Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Sunday Jews

Name: Sunday Jews
Author: Hortense Calisher
ISBN: 9780156027458

by Hortense Calisher

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Overview

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand[ing] vividly with Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried history of this extraordinary—and very American—family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously disappeared.

Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

Synopsis

Book Magazine

Calisher, whose prose has always alternated between the breathtakingly original and the just plain obscure, appears to be entirely undaunted by the prospect of being read by people who like a little clarity, a little forward thrust, a little resolution in their fiction. Opening with the cacophony of a crowded family gathering, whipping back and forth in time, dropping in and out of its predominantly third-person voice on apparent whims, the book seems to drift toward whatever occurred to the author at the time of writing. There's no point in trying to spell out a plot; Calisher's interest lies in presenting a sprawling family whose matriarch, Zipporah (aka Zoe), is an intellectual Jew and whose patriarch and children represent all variety of faith and meaning. The book feels ripe, portentous. Too many sentences burst wide open into absolute pandemonium, and the success of too many scenes depends on one's ability to hold a thousand interrupted thoughts in one's own head. And yet the language in some sequences is truly stunning; the end, which depicts Zipporah's death, reflects the genius of this most mystifying writer.

About the Author, Hortense Calisher

Hortense Calisher has written more than twenty books. Past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

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Editorials

Beth Kephart

Publishers Weekly

Like Edith Wharton and Henry James, Hortense Calisher finds the drama of fiction as much in the analysis of motive as in the various excitements of action. Her newest novel might be said to have a Wharton-ish feel to it"if, that is, Wharton had written about assimilated Jews rather than status-conscious WASPS. The Jewish family at the center is named, surprisingly, Duffy. Zipporah Zangwill's marriage to Peter Duffy is mixed not because they come from different faiths, but because they disbelieve in different deities"Zipporah in the Jewish God, Peter in the Catholic one. The first third of the book, which is marvelously felt, tracks Peter's mental degeneration. After retiring from the university where he had been a philosopher, Peter becomes absentminded, then feebleminded, and finally physically debilitated. Zipporah, a nonacademic anthropologist and mother of five, takes him to Italy to hide his condition. Zipporah is helped by a mysterious nurse, Debra Cohen, an awesomely cool Israeli sabra who disappears when Peter dies. The novel's middle section portrays Zipporah in the autumn renaissance of her widowhood. She inherits a fortune from her neighbor and friend, Norman, and takes a lover, the mythically wealthy Foxy Mendenhall. Calisher shows Zipporah's five children creeping into a professionally respectable middle age, while their children zoom through their 20s. Zipporah is particularly close to her grandson Bertram, who is waiting for a project to happen. He has studied to be a rabbi, but avoided a post. Ten years after Debra Cohen's vanishing act, Bert finds a clue to her whereabouts and tracks her down in Europe. While Calisher's novel is much too baggy, it is also majestically persistent, with an old-fashioned faith in the novel's ability to make worlds. (May) Forecast: Calisher, now 90, has been writing fiction for a very long time, and this big novel is a crowning achievement. With it, she may break out of the gilded writer's writer prison and gain the attention of a larger public. Regardless, this is a must-have for libraries and fans. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Calisher is the bridesmaid of contemporary American fiction: for more than 50 years an imposingly brilliant stylist whose densely declarative and analytical, richly woven fiction has never achieved the canonical status awarded to many writers far less accomplished. Calisher has skirted obscurity (in her ebullient "space opera" Journal From Ellipsia, 1965, and In the Palace of the Movie King, 1994), but at her best (Standard Dreaming, 1972, and Mysteries of Motion, 1983, her complex, luminous short stories), she has surveyed the recently concluded century at all its personal, familial, social, and global levels with a verbal eloquence and intensity of observation that make her writing mandatory, if demanding, reading. Sunday Jews, her 15th novel, published in her 91st year, is a summa, and a triumph. Its tower-of-strength central figure is Zipporah Zangwill, an eminent anthropologist and the 60ish Manhattan matriarch of an extended family of intellectuals and activists who define themselves, and are defined by others, by both their adherence to Zipporah's Jewish heritage and the degrees to which they have fulfilled, or failed to fulfill, their various potentials. When Zipporah's beloved husband, philosophy professor Peter Duffy, begins a slow decline into senility, she decides to sell their townhouse and stimulate Peter's enfeebled faculties by touring all the exotic places she had visited and studied. This decision triggers a seamless interweaving of memory, meditation, and narrative, as Zipporah's plans resolve themselves into a patient, courageous vigil that also becomes an almost unbearably moving celebration of a long and happy marriage. Interpolated stories depicting the conflictedlives of the Zangwill-Duffy children (the most interesting of them is Nell, a world-weary attorney who has borne two illegitimate children) are amply and interestingly developed, but really only secondary. The fulcrum of this rich tale is the love that bonds Zipporah to her husband and also to her splendid grandson Bert, the unlikely vessel through whom all that she cares for will be preserved. This incandescent elegy to age, change, and acceptance burns with an urgency that seems to have pared Calisher's often-reviled ornate style down to a taut, focused simplicity and purity. She has often before written as fervently, even as generously, but she has never written better.