July 5, 2010
Steve Stern’s Frozen Rabbi
A rabbi found frozen in the freezer of a Memphis, Tenn., family is just the beginning of a rollicking, occasionally bizarre but satisfying plotline in Steve Stern‘s “The Frozen Rabbi.”
The teenager who finds the rabbi, 15-year-old Bernie Karp, finds himself re-discovering the past in lots of other ways throughout this book. Indeed, as novelist Ben Marcus explains in The New York Times, Stern’s book contrasts past and present Jewish life and seems to describe the downside of comfort and safety:
It’s hard to feel entirely glad for the Karps when their epic struggles come to an end in Memphis, where the family is assimilated at last. Yet along with the difficult question of just what is lost when assimilation is gained, Stern also raises the hope that even the most unwitting among us cannot fully escape the passions of our ancestors.
Overall, Marcus gave the book high marks. Over at The Washington Post’s Book World, novelist Jess Walter also liked Stern’s latest offering:
Of course, not everything Stern throws into the book (and he throws in a lot) works equally well. A few jokes are groaners, and a section from Bernie’s grandfather’s journal — translated from Yiddish as Bernie reads aloud to his quirky girlfriend — loses narrative steam and is eventually abandoned.
But this is like complaining about an extra mushroom on your kitchen-sink pizza. In all, it’s a fine performance: Stories are told, points made, conventions flayed, and the reader comes to care about what will happen to poor Bernie, earnestly seeking transcendence from a fallen prophet. Of course, as the Frozen Rabbi assures him, he shouldn’t worry; all the answers are in his book, ” ‘The Ice Sage,’ adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God . . . which it’s twenty-nine ninety-five retail.”
Lucky for you, Amazon sells Steve Stern’s “The Frozen Rabbi” for about 30 percent less.
I read this a few weeks back. I have mixed feelings on it, and would like to have know what the Rabbi was like before he was frozen. His thawed out behavior is what emphasizes that issue for me.
The last few pages left me empty and unsatisfied with the ending.