teeth. Stern’s fablelikeaccountsof mismatched marriages, misfit children, gossip, fear, and folly are stoked by sharp-tongued disputations and philosophical humor and stand as the American descendants of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales. Similarly vivid stories take place in New York City during the high tide of Jewish immigration and in Europe, including one about a boy in a death camp. Stern breathes life into every robustly detailed and emotionally nuanced story, lifting the veil between the earthly and the divine to create a radiant book of mischief and magic. --Donna Seaman