I

Cover Story: Summer Reading

The Jewish News surveyed

SHORT STORIES

people around town to find out what
they've been reading this summer.
Here is a sample of responses.

By Chaim Potok
(Alfred A. Knopf; 273 pp.; $23)

ERIC GROSSMAN
Residence: Southfield
Occupation: Teacher
Summer Read:
Kim by Rudyard Kipling;
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

"Kim is a window into a
foreign world in a distant time,
while Tipping Point gave me a
new paradigm for interpreting the
world in which I currently live."

MICHAEL RUBYAN
Residence: West Bloomfield
Student: 10th grade,
Jewish Academy
Summer Read:
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

"This was a very good
portrayal of the Holocaust."

ETTA ZIVIAN
Residence: Beverly Hills
Occupation: Attorney
Summer Read:
The Judgment by D.W. Buffa

"Beautifully written for popular sus-
pense genre. I'd recommend this
above Grisham and Ludlum."

TIM ZWI CKL
Residence: Southfield
Workplace: EDS
Summer Read:
Atonement by Ian McEwan

.

"The book started oddly but
grew on me, and I ended up
really enjoying it."

MICHAEL LIPSON
Residence: Farmington Hills
Occupation: Optometrist
Summer Read:
Hot Night in the City by Trevanian

"Each chapter presents a different
world and different characters."

EMILY KRINSKY
Residence: Bloomfield Hills
Volunteer: Yad Ezra
Summer Read:

A Perfect Arrangement
by Suzanne Berne

"Interesting characters."

6/28
2002

74

OLD MEN AT MIDNIGHT

ESTHER STORIES
By Peter Orner
(Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin; 227 pp.; $12 pb)

ithout stories there is nothing. Stories are
the world's memory. The past is erased
without stories."
The speaker is a fictional character, Ilana Davita
Chandal. But the true voice belongs to her creator, the
celebrated novelist, historian and
rabbinic scholar Chaim Potok.
Born in 1929, Potok has
OLD MEN
emerged over the course of his
AT
35-year writing career as the
MIDNIGHT
chronicler par excellence of the
internal conflict experienced by
so many American Jews — felt
with special poignance in the
CHAIM POTOK
aftermath of the Holocaust —
between the appeal of secular
society and the pull of Orthodox tradition.
Now, in the ever-popular author's latest work, Old
Men at Midnight, Potok's fictional alter ego, Davita,
plays muse and mentor to three disparate men, each
of who has been shaped by Jewish heritage and
scarred by war.
Their individual tales are revealed in three novellas,
each of which could stand separately, but are linked
by Davita's somewhat peripheral but nonetheless res-
onant presence in each as an exacting confessor and
compassionate consoler.
Her ability to listen without flinching to each sur-
vivor's tale leads her to declare, ultimately, her belief
that "there is always a ram in the bush" — a decep-
tively simple announcement that simultaneously
affirms her optimism and acknowledges the bleak
circumstances of history that will always require a
miraculous rescue.
Many readers, of course, will remember Davita as
the heroine of Potok's 1985 novel, Davita's Harp (in
which the main characters from Potok's novels The
Chosen and The Promise similarly appeared in sup-
porting roles).
No, it is not at all necessary to have read Potok's
previous work to enjoy Old Men at Midnight. But
just knowing that Davita has resurfaced (along with
her harp, ever symbolic of the imagination's creative,
healing capacity) serves to reinforce Potok's central
themes of Jewish continuity and connection, the
redemptive powers of memory, and the transcen-
dence of personal pain through art.
At times, Potok's storytelling is a bit sketchy, par-
ticularly in his depiction of Davita, whose own moti-
vations and ongoing history remain largely hidden.
But throughout, Potok illuminates the connections
that bind people to their communities and the bonds
of memory from which, however hard we try, we can
never free ourselves.
That Potok's characters are Jewish and the back-
drop to his stories Jewish history may brand him as
an ethnic writer, but his larger, spiritual and philo-
sophical concerns belong to everyone.

eter Orner's observations of everyday minutiae
— stray marks on an antique table in a B&B
in Nova Scotia, a lone gnarled tree on a hill-
top — spiral into entire worlds of their own that
rarely go where one thinks they might.
In his debut short-story collection, Esther Stories,
Orner, who has received a Pushcart Prize and also
was published in Best American Short Stories 2001,
uses the sparest of exquisitely chosen words to con-
jure terrains not only of place, but of heart and soul
as well.
Orner's skill lies in more than astute observation of
everyday life. Many of the stand-alone stories in the
book's first half turn on a single phrase, deft as a
stiletto, taking the reader into unexpected recesses of
his characters' minds.
Time and again the author portrays the tension
between loneliness and "the grit of living and being
with other people."
The second half of Esther Stories consists of inter-
twined short works that explore
the lost worlds of Orner's grand-
parents' marriages in Fall River,
Mass., and the Chicago suburb
of Roger's Park.
This Chicago native, who
describes himself as a "Jew who
feels guilty for not having a spir-
itual Jewish life," nevertheless
captures post-World War II sub-
urban Jewish life as vividly as he
portrays the Gopher Hole Bar in
Gilbertsville, Iowa, and a bridge over the
Homochitto River in Sibley, Miss.
Orner again concerns himself with his characters'
loneliness and the unexpected and desperate turns
lives can take. The beautiful and brilliant Esther of
the book's title, pushed into a disastrous marriage,
eventually stabs her husband.
Divorced from Lloyd, "a smelly potato from the
look at his mug," Esther disintegrates from a person
who "looks so much like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof seductive, sweaty, a little nasty, a lit-
tle pouty" into a "portly, angry hollow-eyed woman"
who lives in her parents' basement.
An editor more obsessed with symmetry might have
bracketed the initial short stories with each of the two
novellas. But even placed as they are, "Fall River
Marriage" and "The Waters" loop back and embrace
the themes of the 14 stories that precede them.
"Who needs more sorry?" Sarah Kaplan asks her
husband, frustrated by his obsessive reading of John
Hersey's Hiroshima. "We've got enough sorry as it is."
Walt's unspoken answer to Sarah's challenge is
Orner's own response as well: "We can always use
more sorry."
That's not despair talking, but good old Jewish

— Diane Cole

-- Debra B. Darvick

p

rachmones.

