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The Rabbi of Lud


Collection Lannan Selections

Paperback
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Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else.

As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it—or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.

 

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-270-0
ISBN-13 9781564782700
Publication Date May 2001
Nb of pages 277
Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Summary

 

Reviews

Press Reviews

New York Times Book Review
Brilliant, ruthless writing.

Washington Post
Elkin is a master of comic effect . . . one of our essential voices.

Los Angeles Times Book Review
An image of man alone, or rabbi alone, in an empty and absurd universe.

New York Times
As always in his fiction, Stanley Elkin makes of his plot a stage to mount inspired gags, and on which to play his funky, bluesy language, whose comic effects depend on incongruous juxtapositions of
...more


Booklist
Sustains his reputation as a masterful social satirist . . . The reader will laugh aloud at Jerry's self-effacement, at the town itself, at the people around him—wife, daughter, townsfolk—all drawn with delectable tongue in cheek.

Publishers Weekly
Voluble, acerbically witty and deliciously irreverent . . . Elkin is a sorcerer, whose enchanting farce is paradoxically rooted in the quotidian.

Library Journal
A blackly humorous character study very ethnic in tone.

Kirkus
Bouncy, zestfully outrageous . . . This book is extravagantly ethnic and blissfully sectarian, as Elkin drapes grotesque tall tales, baroque spiels and irreverent parodies around a jaunty narrator.



Quotations

Voice is Elkin's big gift (gab included), marking him out as one of the main throats in fiction.
-Paul West

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