- 49 Henry Street, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Stern
Steve Stern
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 is the author of critically acclaimed books such as The Village Idiot; Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter, winner of the Pushcart Writers’ Choice Award; The Wedding Jester, which won the National Jewish Book Award; The Angel of Forgetfulness, one of The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2006; and, The North God. Stern currently lives in Ballston Spa, New York.
Books
About A Fool’s Kabbalah
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.
Praise
“A writer of incandescent precision, vibrancy, wit, daring and bewitchment.” — Booklist, STARRED review
“A crushing, startling novel. . . about the kinds of communal wounds that even mystics struggle to soothe.” — Foreword, STARRED review
“Alternating narratives are steeped in a poignant form of gallows humor.” — The New York Times
“The juxtaposition of Klepfisch’s absurd antics with Sholem’s methodical seriousness gives the novel an intriguing frisson, and the intellectual complexity is shrewdly leavened by the author’s sardonic wit and pithy observations. Stern demonstrates his literary finesse with this life-affirming tale.” — Publishers Weekly
“Peppered with Yiddishisms, historical references, and Kabbalistic expositions, it is a novel immersed in Jewish culture — a culture marked by tragedy and hope, humor and brilliance.” — Brian Hillman, Jewish Book Council
Product Details
A Fool’s Kabbalah
By Steve Stern
ISBN: 9781685891657
Published by Melville House --Feb 18, 2025