The Wedding Jester

The New York Times

A prodigiously talented writer.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Rich and wondrous, these nine tales confirm Stern's (A Plague of Dreamers) distinctive place in modern American Jewish fiction, as he continues to stake out his own unique territory where history and myth intersect, where Jewish legends, mysticism and ancient traditions implode into the everyday with dazzling and unforeseen consequences. "Magic realism" seems too facile a term to encompass these beguiling, multilayered stories in which a flying rabbi floats above houses and trolleys; a humble cobbler and his wife, transported to Paradise via extraordinarily "ecstatic intercourse," enlist the aid of Elijah, prophet-turned-honorary angel, to return them to earth; and a voracious, man-hungry succubus steps from a mirror to seduce a terrified yeshiva scholar. Fervent dreamers, crackpot messiahs, bedeviled housewives, rowdy beekeepers, vagrant angels and wise fools fiercely pursue their obscure destinies in ingenious fictions that prismatically filter Jewish history, tragedy, consciousness, hope and despair through a modern existential lens. In the hilarious and outrageous title story, set in a Catskills singles resort, the bride-to-be--moments before she can say "I do"--is possessed by a dybbuk, in this case the spirit of a wisecracking dead male Borscht Belt comedian. The narrator, a blocked writer who could be Stern's alter-ego, uses a kabbalist kissing technique to exorcise the unruly spirit-which then possesses him. This irreverent, classic story plumbs Jewish humor as a source of strength, a survival tool, a vehicle to resist cant and conformity. Stern's tales utterly transport readers into a fully realized world, whether the setting is the neurotic, Seinfeld-like milieu of a Manhattan writer ("Bruno's Metamorphosis"), or czarist Russia's Jewish ghetto and New York's Lower East Side ("Romance"), or Stern's favorite haunt, a Memphis, Tenn., Jewish community in uneasy coexistence with its gentile neighbors ("Tale of a Kite"). With empathy and bracing wit, Stern's enjoyable stories seismically chart the collision of the Old World and the New, of undying religious traditions and modern secularism, of lust and love, faith and doubt. (June)

Library Journal

In this collection of nine action-packed, richly folkloric stories, Stern (A Plague of Dreamers, LJ 11/1/93) takes his readers on a surrealistic ride steeped in tradition. Jewish mysticism, magic, and otherworldly concerns are featured throughout. In "The Sin of Elijah," Gitl and Feybush Fefer live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the early part of the century. Unbeknownst to them, their lovemaking is observed by Elijah the prophet, leading to a trip to heaven, a return to Earth in the present, and other riotous hijinks. In the title story, nondescript writer Saul Bozoff accompanies his mother to a wedding at the Concord Hotel in New York's Catskill Mountains. His shining moment comes when he is able to exorcise a dybbuk from the bride, who becomes possessed at the altar by a long-dead Jewish comic. Apparitions, the fantastical, and uproarious hilarity are featured throughout. Recommended for large fiction collections.--Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A new collection of nine stories by the highly regarded author of, most recently, A Plague of Dreamers (1994). Stern is sort of the poet laureate of Southern Jewish America, a Memphis native who has managed to transplant the sardonic magical realism of Malamud and I.B. Singer to the exotic climes of the Mississippi Delta. His latest volume is set in numerous other places as well, including the shtetls of Eastern Europe and a fading Catskills hotel-resort, but the themes that have run through his previous work dominate: the tension between religious belief and secular identity in American Jewry, sexual longing, and fear of failure in a success-obsessed culture. Stern's tone is wryly ironic throughout, even in a charming children's story, "A String Around the Moon," which serves as a gentle coda to the book. Elsewhere, most notably in the sardonic title piece, in which a none-too-successful writer of Jewish folklore finds himself performing a Borscht Belt exorcism, and "The Sin of Elijah," in which the prophet Elijah engages in some increasingly not-so-innocent voyeurism, the humor turns downright corrosive. Stern's narrators tend to be nebbishes eaten up with self-loathing (even Elijah retails a line of clever self-deprecation): men who look back on wasted lives with a longing for the unfulfilled promises of adolescence. The result, although a bit repetitive in large doses, is poignantly funny when the stories are taken one at a time. A book to sip with great pleasure, but not to imbibe at a single sitting.