Customer Reviews

The Wedding Jester

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Steve Stern is that rare writer who combines great storytelling with a gift for elaborate, RubeGoldberg sentences. His stories, while comic in nature, reveal hidden depths the more you venture into them. These are tales, rife with magic, that take the reader to places he or she has never been before, places of fantasy and truth, places in the heart and the head. For all his comic exuberance Stern leaves you with much meat to chew on. Highly recommended!

I greatly enjoyed this collection of stories. They were quirky and delicious. This was the stuff that my lower east side grandmother believed in. Saints, sinners and we, the observers cheering them on. The "Old Time Religion" with a twist, beautifully expressed in a multicolor canvass. It did evoke Chagall's work.

What a gem of a collection! The neighborhood mystical rabbi, the newlywed coupling orthodox couple, et al! I loved picturing the Memphis Jewish neighborhood. Can't wait to read his next work!

My only problem with Steve Stern is that he's not a superstar!! His writing is brilliant and what he does with Yiddish themes is transcendent. He uses classic motifs and symbols, such as dybbuks, golems and demons, yet he is accessible to those unfamiliar with Yiddish literature. When his writing is dark, it is redemptive. When it's hilarious, it's also moving. Once you read these stories, you're going to want to read everything he's ever written.

Wild. Imaginative. Entertaining and intelligent. What a joy to read.I look forward to more from Steve Stern who has the ability to take the reader where no other author can.

Steve Stern's prowess reminds me we're doomed and blessed at the same time. His sure hand (every sentence rings true) and steady plot progression (unbelievably well-imagined) put him in the highest echelons of modern writing, yet no one knows about him. Why? But the fact he's still out there is some cause for solace. I agree with another reviewer that Stern is redemptive when dark and moving when hilarious. He's dizzifyingly brilliant and worthy of reams of glowing criticism.

..that Steve Stern had really been accorded his "distinctive place in modern American Jewish fiction." But he hasn't (yet). One does not have to be Jewish, or a Memphian, or a fan of magical realism to enjoy--nay, to wish to live inside of--his amazing stories and novels. His writing is funny and sad and deep and--I swear, I just opened Jester to a random page--"the stuff of forbidden texts, which made otherwise serious scholars into crackpots."

Please, please, please, read his books, whoever you are. If you like Jester, your next stop should be A Plague of Dreamers, Lazar Malkin, and/or Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground.

I'm not a fan of "magical realism" generally; I guess I'm way too Right Brain. But I loved Steve Stern's book of short stories, "The Wedding Jester", when I found the book, years after it was originally published. Stern writes about people - mostly men and always Jewish - who are touched by magic and wonder. Fantastical "events" happen to everyday people in Stern's story. Lives relived, lives changed, and, in some cases, lives lived to the end in ceaseless boredom. But husbands and wives rediscover each other, or in one story, discover the love they had avoided since their wedding day in the old Russian village from where they emigrated.

Steve Stern, who I had never heard of until I found his book, is a wonderful writer. He takes the reader from Memphis to the Catskills, from the 19th century until the end of the last one. His writing is "quirky", not mainstream, but it sure is enjoyable. I'm going to seek out more of his writing.