An excerpt: Worst-Case Scenarios
Spivak leaned forward in his chair, ready to pounce. "Let me give you a for-instance," he said, and reached for the telephone that sat in front of him on the polished rosewood conference table. A group of elderly women sat across from him, some tapping their fingers on the tabletop, others holding their purses in front of them like shields. The air in the conference room was lush with the scent of perfume. "Now, let's just say that you're home alone," Spivak began. "It's nighttime. Very late - one, two in the morning." He punched some buttons on the phone. "Okay - the telephone rings."
And it did. The ring blasted into the conference room, and the group of elderly women flinched at the sound. Spivak leaned forward and adjusted the volume on the side of the phone. He looked intently across the table at a tall, buxom woman in a navy blue dress. Her silver hair was thick and piled high on her head, and a broad streak of white shot straight up through the middle of it, rising off her forehead like a runway.
"What should you do?" he asked her. "Should you answer it?"
The phone rang again, just as she was about to speak. "I'd be in bed," she said. "My husband would answer it. The phone's on his side."
The phone rang again. "He isn't there," Spivak snapped.
"He's not?" the
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Meanwhile, in "At the Great Divide" and "Shifman in Paradise," Spivak's coworker plays tough after a diagnosis of cancer. (Who knew Hodgkin's disease could be such a knee-slapper? Turns out Shifman's spleen is one of those "optional organs," as his doctor puts it: "You have a spleen? Fine! You don't have a spleen? Fine! No problem!") The patient's dirty little secret, however, is that he is actually enjoying himself--especially since his illness allows him easy access to the Teutonic charms of Greta Braunschweig. Previously, "if he touched her in anything resembling an intimate spot, she'd fix him with a dark Gestapo-like glare that made Shifman want to cry, 'My papers are in order!'" Now he finds himself missing her old ways, which made him feel more Jewish than he ever had in his life: "Who needed mumbled, unintelligible prayers to the Almighty and a bunch of boring lectures about ancient history, when you could get genuine firsthand persecution?"
If these heroes share anything, it's that they feel most Jewish under duress. Illness, anti-Semitism, death, a sharp blow to the head from a garden rake--any of these are enough to drive them into the arms of their ancestors. Shapiro, obviously, is a very funny writer, but he also offers up moments of surprising pathos, pitch-perfect for the stories they inhabit: flocks of homing pigeons "floating up into the sky like ashes" before remembering their way home; the painting Rosenthal does in a dream, in which his ex strains to hold back Abraham's murdering arm; Spivak's apology to his wife, beamed through the Flaxman Voice Transformer Deluxe so that he sounds like a choked-up Gregory Peck. Shapiro may have the timing of a borscht-belt comedian, but his heart is conspicuously in the right place. If anyone can make slapstick a convincing agent of moral redemption, he's the man. --Mary Park
"Bad Jews marks the emergence of another original voice on the contemporary Jewish American literary scene—a voice that registers in often richly comic and profoundly moving ways."—Forward.
"Gerald Shapiro casts an incisive eye over his contemporaries."—New York Times Book Review.
"Shapiro shows his readers the way home both emotionally and spiritually with his abiding compassion and tightly wound humor."—Booklist.
Bad Jews and Other Stories is a nuanced and comic vision of life, love, and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. Separated from the character-building hardships endured by their parents and grandparents, unable to find a faith of their own or for that matter to believe in much of anything at all, the characters of Bad Jews and Other Stories wander through the moral landscape of their lives in a loopy version of the Children of Israel’s meandering way home. Along the way they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And as often as not they find redemption as well as disaster.
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