“Given a choice Albert would have never left his recliner…” thus begins the strange love story between a man and his chair. In Papua New Guinea a hitherto uncontacted tribe is discovered to speak Yiddish. A little deaf orphan survives the Bosnian massacre and is adopted by a nurse from Toronto where he meets another survivor, a deaf-mute Muslim girl who changes his life. A hiker, lost in the forests of New England meets a
reclusive Hungarian trapper who he suspect is God hiding from humanity. An old widow loses her winning lottery ticket when she is run over by a bicycle courier in Manhattan with whom she forges a life-changing friendship at the ICU. And then there is “Yossl the citron king”, a traveling merchant peddling sacramental Etrogs in the shtetls of 19th century Austria who marries a “shiksa” and turns out to be the author’s putative great grandfather. These and others are some of the eccentric characters that populate this absurdist hilarious short story collection. |