Tales From the Jewish South

Book Review by Nina R. Schneider

In the Mouth: stories & novellas by Eileen Pollack Four Way Books, 2008.

In her fiction, writer Eileen Pollack treats American-Jewish characters with honesty, affection and humor—yet adds a satiric edge that is both recognizable and disconcerting. The author of the novel Paradise, New York and the story collection The Rabbi in the Attic returns with tales set in the Jewish uber retirement community of Boca Raton, Florida, aka “Boca,” which means “mouth” in Spanish.  In her latest collection, In the Mouth, I was struck by the authenticity of both the characters and settings. Dramatic conflicts between adult children and their aging parents in distress reveal surprise role reversals.  Pollack’s themes include deception, loss, guilt, illness, as well as human yearnings for love and meaning at all stages of life.

The second story in the collection, “The Bris,” was chosen for The Best American Short Stories of 2007 by editors Stephen King and Heidi Pitlor.  Marcus, an accountant, is visiting his dying father in a Boca hospital.  Dad, who took him to synagogue every Shabbat, reveals his last wish, a circumcision, so that he can be buried next to his beloved wife in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery.

“I wasn’t born a Jew,” his father cried.  “And I never converted.”

The force of his father’s revelations set in.  Short and solid as he was, Marcus swayed like a beachfront high-rise in a hurricane. 

Pollack is comfortable writing across gender and narrates much of the story from Marcus’s interior point of view:

(Marcus) had inherited his zayde Lieberman’s dark Hebraic looks.  That his mother had been a Jew guaranteed that Marcus would be certified as Jew by even the strictest rabbi.  He had attended Hebrew School, well, religiously, and – thanks to his father—had been circumcised and bar mitzvahed.

And so  begins Marcus’s dubious quest: to find his dying father a mohel.

 

Things don’t go so well. A poverty stricken old man with “gray teeth, gums an unhealthy brown” throws Marcus’s money back at him with contempt.

 

“To be a Jew there are no shortcuts! God demanded that Father Abraham be circumcised at ninety-nine, and because Abraham agreed, God told him that his seed would be as numerous as the sands on the beach.  Abraham didn’t try to sneak out of the operation.  He didn’t wait until he was dying and no longer conscious of the pain…”

Three of the six stories feature dentist Milt Rothstein as a recurring character. Pollack’s father was a dentist and her grandparents owned a hotel in the Catskills, where she grew up.   In “Milt and Moose,” Milt has announced his retirement, but many of his patients protest, including Miss Sink, his former high school math teacher.

“I suppose you think I’m going to offer you good wishes.” She stood beside his chair, straight as a rubber-tipped pointer. Her hands didn’t shake.  “I am ninety-three years old, and the probability is high that I will not live more than a few years longer. One would think that one’s dentist would have the courtesy to wait until his oldest patient died before he retired.”

 

Milt reflected “she was ninety-three years old, and she would die and take with her all her knowledge of mathematics, as Milt himself would die and take with him all the learning, intuition, and dexterity he had acquired in four decades as a dentist…”

“Beached in Boca” features Wendy, a journalist, and her retired and ailing father, Milt Rothstein. Pollack writes,“On her fist visit, Wendy had dubbed her parents’ pod “Boco Loco,” nestled as it was amid Boca This and Lago That.”  Wendy, who lives in Montana with yet another inappropriate male, does much reflecting on the search for love. Her father, a widower, reluctantly reveals that he has AIDS while they are sitting in his Grand Marquis. And, he refuses to have the full treatment. All he wants if for his daughter to play a round of golf with him. 

“He had been lonely, he said. So very, very lonely. And being so lonely, he had done things he wouldn’t have done if Wendy’s mother were still alive.”

Wendy laments the irony of it all.

 “No, it didn’t seem fair that a man could spend so many years trying to do right, then slip up and commit one sin and be so unjustly punished…. She had to be the only member of her generation whose father had gotten AIDS. And with her sexual history…”

Of course, Wendy meets an attractive but despondent man named Adam at the pool who has even worse family problems. His father’s tragic story threads through this novella as Adam and Wendy bond. Boca itself intermittently serves as a main character, when, for example, they decide to go to the flea market.

They parked in the enormous lot and joined the methodical flow of old women with shiny white handbags and their wispy-haired husbands, who, Wendy knew, looked forward to buying tubs of peanut brittle and munching the candy while marveling at electronic gadgets that would have earned their disbelief if they had seen them in Buck Rogers half a century earlier.

Pollack nails intergenerational points of view and recalls Jewish pop culture with aplomb – Dr. Brown’s Cel-ray Tonic anyone?

Nina R. Schneider teaches writing at Bentley College in Waltham, MA and writes short fiction.