Jokes, specifically Jewish jokes, are an integral part of this entertaining first novel set in Brooklyn in 1949. The rather generic male characters-Archie Feinstein, Jack Goldfarb, Benny Kubbleman and their pals, all presided over by fatherly retiree Meyer Woolf-mostly sit around in a luncheonette where they argue and schmooze, discuss politics, women, their creaky marriages or jobs. The female characters, in 1940s fashion, tend to be brash, forward, sarcastic, assertive and highly sexed. Izzy, the only fully realized character, a street singer who plays a concertina, was a boxer before WWII, when shrapnel was permanently lodged in his head. Haunted also by memories of his father, who was killed in a pogrom in Poland, Izzy drifts from one babe to the next, having a fair amount of raunchy sex. The punchy, clipped dialogue, which exudes a comic-strip flavor, is riddled with jokes about infidelity, lawyers, nuclear war, the H-bomb, sex, Jewish women, God, Stalin, Hitler and the Holocaust. Set on the eve of the Korean War, the novel speaks volumes about Jewish humor-or any humor-as a survival mechanism to cope in an irrational world from which God seems to be on vacation. Brooklyn-born Bloom, who teaches at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, peppers the story with period references-Milton Berle, the Brooklyn Dodgers, etc.-that create a wonderful ambiance. Many of the borscht belt jokes are pedestrian; others are laugh-aloud funny. (Mar.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Bloom, a Brooklyn native, won the 1995 Associated Writing Programs award for this moving first novel about a World War II veteran trying to make sense of the past while negotiating the present. In Bald Sam's Brooklyn luncheonette, Izzy regularly joins a group of friends who spend their time telling well-worn jokes as a way of masking their unspoken fear that the Holocaust was a sign that God had forsaken the Jews and their belief that the looming crisis in Korea will escalate into World War III. Decent and kind, but bearing two burdens, Izzy listens to the jokes but cannot tell them; along with the pieces of shrapnel in his head, he cannot forget the death of his father in a Polish pogrom. This novel, told almost entirely in dialog, does a fine job of portraying one of the walking wounded whose best hope for a friend is that "she might never have to know any more than she could bear." Recommended for literary collections.-Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Debut fiction and poignant character study that captures the tone of Jewish life in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1949.
Bloom brilliantly exploits the novel as a form by drawing on the simultaneity of film editing. Indeed, writers jealous of film's ability to juggle two or three separate scenes into one flow of images will wonder why no one else has tried this device since Jean-Paul Sartre's postwar novel Troubled Sleep, which elided scenes in midparagraph or midsentence. Here, Bloom uses the technique sparingly until the later chapters, which take off like the whoosh of the montages in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Paranoia about WW III blooms while Jews meet in Bald Sam's luncheonette and tell jokes (an aesthetic against racial pain). Izzy, a former boxer, has returned to Brownsville after fighting in Germany with the 39th Infantry. He has a head full of shrapnel, plus a disability pension, and fears that he's emotionally lobotomized ("I have the feeling whatever's happening, it's not really happening to me"); meanwhile, he lives off his disability, and sometimes plays his concertina in courtyards for coins and for contact with housewives. As a child in Poland, he memorized the complete fund of Jewish jokes told at his father's tavern. Then at ten, fleeing persecution and his father's murder, Izzy, his sister Miriam, and mother came to Depression Brownsville. His mother has since died, and his exhausted sister survives by running a tiny coffeeshop, where Izzy occasionally helps out. Izzy's older friend Meyer Woolf has been pushed by his wife to invite Izzy to dinner in order to meet Meyer's aging niece Celia, and the muted dinner is one of the stronger, more closely woven set-pieces here. Also rich are Izzy's dalliances with Maureen, an aging Irish whore, and with Mary, a librarian crazed by thoughts of the newly announced hydrogen bomb.
Memories of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Joyce's Cyclops/bar scene in Ulysses. Not much seems to happen, but a memorable movie lies embedded in these haunting pages.