Fabulous Small Jews (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fabulous Small Jews Daryn Glassbrook Fabulous Small Jews, by Joseph Epstein. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. 340 pp. $24.00. Fabulous Small Jews is Joseph Epstein's second collection of short stories, following The Goldin Boys, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times in 1992. Epstein is more widely known for his essays, which have appeared frequently in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Commentary and in the Best American Essays annual. While Fabulous Small Jews does not exactly change the impression that Epstein's talents [End Page 139] are most suitable to the essay form, many of its eighteen stories are entertaining and a few are genuinely moving. The book takes its title from a tristich in a Karl Shapiro poem, "Hospital": "This is the Oxford of all sicknesses. / Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews / And actresses whose legs were always news." Though the stories are all set in the middle class neighborhoods of Chicago (Epstein himself is a Rego Park native), it is this emblematic image from Shapiro, equal parts irony and nostalgia, which clearly stands as the dominant motif of the collection. Most of the stories are told from a single point of view, usually that of a middle-aged Jewish bachelor or divorcé who has been living comfortably on a retirement pension or inheritance. These men reminisce about their glory days as high school athletes or promising graduate students as they try to come to terms with their failed ambitions, family conflicts, and deteriorating health. Successful in their professions, they are nevertheless envious of the more enduring achievements of an old friend or mentor. They are so hidebound by convention and personal habit that the slightest uncharacteristic gesture—asking a stranger on a date, supporting charitable causes—seems momentous. Epstein's interest in these kinds of stories is what distinguishes him from Bellow and Roth, however much he remains indebted to them both. His characters are neither self-consciously brilliant nor sexually adventurous. They are more prone to debating whether Walter Payton or Gale Sayers was the more nimble running back than whether Heidegger or Spinoza was the more profound philosopher. On the dating scene, they are more interested in finding a pleasant short-term companion than a sex goddess. In "Don Juan Zimmerman," a lifelong bachelor finds contentment with a woman whom he once dreamed about marrying back in high school. Though they never marry, she provides care and solace when he discovers he has terminal cancer: "His illness made Donny tired, and most nights they watched the VCR in Bobby's den. She had stocked up on the movie candy of their youth . . . and every night she popped corn, not sparing the butter" (p. 198–9). Such a tender scene, bordering on sentimentality, contrasts starkly with the sadomasochistic manner in which Mickey Sabbath copes with his lover's terminal cancer in Roth's Sabbath's Theater. An equally apt title for this collection might have been Whatever Happened to Mr. Jones?, after the befuddled bourgeois gentilhomme in Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man." As a prominent neoconservative spokesperson—he is a contributing editor to William Kristol's The Weekly Standard and a trustee of the Hudson Institute—Epstein has been waging a fierce war of words against the countercultural legacy of the sixties ever since his notorious 1970 cover story for Harper's Magazine, "Homo / Hetero: The Struggle For Sexual Identity." [End Page 140] In a recent essay for The Weekly Standard, "The Perpetual Adolescent" (March 15, 2004), Epstein discusses his alienation from the mass rebellion of the sixties: "I had two sons by the time I was 26, which among other things, made it impossible, either physically or spiritually, for me to join the general youth movement of the 1960s, even though I still qualified by age." No matter what their social status, Epstein's male protagonists tend to resemble him in their willingness to remain out of fashion. The narrator of "Love and The Guiness Book of Records," a bartender who has never been to college, is a jazz snob who is offended by...