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ALYS. R. YABLON:
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Grumpy middle-aged men

In his latest book, a collection of 18 short stories, noted essayist, editor and lecturer Joseph Epstein tackles the subjects of advancing middle age in its many, often depressing complexities.

The Fabulous Small Jews of the title are scrap metal dealers and academics, errant fathers and recent widowers, social misfits and high-society gangsters. Eighteen, the numerical equivalent of chai (life), implies a wide range of emotion and experience, but in fact most of these stories come across with a similar effect. A Holocaust survivor checks into an old-age home only to be confronted with non-survivors who are more morose than their experience warrants; a man struggles to cast off his dead father’s unhealthy influence only to find himself dependent upon a therapist he finds nearly as distasteful; and a son watches helplessly as his father descends into dementia. A no-nonsense divorce lawyer must face the unraveling of his own marriage, and a long-time bachelor is diagnosed with terminal cancer just months after he finally concedes to a healthy relationship. In each case, the heavy weight of disappointment and disillusion is almost too much to bear, and the tendency of the protagonists to passively accept their dissatisfying fates elicits the same frustrated resignation in the reader.

But while the stories exhibit less originality and panache than Epstein’s essays, often ending in abrupt halts before sufficiently dealing with the meaty subjects they raise, the sharp humor and sensitivity are testimonies to Epstein’s solid grounding in this generation of American Jews. The academics are appropriately stilted, the old Jewish men are jovial, the disgruntled are distinctively irritating. The stories focus on generational conflicts, guilt, sickness, unfulfilled lives and loves. Yet despite the less than uplifting subject matter, Epstein’s use of subtle but inevitably "Jewish" dialogue, both internal and external, to evoke the tones and tensions of relationships, is often laugh-out-loud funny.

In "Don Juan Zimmerman,‘ a serial bachelor composes his own imaginary personal ad for the Chicago Jewish Chronicle: ’Man in middle fifties, balding, not in very good shape, fairly well-to-do, not previously married and probably unmarriageable. Seeks easy sex of an uncomplicated kind… No taste for open communication. Limited range of interests, art and culture not included. Poor dancer. Gastronomically unadventurous. Not comfortable with children. Values less important than good looks."

And then there is the unforgettable Seymour Hefferman of "Postcards,‘ the self-proclaimed ’Zorro of culture,‘ a child genius and bitterly unpublished poet, lacking in most social graces, who turns to sending anonymous, offensively critical postcards to writers and artists whom he dislikes. Is it any wonder? When his fourth grade teacher explained to his mother that Seymour had an IQ of 153, she characteristically replied, ’So if he’s such a genius… how come his room’s a pigsty?"

BEYOND THE characteristic Jewish jokes and self-effacing descriptions, we read "The Master’s Ring," perhaps the boldest, most poignant piece in the book.

Malcolm Gaynor, formerly Max Goldstein, was the biographer of a literary figure referred to as "The Master,‘ a stereotypical anti-Semitic modernist. The Master’s works were statements on ’the dominance of one human being over another‘ and ’betrayal," and Gaynor molded his own life according to those dimensions. Shedding the layers of Jewishness from his consciousness and allowing a neutral persona to fill in the blank spaces, he betrayed his heritage in the process.

Reading Gaynor’s journals after his death, literature professor Arnold Shapiro discovers stories of rejection, dismissal and prejudice. A quota Jew in university, Max was discouraged from pursuing his goal of becoming a professor, and soon resolved to change his Jewish name and his accent, morphing into a tweedy, mid-Atlantic intellectual.

As we discover, the Judaism Max knew was ritualistic at best, devoid of spirituality: "Max, eight years old… was fishing with baited hook and string at a small creek when he heard frightful cackling sounds, half beast, half human. Turning, he looked up the hill and saw an unshaven man in a yarmulka muttering a prayer before slitting the necks of chickens, one after another, and tossing them into the high grass where, with a gruesome death cackle, some forced themselves into a last apoplectic leap before expiring… That, Max decided, was Judaism: scary and squalid, noisy and nauseating."

Shapiro reflects on the particular dilemma of the modern Jewish intellectual. Although he sympathizes with the unfair pressures and prejudices Gaynor experienced as a young man, Shapiro cannot help criticizing. Though he admits to his own assimilation and intermarriage, he cannot concede to this resignation from the "club of Jewishness‘ in the post-Holocaust 20th century. He recognizes that nearly all of the writers he studies and teaches, including the Master, bear ’the stain of Jew hating, if not Jew baiting,‘ and that Jewish intellectuals can do little more than to ’make them seem more familiar, put them through our own dramas of alienation, anti-capitalism, Freudianism, and other intellectual dipsy-doos.‘ Even so, he chooses to remain slightly outside the high literary society and within the ’heavy historical freight of his ancestry."

Of all the characters we meet here, Shapiro most closely resembles his creator in his commitment to both to the literary life at large and Judaism specifically. Epstein, who is himself from the same generation as many of his protagonists, captures the experience of identity crises at middle age and beyond from a particular perspective — one that is rife with both the guilt and pride of a Jewish sensibility.