March 6, 2012
Mel Klein brings back a voice rarely heard today in American short fiction, the voice of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote from a Jewish perspective about the struggles of ordinary people with the everyday travails of life: love, hate, marriage, heartbreak, duty, lust, guilt, displacement, failure, pain, sickness, aging, death.
These stories are about real, three dimensional characters, and have strong dramatic arcs, with beginnings, middles and ends. They leave you thinking. And feeling. And sometimes crying.
The ten stories in this collection display a wide range of both scope and genre.“Elza of Prague” is a dramatic thirty year search for a lover lost in the roundup after the Prague Spring. At the other end of the spectrum, “Fazoozle” is a side-splitting lark in which a young man comes up with a bizarre baby name to aggravate his overbearing mother in law.
In the lead story, “Wet Shoes”, an ordinary shoe store owner takes in an illegal alien shivering in a snow storm, and begins a heroic rescue effort, returning the kindness of a stranger long ago. It is an uplifting tale that reaffirms the decency of ordinary people and the connections between us.These stories are about real, three dimensional characters, and have strong dramatic arcs, with beginnings, middles and ends. They leave you thinking. And feeling. And sometimes crying.