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In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis . . .
At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent.
The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they'd been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies.
Steve Stern's A Fool's Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem's quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin.
At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. In a parallel narrative, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village.
As Menke's efforts collide with the monstrous reality of the Holocaust, we see-in another place and time--evidence that Dr. Scholem, in defiance of his austere reputation, has begun to develop the anarchic characteristics of a clown.
A Fool's Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic. Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O'Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at Skidmore College, the majority of those years as Writer-in-Residence. He has also been a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars. Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York. He'd started out in Paris, then on to Zurich and Prague, cities still vital and unblemished in their appearance; then Frankfurt, Munich, his native Berlin, Vienna, and points east, which were ashes. He had begun as the renowned scholar Dr. Gershom Scholem, dispatched by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as emissary of the Otzrot HaGolah, the Treasures of Diaspora Archive, and returned to the nervous calm of Prague a broken man.
On the train from Frankfurt he'd neither looked out the window nor read a book. He had no book with him, nor did it even occur to him that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he'd brought along no classic theological or philosophical text to peruse. From all the dogmas and mythologies, canons and wisdom literatures, that had been his food and drink, he was fasting. Wasn't every day now its own Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? But like Kafka's hunger artist his fast was not to be admired; the "banquet" of existence had no special appeal for him. He felt no flicker of sensation upon his arrival in the city that he and Walter had declared as consecrated to its native son Franz. Gershom checked into the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square where he had previously stayed, signed the guestbook with an illegible scrawl, and accepted the key. But as he followed the bellhop carrying his suitcase through the plush lobby toward the gilded glass cage of the lift, he broke down. Perhaps it was the rich
At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent.
The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they'd been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies.
Steve Stern's A Fool's Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem's quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin.
At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. In a parallel narrative, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village.
As Menke's efforts collide with the monstrous reality of the Holocaust, we see-in another place and time--evidence that Dr. Scholem, in defiance of his austere reputation, has begun to develop the anarchic characteristics of a clown.
A Fool's Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic. Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O'Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at Skidmore College, the majority of those years as Writer-in-Residence. He has also been a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars. Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York. He'd started out in Paris, then on to Zurich and Prague, cities still vital and unblemished in their appearance; then Frankfurt, Munich, his native Berlin, Vienna, and points east, which were ashes. He had begun as the renowned scholar Dr. Gershom Scholem, dispatched by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as emissary of the Otzrot HaGolah, the Treasures of Diaspora Archive, and returned to the nervous calm of Prague a broken man.
On the train from Frankfurt he'd neither looked out the window nor read a book. He had no book with him, nor did it even occur to him that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he'd brought along no classic theological or philosophical text to peruse. From all the dogmas and mythologies, canons and wisdom literatures, that had been his food and drink, he was fasting. Wasn't every day now its own Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? But like Kafka's hunger artist his fast was not to be admired; the "banquet" of existence had no special appeal for him. He felt no flicker of sensation upon his arrival in the city that he and Walter had declared as consecrated to its native son Franz. Gershom checked into the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square where he had previously stayed, signed the guestbook with an illegible scrawl, and accepted the key. But as he followed the bellhop carrying his suitcase through the plush lobby toward the gilded glass cage of the lift, he broke down. Perhaps it was the rich