Adam Mansbach:
The End of the Jews: A Novel by Adam Mansbach (English) Paperback Book - Taschenbuch
ISBN: 9780385520423
The Nile on eBay FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach The ruthlessly engrossing and beautifully rendered story of the Brodskys, a family of artists who… Mehr…
The Nile on eBay FREE SHIPPING UK WIDE The End of the Jews by Adam Mansbach The ruthlessly engrossing and beautifully rendered story of the Brodskys, a family of artists who realize, too late, one elemental truth: Creation's necessary consequence is destruction.Each member of the mercurial clan in Adam Mansbach's bold new novel faces the impossible choice between the people they love and the art that sustains them. Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remakes American culture while slowly suffocating his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black musicians only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another."The End of the Jews" offers all the rewards of the traditional family epic, but Mansbach's irreverent wit and rich, kinetic prose shed new light on the genre. It runs on its own chronometer, somersaulting gracefully through time and space, interweaving the tales of these three protagonists who, separated by generation and geography, are leading parallel lives. FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description The ruthlessly engrossing and beautifully rendered story of the Brodskys, a family of artists who realize, too late, one elemental truth: Creation's necessary consequence is destruction.Each member of the mercurial clan in Adam Mansbach's bold new novel faces the impossible choice between the people they love and the art that sustains them. Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remakes American culture while slowly suffocating his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black musicians only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another."The End of the Jews" offers all the rewards of the traditional family epic, but Mansbach's irreverent wit and rich, kinetic prose shed new light on the genre. It runs on its own chronometer, somersaulting gracefully through time and space, interweaving the tales of these three protagonists who, separated by generation and geography, are leading parallel lives. Author Biography Adam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner oAdam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner oAdam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Blacf the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Blacf the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. Hik White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. Hik White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Boo Review Quote Praise for The End of the Jews "Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of its consequences-very exciting fiction indeed." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "A delight." -Publishers Weekly "Adam Mansbach is a true talent and his new book is a masterwork of the Jewish arts of humor and sadness." -Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng "Lyrical, brave, and moving . . . further proof of Adam Mansbach's formidable talent. At every turn, The End of the Jews is startling in its honesty. This novel is not to be missed." -Daniel Alarc Excerpt from Book CHAPTER ONE Tristan Brodsky jogs across the block, toward his building, sidestepping the rotten produce the fruit-and-vegetable men pitch toward the gutters as they close up shop. He is late for a dinner table he will be the first to vacate, but Tristan''s ears still perk, listening for the slaps and shouts that herald stickball. Tristan is a two-sewer man. If a game is being waged against the wall of Moishe''s Delicatessen, he can cut the line and step up next to bat on neighborhood respect alone, take his two broom-handle swings at the pink rubber ball. No matter who is pitching, the fielders will retreat to the second water grate--the greatest compliment in life. If eager dice tumblings and tough, anxious murmurs waft through the coal-smudged autumn air, Tristan can follow them into the brick-walled alley and extend a math-filled hand and be given the cubes as soon as the shooter makes his point or craps out. He can wager his train fare and win enough to buy himself breakfast tomorrow, or else lose his nickel and be fucked and miss tonight''s class: yet another setback for the Jews. The neighborhood is quiet, though, of boys his age. Only the old men are out tonight, standing three and four beneath the failing butter-colored shafts of the streetlamps, each group very close together, many hands moving in English, Yiddish, German. German, Tristan likes best, though he understands it least. He and his little brother, Benjamin, have a game in which they pretend to speak it, the joke being that each word is incredibly long and articulates a concept or circumstance so complex or specific that it takes a paragraph of English to define. Their father, on the street, invariably joins a Yiddish-speaking cadre. He will not teach Tristan the language, even though it''s all around. Jacob''s face darkened and he shook his head the one time Tristan asked, as if embarrassed to speak the tongue of the old shtetl or scornful that his American son wanted to know it. Tristan was unsure which was unworthy, he or the language. Regardless, the desire disappeared. The apartment is three flights up, twelve mingled dinner smells away, and Tristan breathes through his mouth as he ascends. Everyone cooks the same food the same way in this tenement, this part of town. The thick-waisted matriarchs pick through the same piles of pale vegetables at the same wood-crate markets, filling sad cloth bags with potatoes and turnips and wilting cabbages and waddling down the street to haggle over stringy gray beef. Undernourished chickens dangle from the butchers'' rafters on bloodstained lengths of rope, as if they had lost patience with the mundane gore of ghetto life and flung themselves to their demise. Every mother in the neighborhood culls dignity from her ability to sate a growing brood on water, chicken bones, and withered carrots. It seems sometimes that the Jews think only of food, that for all the ritual and history and custom Tristan has endured in Hebrew school and seen dimly reflected at home, for all the professed sanctity of knowledge, all his people really care about is sitting down to a full table--what it''s full with doesn''t even so much matter, so long as the platters overflow. Tristan''s parents, everybody''s parents, chase one foot with the other all day long and come home to a bowl of hot stew and a hunk of crusty bread to dip into it, and talk to their children about education with their mouths full. They buy two sets of dishes, buy the more expensive kosher meat, buy shul memberships, buy into the notion that the Jews are smarter than everybody else and that things are improving for them all the time, even if the country as a whole is in the shitcan and half the Bronx is on rent strike. For three months last year, Jacob kept a homemade blackjack under his bed in case goons came to collect, and Tristan''s broomstick stayed close at hand for more than just stickball. Already some of the most prominent men in America are Jews. Already we have Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Groucho Marx, the good half of Mayor La Guardia. Already we have Hank Greenberg, the best first baseman in the history of baseball. Already we have Tristan Brodsky, cutting past the rising smells of soup pots and gefilte fish: fifteen years old, the sum total of five thousand years of Jewry, one week into City College, a mind on him like a diamond cutter. Here is hope and proof incarnate even if he has not been to shul since his bar mitzvah and often skips dinner entirely, subsisting instead on five-cent apples bought from one of the six thousand vendors who have decided that hawking fruit is more dignified than joining the waiting list for city relief. Tristan opens the apartment door and steps into the dim, grease-stained kitchen, where his father, brother, and two sisters are arrayed around an overburdened card table. "Sorry I''m late," he says, picking up his fork. His mother spins from the sink with a big woman''s grace and waves an arm at Tristan''s back. "Late for dinner is no problem. Late for opportunity, Jacob, that''s what I worry about. They give him a scholarship, and already he''s fooling it away." Tristan stabs a bite of boiled beef and cabbage and squints across the table at his old man''s wristwatch. He has five minutes to eat, if he wants to make it on time to the address printed on the postcard in his pocket noting that due to special circumstances the first meeting of Professor Pendergast''s Cont, Random House USA INC International Concepts<
