| Title | : | The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0618721959 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780618721955 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2010 |
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories Reviews
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“In the end he was just another kibitzers, staring in at the edge of the crowd”.
The old geezers in these stories are wonderful: SO GOOD!!!!! ....a doctor, a retired Philosophy professor, English teachers, neighbors in the Chicago area mostly - some retired transplants from New York.. Jewish - pushing senior years and beyond...doing simple things from bits of shopping, simple dinners while watching PBS, Reading biographies of composers and musicians, and the occasional 19th century novel, or the occasional chamber music concert, or foreign movie...
....days predominately passing in solitude.
While a few of the men were content’ with the cycles of life, few regrets, others were suffering from late-life crisis.
....wives have been dead for many years.
one died of leukemia... another from ALS... etc.
Good wives. Their wives were loved.
It was the age of Viagra, where men in their 80s were walking around with grins on their faces.... but the men in these stories didn’t feel a strong urge to pursue women.
They were educated...had dedicated their lives to working hard. Their minds were sharp and active. Their libidos less so.
This is the first time I’ve read anything by the author
Joseph Epstein.
I love this author!!! Who is he???
More please!!!!!!
A happy smiling reader 🙂
*If you live in Chicago area ...and or enjoy stories about ordinary people...by a bright skilled writer...
you’ll love the collections of these stories too. -
Another collection of short story jewels from Joseph Epstein (Fabulous Small Jews). Set in Chicago with lots of local color.
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The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff by Joseph Epstein, is a book of short stories, all of which focus on male Jewish protagonists, usually in their 60’s, in Chicago. The stories generally deal with lost love and disappointment. The protagonists often are living their days out without much thought of change in the future. They are caught up in the myth of the melancholy of old age. They think they are content with their lives and adjusted to the losses they have suffered until some event changes their perspective.
In the title story, Dr. Minkoff, whose wife has recently died of ALS, goes to a fundraiser for that disease and meets a charming widow. He tries to develop a relationship with her but fails because she is too rich and he is not ready for affluent retired life. At the end of the story he “readied himself to haul those two large Louis Vuitton suitcases onto the street and into a cab, so that he could get back to work.”
In The Philosopher and the Check-out Girl, a philosophy professor and a check-out girl begin an affair. He fears intimacy and she tries to help him along. He tells her, “I’m not used to living life so directly”. She responds “You ought to try it. Dive in. The water’s fine.” “I won’t drown?” he asked. “I won’t let you go under. I promise.”
Salzman, the philosopher, takes a chance and dives in.
Bartlestein’s First Fling is typical of the stories in the collection. Bartlestein has played it safe all his 64 years. He has a wife and two daughters, two grand-children, and has been faithful to his wife up until now. “So the question is, what is Lawrence R. Bartlestein doing in his office at 6:45 on a Wednesday night, slipping his hand under the blouse of a young woman named Elaine Leslie, a desigher at Perelman plumbing? Elaine at this moment has her hand on Bartlesteins belt buckle, loosening it with what seem like very deft hands.” While Bartlestein’s relationship with Elaine does not work out, he realizes he is cut out for the responsible life he has. “What he is truly grateful for, he realizes almost with relief as he pulls into the driveway, is that she showed him a kind of life he is now certain he could never lead.”
The final story in the collection, Kuperman Awaits Ecstasy is a excellent and perhaps my favorite. Kuperman is an auctioneer, very successful, with a net worth of about three million dollars. What is important to Kuperman is his business and not much else; not his family, not the arts and not his friends. He meets a charming woman who loves music and they begin a friendship that gradually gets deeper and deeper through music. However, he finds out that she is dying. He speaks at her funeral with a kind of emotion he had never experienced before. He goes back to his home and listens to Mozart. “The music filled him with pleasure of a kind he had never known before. Although Kuperman may not have been fully aware of it, he had just achieved ecstasy.”
The stories are all filled with moral conflict of some sort and a yearning to experience life in a more fulfilled manner. They are fraught with guilt about the past and what-ifs. The book is also a love story about Chicago. I found the collection excellent and fulfilling. I read the stories aloud to my husband as we drove long distances and it was a wonderful way to experience this book. -
A bunch of kindle deals for Valentine's day - most of them look good!
Find them from the
Kindle Daily Deal page.
Maynard and Jennica $0.99
Frances and Bernard $1.99
A Certain Slant of Light $1.99
First Comes Love $1.99
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff $1.99
Cupid $1.99
Barefoot Season $2.19
The Frontiers Saga $1.99
Furies $1.99
(additionally, once you own the kindle book you can get the audible book for $1.99)
The Captive Maiden $0.99
The Merchant's Daughter $0.99
The Fairest Beauty $0.99
The Healer's Apprentice $0.99 -
Like the solid and decent, if unremarkable, men of whom he mostly writes, you can depend on Joseph Epstein. You can count on his stories being immediately engrossing, right from the first sentence, and thoroughly entertaining. You can depend that, no matter how tired you are when reading him, your eyes will never grow heavy with desired sleep, even when you couldn’t make it through a page-and-a-half of anything else. And you can be sure that two or three times in a collection, he will touch you deeply. In this volume, I especially recommend “Kuperman Awaits Ecstasy.” Funny . . . and beautiful.
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I enjoyed every one of these short stories.
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Epstein is a bit of a throwback, no flavour of the month sort of writer. He writes crafted, crisp, clearly-thought-out prose; no flower and very little sentimentality, in fact, he has a bitter aversion to the pretension of artsiness. His chosen subject matter is often Chicago Jewish males, and in the case of this new collection, men about the author's age, in the third act of life. It's very much Saul Bellow territory and one may wonder why Epstein has never written a novel, though guesses are easy to hazard. For one thing the novel is a 'messy' form (Mordecai Richler, when asked why he wrote novels instead of poetry or short-fiction, famously said that novels left a lot of room for error.) For Epstein, it is apparent from his prose, that any 'messiness' would be intolerable. Another reason may be that novels about Chicago Jewish men of a certain age and ilk are Bellow territory, and he's smart enough to know that it would be unwise to cross that boundary and risk being compared to his illustrious predecessor novelist. It's too bad really because I think Epstein's work would stand up quite well. His doesn't have Bellow's penchant for excess (over-thinking, over-writing, over-indulging.) An Epstein novel, I believe, would be tight and satisfying, perhaps even surpassing Bellow's late period novellas. I know this is pure speculation but the economy and humour of Epstein's prose allows him to manage in a few words and sentences what it often took Bellow pages to describe. For example, in the story "Bartlestein's First Fling" about a man in the plumbing supply business who flirts with the possibility of living a life of passion for the first time, Epstein writes, of the protagonist, "He found the Lexus to be the perfect car for him: dependable, not too showy, efficient, quietly luxurious. He has himself become a kind of human Lexus." In another story, Epstein says of a businessman, "he laughed a lot but I never saw him smile." The comparisons with Bellow, admittedly unfair, are inevitable. It may be why I read the modus operandi in "My Brother Eli" as Epstein's response to what Bellow himself was known for; writing family and friends into his fiction, particularly as a way of humiliating ex-wives. Eli is a Bellow-like character, a novelist, winner of every major literary prize, the toast of Chicago and the literary world, married multiple times, irredeemably self-centered, indulgent and miserable despite his 'success'. Eli keeps getting bailed out by his older brother Lou an auto parts salesman and narrator of the story. When he reads Eli's novels, Lou can't make heads or tails of them, "I had to drag my eyes across every page, thinking who could possibly give a damn about all this. So the hero of the books is sensitive, and the people he is forced to live among aren't. I didn't see the big deal." Epstein mostly sides with the uneducated, the uncultured, and the stalwart. He has genuine affinity for hard-scrabble, hard working, self-made men, particularly those who came of age with WWII, and who might have skipped university in favour of building lives for themselves and their families; men who sought and achieved a quietly noble existence. In the collection's exquisite coda "Kuperman Awaits Ecstasy" one such man is introduced to the pleasures of classical music by a dying woman while providing the ideal companionship to her in the last stage of her life. Every story in this collection seems to be about the search for dignity, which arrives, often unexpectedly, in the form of a gift from a relationship between two complete opposites. In "Beyond the Pale" that relationship is first between a boy and his grandfather who teaches his grandson to read Yiddish. Later, the boy, now a young man and literary editor, becomes the last hope to rescue from oblivion the reputation of a famous Yiddish novelist. As I said, Epstein is a superb craftsman of character whose prose are diamond-cut, hard and precise, not a word wasted. Where his stories tend to lack is their endings. They fizzle out instead of crackle-pop. And maybe that's another reason why Epstein has avoided the novel, plot is not his strong suit. One ending that does provide the required punch is "You Could Also Love a Rich Girl" which closes with a Vaudeville-style zinger.
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"The Love Song of A Jerome Minkoff" is Joseph Epstein's third book of short stories. He has written books of essays as well as other works. I had read - and thoroughly enjoyed - Epstein's first two books of short stories and eagerly chose "Love Song" from the latest Vine list.
I am not a great fan of short stories. I generally like longer works of fiction, but lately I've come to realise that the writing of good short stories is probably far more difficult than writing a novel. With short stories, the author doesn't have the latitude to endlessly express himself. What he writes must be - by definition - short and to the point. Characters have to be drawn carefully and plots are often jettisoned to make way for character development.
Epstein is a master at character development. This book, consisting of fourteen short stories, begins and ends with stories about older men, widowers, who are given second chances at love and fulfillment. All of his stories are set in Chicago - with some action in California, New York, and Washington DC - and all are about men of a certain age. The age that it appears Epstein is now. All the characters are Jewish, and most raised on the North Side of Chicago, the Chicago of Senn, Sullivan, and Mather High Schools, and now living in either the northern suburbs or the Gold Coast. Most of the stories are written in the first person. All the stories are interesting, all of them. There's not a clunker or loser in the bunch. Each could have been easily expanded into novel length, but all tell their stories in the pages allotted.
These stories tell of a generation of men, mostly coming from immigrant families and coming of age after WW2. Generally they've stayed married to their first wives and are reasonably content in the paths their lives have taken. Each looks back over lives well-lived, with the nuances in relationships that come from long lives.
I can't stress enough how well written these stories are and how much I think most readers will enjoy them. You don't have to be Jewish and from Chicago to appreciate these stories.
And, if you enjoy Joseph Epstein's stories, you might also enjoy the work of Adam Langer. His novels are set a generation after Epstein's - and, of course being novels, they're full length - but they're set in the same North Side of Chicago milieu as Epstein's. Langer's novels - sly and hilarious - are "Crossing California" and "The Washington Story". -
This is a collection of short stories mostly about Jewish residents of Chicago in the postwar era. By turns charming and unsettling, most of the stories begin by describing the daily rhythms of Jews in various walks of life, covering the standard set of family, friends, romance, work and aging. The mostly conventional characters range from blue-collar to academics, literary types, and financiers, but mostly the stories center around the paradox of the unknowable or unanswerable that lurks in all of our lives: why do some people behave badly, or fall in love with the people they do, or make any number of decisions that affect the people around them so profoundly. No answers are proferred but along the way we get to see a range of at times quite similar but nonetheless equally entertaining characters and to ponder some of the mysteries of life in a time-honored fashion.
A quick read, with tight prose, I greatly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone interested in modern American fiction, Chicago or Jewish culture. -
If Fabulous Small Jews (my first Epstein book) was a fluke discovery, this gem here is a product of my concerted efforts at prospecting. Most of the stories made me feel I was really there. His characters, especially, seem very real and familiar to me. They're usually middle-aged or retired teachers, doctors, businessmen, writers. Who grapple with friendship, loneliness, dating, affairs. The mundane things, yes--but I found myself so involved in their lives.. I applaud Mr. Epstein for his genius in storytelling!
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As typical to Epstein a pleasant and sentimetal read.
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It was sweet to read stories about elderly Jewish men from Chicago. This is a demographic that isn't frequently portrayed in fiction.
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Some stories were better than others.
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Boring in the most beautiful way. A perfect way to spend your short commute spying on the lives of others. Love it.
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The second book of short stories I read by Epstein. All poignant stories of Jewish men that are all sad in many ways and speak many truths. Highly enjoyable.
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This is one talented writer.
While I’m not a fan of short stories (I like to get immersed, swept up in a book), the common approach and tone the author uses seemed perfect to me. Each story was a gem. -
Having read a couple of the author's essays, I was eager to dive into this book of stories. I read the first five, and am abandoning it. There is no redemption here, just sad brokenness. And too much profanity for my tastes.
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An enjoyable set of stories about older Jewish gentlemen, primarily set in Chicago, who are rethinking some of the major events and decisions in their lives.
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"Life offers more mysteries than there's time to solve. I fancy myself a thinking man, but I haven't solved a single one."
Let's begin with the obvious and say that Joseph Epstein is a great writer. I knew this from several essays I had read, and I was interested to see how his writing would translate to fiction. The answer seems to be that his writing's form remains impeccable, but his narratives are disappointingly lifeless to a degree. This is a harsh criticism on my part, and perhaps lifeless is far too strong a word. It's just that even though I enjoyed Epstein's observations I never really felt engaged by his characters or the situations they find themselves in.
Those characters are pretty uniformly intellectual people--academics who have devoted their lives, in varying degrees, to literary pursuits, with varying degrees of success. This is where Epstein's stories shine: capturing the vanities, disappointments, and confusions of academics. The burning shame and envy of the ambitious academic whose talent is vastly inferior to his or her drive. The bewildering ways in which academic smarts can be so wildly different from street smarts. The ways that intellectual drive can alienate you or leave you disconnected from other parts of the world. The fierce competition, the jealousies, the loyalties, etc. Epstein turns through all of the various topics relating to his theme with the ease of a man who has seen them all, alternately condemning and praising the various ways of academics. He seems to love his "high-IQ misfits, blessed with dazzling minds or imaginations but unequipped to take life straight on," but he never fails to see them for who they really are. One group might be derided for lacking "perspective, discrimination, distance, above all moral judgment," and so on. But they always have a quiet dignity. They are noble, working for recognition and respect instead of money. Take the character in one story who "occasionally published poetry in magazines with more contributors than subscribers." Her dogged perseverance is admirable, even if her inability to let her daughter set her own goals in life is decidedly not.
Epstein also has a sharp wit that comes out a little too infrequently for my taste. In one story a character describes his neighbor's daughter by noting that "boys seemed to take no interest in her, and in their crude adolescent way no doubt referred to her (I hoped only behind her back) as a dog or a pig," blissfully unaware that the "crude adolescent" remark was actually his own invention. It's a biting, amusing, and remarkably subtle dig on Epstein's part, and I just wish that there had been more moments like that. Because those moments really let you into the story and interact with the characters (even if it is only to pass judgment), and by and large I found the stories to be impenetrable. The only story I felt engaged in was "Casualty," the second entry in the collection, about one professor's lengthy relationship with an alcoholic colleague. That leaves a whopping thirteen tales that I felt estranged from, which I don't think I need to tell you isn't exactly the best reading experience in the world.
Still, Epstein's writing is superlative. Personally, I think it's better suited for essays. I think I'll continue to read him in that form instead (Snobbery: The American Version is a must read). -
This is not my favorite of Epstein's books; to my mind, Fabulous Small Jews is much better. In "Love Song," I felt that several of the stories were weaker -- there's often too much background rather than action, and things wander a bit. I say that, too, as a reader who's generally patient and doesn't expect strongly plot-oriented stories at all.
Also, more than three of the stories contained resentful remarks about women whom the protagonists viewed as not being the right type of woman: women on academic staffs who were feminists, women who were gay or whom his characters took for gay, and women who "caused problems" by the assessment of Epstein's characters.
Characters are characters, I know, and they all have their own points of view. But when something like this seems recurring, it's hard not to notice. I was disappointed to see that, because in the past I've very much liked Epstein's books. -
Really enjoyable. You care about all the characters.
