The Rabbi of Lud [Hardcover]

Stanley Elkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1987

-- Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn resides in Lud, New Jersey, where Jews from the surrounding states come to bury their dead. Distressed by the lack of living children in the area, the Rabbi's daughter Connie creates a scandal that livens up the town of Lud when she testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Elkin, whose Magic Kingdom tours terminally ill children about Disney World, here reconfirms his reputation as master of the ineffable. Once again, he defies death with a glistening tale that is laugh-out-loud hilarious as well as poignant. He introduces Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn, a graduate of an offshore yeshiva in the Maldive Islands, whose business is officiating at funerals of people he has never met in the necropolis of Lud, N.J. Endearingly, madly in love with an eccentric wife who is turned on by his phylacteries, he lives in a ghost town of death's service-related industries, where his daughter, the only child in this Potemkin village, learns to read Hebrew from tombstones. Voluble, acerbically witty and deliciously irreverent (to his mind, the dead laid out in caskets behind the plate glass of the funeral home "looked too much like the lobsters one picks out for one's dinner at the bottom of the tanks in seafood restaurants"), he lies low and coasts through life. But one day the "professional grief administrator" is forced to confront realityhis teenage daughter, aware that her father is a professional failure, rebels; shortly thereafter, he has to officiate at the funeral of someone he has loved. Elkin's self-mocking send-up of Judaism and New Jersey suburbia evokes Philip Roth, and his descriptions of obsequies, religious proprieties, voluptuary morticians, the physically disabled or the madcap adventures of the chief rabbi of the Alaska Pipeline (Goldkorn's one-time pulpit) are keenly convincing. Readers may be disappointed that his story ends rather abruptly, but they will be convinced that Elkin is a sorcerer, whose enchanting farce is paradoxically rooted in the quotidian; his secrets are all the more faith- and life-affirming because they are shrouded in death and disaster. A chapter previously appeared in Chicago magazine. (October 14) to Jane or Ann Y.: since this review is long, please try to break it rather than have it run the length of a column. you can change the pub date order if you have to.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is typical Elkin, a blackly humorous character study very ethnic in tone. Jerry Goldkorn, who barely made it though his own bar mitzvah, is the rabbi of Lud, New Jersey, noted primarily for its many cemeteries. Indeed, the rabbi's chief function is to preside at the funerals of people he never knew. He clearly recognizes the basic absurdity of his role but seems content with his lot. Not so his daughter, who rebels by claiming to talk with the "Holy Mother" and St. Myra Weiss, patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred. In a lengthy digression dealing with the rabbi's leave in Alaska, one senses that Elkin somehow lost his way. The book has its moments but in the end leaves one feeling a bit unsatisfied. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 277 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068418902X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684189024
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,266,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches & Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh's Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.