The One-Star Jew

In these interconnected stories, David Evanier combines the absurd and the touching, playing sweetness against sadness in electric stories from the edges of New York life. A blitzkrieg of unforgettable characters from 42nd street, the Lower East Side, Hell's Kitchen, the Upper West Side, and Morningside Heights transfigures his prose: **an eighty-four year-old woman locked in mortal combat with her black Home Care worker; **a young writer fighting his way through the phantasmagorical, pornographic vastness of Times Square as he sets out to outwit his draft board; **a sixty-four year-old hippie working nine for five for "Jews for Israel"; **a psychiatrist who dreams of becoming a rabbi; and **a rabbi who dreams of opening a bagel shop. All are captured in a redeeming light beyond good and evil, beyond the tragic and the bizarre. Each story represents an incident in the life of Bruce, a writer whom we follow from adolescence through middle age. This technique allows the author to juxtapose a sequence of unusual and varying perspectives on his characters, rendering the gaps in the action and poignant as the events themselves. This is a book in which the style is perfectly adapted to the matter. The shifting perspectives of the linked stories not only enable Mr. Evanier to compose a remarkably rounded portrait of Bruce but also reflect the kaleidoscopic images of life in New York City. THE ONE STAR JEW is both exciting fictional achievement and a penetrating study of our lives and time.