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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 18, 2025 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781685891664
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781685891664
- File size: 1114 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 1, 2025
"Books form the soul of the Jewish people," states Gershom Scholem, esteemed scholar of Jewish mysticism, as he embarks on an ill-conceived quest to collect Jewish tomes from the bloody wreckage of WWII. Stern, heir to Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer with his own American vaudevillian swing, portrayed painter Chaim Soutine in The Village Idiot (2022). Here Stern has Gershom hanging out with Walter Benjamin and corresponding with Hannah Arendt until he finds himself alone and unmoored as he faces the full brunt of the Nazi genocide. Meanwhile, in the dirt-poor shtetl of Zyldzce, Menke Klepfisch, a raggedy, mischievous jokester, pines hopelessly for the rabbi's beautiful daughter. When the Nazis arrive, Menke attempts to ply his role as jester to ward off the worst of their violence. Stern dissects the role of the fool over the course of a many-stranded plot involving a doomed ship overloaded with Jewish refugees and books, a cave-dwelling bookseller, Menke's pranks and Gershom's inquiries, and charming scenes of comedy and valor in contrast to endlessly shocking Nazi atrocities. Ultimately, he asks why people embrace and empower a "stark-raving psycho" as savior. A writer of incandescent precision, vibrancy, wit, daring, and bewitchment, Stern dramatizes the delusions of hope, the fathomless hell of genocide, and the eternal flame of love and remembrance.COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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