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(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, January 05, 2006

REALLY BAD NOVEL

Via Betsy’s Page, this comment from John Podhoretz:

[Abramoff] is like a really bad novel. An Orthodox Jewish lobbyist stealing money from Indian tribes, funneling it through a yoga instructor at the beach, and being a possible accessory to a gangland hit in Florida?




Does sound like an impossible plot. But UD’s done some research and come up with actual, similar-sounding novels. First, a couple described by the Jewish Review:


The Longest Night by Gregg Keizer, C. P. Putnam's Sons, 2004, 366 pages, hardcover, $24.95

What happens when a New York Jewish gangster sends his hit man "Mouse" to Europe to ensure his "donation" is properly spent rescuing a trainload of Jews from the Nazis? It turns into an unpredictable story of an unlikely rescue and an equally unlikely redemption.

Mouse soon discovers Hitler's Europe is nothing like the streets of New York. Before he knows it, Mouse is racing to avoid capture not by police but by Nazis. And now he is shooting to save lives. Mouse finds tenderness and courage on the mission he considered crazy.


The Matzo Ball Heiress by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Red Dress Ink, 2004, 320 pages, trade paperback, $12.95

Heather Greenblotz, the 31-year-old millionaire heiress to the world's largest matzo company, normally spends Passover eating a non-kosher ham and cheese sandwich. Then the Food Channel wants to air a live broadcast of the Greenblotz family seder, a publicity opportunity too good to "pass over." Knowing that even if she could round up her scattered family, the telecast would expose them as frauds, Heather finds the perfect cast to portray her family.

It almost works--until her real family decides to show up and take part in the seder. With the cameras about to roll, Heather has to cope with the turbulent reunion between her scuba-diving mother and her bisexual father, who appears with his swishy boyfriend, her cousin's shiksa girlfriend and her best friend's Egyptian boyfriend.



Three more plot summaries, from the New York Times book review:


In 1978, Tova Reich's novel Mara depicted an Orthodox rabbi who doubles as a shady nursing-home owner, married to an overweight dietitian so obsessed with food that she gorges herself with five-course meals, even on the fast day of Yom Kippur. The Hasidic hero of her 1988 novel, Master of the Return (praised by Publishers Weekly for its "devastating accuracy") abandons his semi-paralyzed pregnant wife in her wheelchair in order to spit on immodestly clad female strangers; at home, he helps his 2-year-old son get "high on the One Above" by giving him marijuana. Reich's 1995 novel, The Jewish War, told of a band of zealots whose leader takes three wives and encourages his followers to kill themselves.



UD also stumbled on a film:

It's a bit unusual that Sheldon, a young schlemiel accountant wants to join a Chevrah Kadisha (a traditional Jewish burial society that prepares bodies for interment), but the elders decide to give him a try. Then two million bucks go missing from Sheldon's former employer. Canadian director Nicholas Racz uses the little-seen world of the Jewish burial society as a backdrop for a quirky, darkly funny murder mystery complete with Jewish Mafia thugs, devious detectives, and nervous breakdowns.

THE BURIAL SOCIETY
Canada, 2003 - 100 minutes