From Publishers Weekly
This is Minnie Bloch's story, as told in her twilight yearsover coffee in a shopping mall or during supper served in her apartmentto her friends Mrs. Pinsker and Mrs. Stellberg. Mostly it is about Manny, her son Emmanuel, who was a little boy when his father was killed while selling vegetables from a cart on the Lower East Side on a Sabbath. She tells how Manny's hair turned white in a single afternoon in his 17th year, when he heard his father's voice speak from a white bird flying over the tenement rooftops. About how he went to Cincinnati to study to be a rabbi, then married the daughter of his benefactor. She tells her friends, who are mothers and grandmothers too and so can understand, how her daughter-in-law lost her private sorrow in the emptiness of drink, and how Manny found some happiness with Florette, a survivor of the Holocaust. Minnie's eyesight fails over the years she tells her tale until in the end, nearly blind, she lies in a nursing home, explaining her granddaughter Sarah's confusion when Manny left the congregation for business and how Sarah's resentment grew as her father's fortunes did, and finally was the cause of his downfall. Minnie's story overflows with compassion and a profound sadness. Told in language that is earthy, lyrical and never false, it is as deep and powerful and lasting as her wisdom. Cheuse is literary critic for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and the author of The Bohemians.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Set as a series of conversations between the protagonist's mother Minnie and her friends in "the grandmothers' club," Alan Cheuse's second novel is the story of a midlife crisis of tragic proportions, of the rise and fall of the hopelessly divided Manny Bloch. Early in the novel a pigeon suddenly speaks to Manny in what the 16-year-old perceives to be the voice of his dead father. "You want to be both rich and blessed?" the bird asks. "Follow me then." Manny does, becoming by all appearances a consummate success, both the respected rabbi of a quarrelsome NewJersey temple and a prosperous businessman. Now in his early forties and torn apart by the conflicting demands of his two lives, Manny leaves the temple to devote himself to business, soon guiding his company to the takeover of a fruit company with extensive Central American holdings. But even here peace of mind eludes him. His wife's emotional problems lead to confinement in an asylum, and his daughter becomes involved in a sexual scandal at college. "Manny doesn't understand the women he lives with" Minnie Bloch says, and this blindness results in disaster when Manny leaps to his death after his daughter's revengeful betrayal. What makes this novel unusual is the doting, yet perceptive, Minnie Bloch, the frame through which we view Manny's rise and fall. She surrounds Cheuse's contemporary themes with a delightfully old-fashioned sort of storytelling, as if her tales derived from the collective memory. And she attains to mythic proportions herself, becoming, by book's end, a kind of spiritual mother, viewing generation after generation of her ever fallible sons with a mixture of love and sadness. The G-randmothers'Club is a remarkably rich and resonant novel. -- From Independent Publisher
