Podcast of my story "Grow, Grow"

Superstition Review will be airing a podcast of my reading of "Grow, Grow" on December 10, 2013.

Enclosed Garden, by Angelina Muniz-Huberman

The translator of Angelina Muniz-Huberman’s collection of stories “Enclosed Gardens” warns us that in translating this work from Spanish to English, much has been lost.   

Of course, this is the case with all works of translation, but this translator goes out of her way to explain that what we are reading is a thin facsimile of the original.

This is what makes this book such poor reading.   Without the background in Spanish and Mexican literature, whose allusions abound in this small collection, these stories appear to be little more than one more venture into Spanish and Latin American magic realism, and who needs that?

If you have read Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Luis Borges, you don’t really need to read Enclosed Garden.  It seems derivative and second rate.

Agave Magazine

Agave Magazine will be publishing my story "The Kingdom of Empty Space" in Vol.1, Issue 2 {Winter/Spring 2014).

Check out their excellent web page:

Agave Magazine

The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories

You’re in some seriously weird territory in The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, edited by Ilan Stavans.   

First, collecting a series of stories under the rubric “Jewish” is difficult by definition.  What is a “Jewish” story?  The answer is, there is really no such thing.  Many of the stories in this collection have little, if any, Jewish content.  So, the reader must seek underlying or unconscious Jewish content, and suddenly one is in an interpretative world with many pitfall and few benefits.

With this central question unanswered, the collection stands tottering and uneven.  It spans the globe, gives the reader a glimpse into figures long since receded into the literary dustbin (like Israel Zangwill), contemporary powerhouses like Roth, Oz, Bellow, and a lot in between, and old masters like Agnon.

So, this collection will please few.  Yes, there is a selection to choose from; sure it is necessarily broad and inclusive, yet somehow, for all that effort, the stories lacks emotional or intellectual punch.   

It is as if the editor picked breadth over content.

The Path of Blessing

Marcia Prager’s The Path of Blessing: Experiencing the Energy and Abundance of the Divine, is an extremely gentle, soft examination of the constellation of blessings which accompany Jewish religious life.  She focuses on the most used Baruck ata… formula, using each word of the generic part of the blessing as the jumping off point for examination and exegesis.

Prager was taught by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, so his imprint is all over this work.  The Jewish Renewal text presented here is definitely for beginners, not for people more advanced in their study of Judaism, who will quickly become bored or frustrated with Prager’s often elemental interpretations.

Red Cavalry - Issac Babel

Russian-Jewish writer Isaak Babel’s collection of stories, Red Cavalry, comes close to perfection in many ways.  In terms of theme, tone, pacing, and momentum, Babel gets everything right.

The collection follows the exploits of a Cossack cavalry unit in its fight against the Poles.  Although war features heavily in the stories, it is merely the focal point of the action.  Babel takes characters from diverse backgrounds, experiences, political and religious stances and shades, and gives them a voice in his tales.

It is no wonder that Babel did not survive Stalin.  A mind and creatively so vast and encompassing could never fit into an ideology no matter how broadly defined.