The End of the Jews: A Novel [Paperback]

Adam Mansbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2009

The ruthlessly engrossing and beautifully rendered story of the Brodskys, a family of artists who realize, too late, one elemental truth: Creation’s necessary consequence is destruction.

Each member of the mercurial clan in Adam Mansbach’s bold new novel faces the impossible choice between the people they love and the art that sustains them. Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remakes American culture while slowly suffocating his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black musicians only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.
The End of the Jews offers all the rewards of the traditional family epic, but Mansbach’s irreverent wit and rich, kinetic prose shed new light on the genre. It runs on its own chronometer, somersaulting gracefully through time and space, interweaving the tales of these three protagonists who, separated by generation and geography, are leading parallel lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The lives of a young Jewish man in the 1930s and a young Czech woman in the 1980s echo across generations in Mansbach's (Angry Black White Boy) continuing investigations into ethnic identity. Tristan Brodsky, the son of New York Jewish immigrant parents, is introduced to pre-WWII jazz and African-American culture by a City College professor who mentors him into a mostly successful, though often controversial, career as a novelist. Tristan's grandson and namesake, known as Tris, is a suburban teen in thrall to hip-hop culture who becomes a novelist himself. (Tris's writerly angst provides some of the funniest scenes in the book.) Then there's Nina Hricek, a talented young Czech photographer who is all but adopted by a touring American jazz group passing through Prague: the black band members affectionately dub her Pigfoot and insist that she must be part Creole. Nina becomes a sort of apprentice to the group's tour photographer. One night, when covering a gig at New York's Blue Note, she locks eyes with a man working at the club—Tris. Mansbach moves effortlessly between U.S. jazz clubs of different eras and Communist Prague, and his dialogue rings true. Believably eccentric characters and an inventive cross-generational plot make this novel of immigration's vicissitudes a delight. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Praise for The End of the Jews

“A beautiful, funny, heartbreaking book that manages to take on art, love, identity, class anxiety, being Jewish, and wishing you were black. Very few writers could have attempted all this without farcical results. Adam Mansbach succeeds, brilliantly. The End of the Jews is an intense, painful, poignant book.”
-The Boston Globe


“Set against some of the great events of the 20th century -- Mansbach brings off some extraordinary scenes…unique.”
-LA Times

“Smart and cynical.. the creative partnerships among artists are suggestively and beautifully portrayed.”
-The New York Times

“A stirring panoramic snapshot. The ambition and artfulness in the the novel’s pages earns it the right to be part of the same conversation as Call It Sleep and The Ghost Writer.”
-Washington City Paper

“A radiant world…full, memorable characters…Mansbach's prose crackles with insight.”
-San Francisco Chronicle

“With roving, insightful omniscience, Mansbach considers the predicaments of artists and the pratfalls of love…careful and humane–reverential of human complexity and more impressive for it.”
-Time Out New York

“Mansbach nails the itchy resentment embedded in the symbiotic relationship between artist and subject.”
-Time Out Chicago

“Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of its consequences—very exciting fiction indeed.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A delight.” —Publishers Weekly

“Adam Mansbach is a true talent and his new book is a masterwork of the Jewish arts of humor and sadness.”
—Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

“Lyrical, brave, and moving . . . further proof of Adam Mansbach’s formidable talent. At every turn, The End of the Jews is startling in its honesty. This novel is not to be missed.”
—Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio

“As Czeslaw Milosz famously said, ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ but Adam Mansbach takes this notion to new extremes in this smart, moving novel. This is fascinating, scorching drama.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

“Mansbach has made something new of the multigenerational Jewish epic; this is far more tough-minded reading than we are used to on the subject. I don’t love Jews any less for it, and neither does Mansbach, but I do know us better for what we are. This is a heartfelt, truthful book.”
—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men

“Few writers tackle a story with as much sheer vigor as Adam Mansbach. Replete with sorrow, humor, and furious energy, The End of the Jews is an unflinching novel of hard truth.”
—Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (March 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385520425
• ISBN-13: 978-0385520423
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #905,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam Mansbach's most recent book, Go the F*ck to Sleep, is a #1 New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked-about books of the decade. A viral sensation that shot to #1 on Amazon.com months before the book was even available, GTFTS has also topped bestseller lists in many of the other thirty-plus countries in which it's been published, and is forthcoming as a feature film from Fox 2000.

Mansbach's last novel, The End of the Jews, won the 2008 California Book Award and was long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Prize. His previous novel, Angry Black White Boy, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005; it is taught at more than eighty universities and was adapted into a prize-winning stage play. He is also the author of the novel Shackling Water, the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, and A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing, an anthology of original short stories which he co-edited with T Cooper.

An inaugural recipient of the Ford Foundation's Future Aesthetics Artist Grant, Mansbach is the 2009-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. The founding editor of the pioneering 1990s hip hop journal Elementary, his fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, N+1, Vibe, and JazzTimes, and been widely anthologized. Mansbach's forthcoming projects include a graphic novel, Nature of the Beast, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2012, and a new novel, Rage is Back. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is a frequent lecturer on college campuses across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You don't have to be Jewish ...., March 30, 2008

By 

Richard P. Carpenter (Danvers, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The End of the Jews: A Novel (Hardcover)

I am not Jewish, yet I enjoyed Adam Mansbach's moving multi-genererational novel immensely, and so, I suspect, will you. Certainly the novel is laced with references to Jewish customs, traditions, and even dishes (noodle kugel, anyone?), and it deals partly with the complex relationships between Jews and blacks. But ultimately the book is less about being Jewish than about being human. It is about closeness and aloofness. It is about what marriage does and doesn't accomplish. It is about friends and family and how difficult it sometimes is to extricate yourself from situations caused by those nearest to you. There is sadness and tension (and a modicum of sex), but there is also humor, and a chapter in which grandfather and grandson go on a graffiti expedition is simply a howl. In the end, you will find that it doesn't matter whether the characters are Jewish or Swedish or Brazilian or Martian: They and their hopes, dreams, and disappointments will linger long in your memory.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, beautiful, unforgettable, April 9, 2008

By 

Olivia Stanfield (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End of the Jews: A Novel (Hardcover)

This novel is a rare treasure. It's beautifully written, daring, and wide-ranging in its concerns. More than anything, though, each and every character in the book is rendered with astounding empathy and insight. This is even more impressive given the range of the voices -- they are old and young, male and female, black and white. The End of the Jews weaves several stories together expertly and seamlessly. The best scenes here rival anything I've ever read, and the probing, subtle way the author explores identity and relationships -- between men and women, blacks and Jews, children and parents -- makes you remember why it is that we turn to fiction to begin with.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant writing, May 16, 2009

By 

C. E. Selby "Eric Selby" (Miami Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The End of the Jews: A Novel (Paperback)

The writing is brilliant. I am not Jewish, but my "domestic partner" is. The opening of this book makes a writer like me ooze with jealousy. We meet Tristan, living in the Bronx, with all the other Jewish families in the apartment building. And we just know that he will be breaking out of "tradition"! You too might be thinking "Fiddler on the Roof." Then suddenly the reader is transplanted to Prague when it was under Soviet rule to a truly remarkable story--and it seems to be a separate story--of another sort-of Jewish family. But there are connections. Then out of nowhere, it seems, comes Tris in chapter three, a teenager, who is driving his mother mad, his mother being the daughter of the Tristan (hence Tris the grandson) from the first chapter. Oh, my. Poor Linda! The end of the Jews all right. This is just the most amazing book, and the pieces fall into place. It deserves more than five stars.