Jonah and Sarah

In ""Jonah and Sarah"", love, talent and magic oppose - and sometimes vanquish - anti-Semitism, totalitarianism and vulgarity. From the deceptively simple narratives ""Apple Cider Vinegar"" and ""A Hurricane Named Bob"" to the surrealist tale ""Dismemberers"" and the magical ""Jonah and Sarah"" and ""The Lanskoy Road"", the tempo fluctuates, but throughout, David Shrayer-Petrov seamlessly preserves familiar voices. The stories have a genuine feel for setting and epoch - Soviet stories work as narratives of everyday life, while the American stories offer an accurate sense of an ?migr?'s alienation. Like all good works of fiction, these stories take on a mythic quality and transcend time and place. Each carries and communicates to the reader an aura of mystery, the enigma of love, and a meeting of Jewish past and present. Whether he invokes lyrical dialogue, gentle irony, or sharp polemical discourse, Shrayer-Petrov shows that he is a powerful presence in Russian and Jewish literature. For those interested in fiction about new immigrants to America or in the psychology of Jews in the two decades before the Soviet Union's collapse, this collection is a useful read.