arts & entertainment
The
Bard Of
Brookline
At 75, short
story master
Edith Pearlman
is finally being
recognized.
Eric Herschthal
New York Jewish Week
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48
November 10 • 2011
IN
*
R
ecognition was never some-
thing Edith Pearlman asked
for, but she can no longer
ignore it. Last month, the 75-year-old
Jewish writer was named a finalist for
the National Book Award in fiction for
her latest collection of short stories,
Binocular Vision.
And while Pearlman isn't exactly
dodging the limelight, she's not going
out of her way to bask in it, either.
"The praise that has come is very
welcomed," Pearlman said from her
home in Brookline, Mass., where she
has lived for decades. "But it's nothing I
missed before.
"When I was young:' she added, "I
wanted to publish a book simply to be
buried with it; that's all I wanted. I had
no ambition beyond that."
But given her prodigious gifts — her
economic use of words; her ability to
craft astutely observed, deeply humane
stories that grapple with the Holocaust,
revolutions and assimilation — it is no
wonder someone would notice.
To be fair, the National Book Award
jurors are somewhat late to the party.
Earlier this year, Pearlman won the
prestigious PEN/Malamud Award, given
annually to a significant short story
writer; her works have appeared regu-
larly in the Best American Short Story
series; and in January, when her latest
collection came out, the exclamatory
appraisal was put on the cover of the
New York Times Sunday Book Review.
"Pearlman's view of the world is
large and compassionate, delivered
through small, beautifully precise
moments:' wrote Roxana Robinson, an
accomplished short story writer her-
self. "These quiet, elegant stories add
something significant to the literary
landscape."
That so many of Pearlman's stories
brim with Jewish characters is hard to
miss, too.
Stories like "Day of Awe" focus on a
Jewish-American grandfather who goes
to visit his gay son in Central America.
He arrives 26 hours before Yom Kippur,
and throughout the story, the grandfa-
ther frets that he will defile the holiest
day of the Jewish year if he cannot find
a proper minyan of 10 Jewish men. But,
as he becomes endeared to the locals,
everyone begins to seem Jewish.
"In the bed alone he found himself
wondering whether the handsome
Chilean chef might also be a little
bit Jewish',' Pearlman writes of the
grandfather. "And that native Canadian
woman from last night's party — such
an expert kvetch."
Other stories capture the tensions
within Israeli society.
Perhaps most memorably, in
"Allog," which was included in the Best
American Short Stories collection from
2000, an aging Jewish family warms to
a non-Jewish Southeast Asian nurse.
Since Israeli citizens don't want that
kind of job, the government invites
impoverished immigrants on tempo-
rary visas to fill the positions.
"Citizenship was not part of the
deal:' Pearlman writes."Weren't these
people already citizens someplace else?
The Law of Return did not apply to
Catholics, which most of them nomi-
nally were, nor to hepatoscopists" — a
practitioner of Eastern medicine —
"which some of them were said to be."
Pearlman sets her stories in far-flung
places, from Latin America to Israel,
and a central theme is often disloca-
tion. So you'd think the writer would
have lived a nomadic existence her-
self. But she hasn't, she said. She's lived
in Brookline for much of her adult life,
with the exception of a year spent living
in Israel in the mid-1990s — where she
got the idea for "Allog."
"All the stories I write come from
someone I've met, or some anecdote
I've heard:' Pearlman said, noting that
few of her stories are autobiographical.
Yet she acknowledges that many of
the stories hit close to home. Her father
immigrated to the U.S. from a small
Jewish town outside of Kiev when he
was just a boy, at the turn of the 20th
century. Her maternal grandparents
also were Jewish immigrants from