Pinchas Pelovits, “The Twenty-Seventh Man”
Pinchas is the title character in this darkly ironic story about Soviet leader Josef Stalin purging twenty-six Jewish writers on charges of propagandizing against the state. Somehow, Pinchas Pelovits manages to accidentally make it onto this execution list despite the fact that though he writes incessantly, he has never published anything. The situation makes Pinchas seem at times to be a 21st century incarnation of a Kafkaesque victim of bureaucratic malevolence.
Reb Yitzhak, “Reb Kringle”
At the other end of the spectrum is the title character of a story steeped in irony, but of a much less dark sort of intensity than Kafka trucked in. Yitzhak is an old Jewish man who finds works as a mall Santa Claus during the holidays. To suggest that Reb’s story does not enter into the same dark corridors of irony at that of Pinchas is not, however, to understate the emotional intensity of his more comic narrative path.
Charles Morton Luger, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue”
The definition of a “gilgul” is essentially that of the living body into which the soul of someone already deceased has passed for the purpose of atonement. Luger is the title character of this story which opens with the moment in the back of a New York cab in which he is suddenly struck with the epiphany that he now is inhabited by a Yiddishe neshama: a Jewish soul.
Ruchama, “The Wig”
Ruchama is a wigmaker who was once quite the stunner, but three kids, an apathetic husband and life in general has taken quite a bit of the zing out of her self-esteem. She blows a significant amount of money she just collected from a customer to bully a deliveryman with the most beautiful head of hair she’s ever seen into sacrificing it. The irony cuts deep both ways in this story: it is at once strangely comical yet also darkly depressing.
Dov Binyamin, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges”
The protagonist—of sorts—of the title story has a problem that reveals the meaning of the title. The unbearable urge is this case is to make love to his wife even when she claims to be observing the religious ban on sexual relations during menstruation. Dov Binyamin seeks counsel from his rabbi on a course of action for the relief of his unbearable urges. The solution turns out to be a prostitute. But that’s just the start of his ironic journey.
