Angel of Forgetfulness

From Publishers Weekly
Heaven and earth engage in a tug of war over the Jewish soul in this sprawling historical bildungsroman. Stern (The Wedding Jester) combines three distinct but interlinked narratives. The first tells the story of Nathan Hart, a Jewish immigrant on the Lower East Side circa 1910 who woos young Jewish bohemian Keni by telling her the second narrative-a tale about an angel named Mocky and his half-human son, Nachman, both of them also living on the Lower East Side in self-imposed exile from heaven. The third narrative belongs to Keni's nephew Saul, a morose, lonely young man who embarks on an odyssey through the post-Vietnam sexual and psychedelic revolutions that takes him to a hippie commune and an avant-garde theater troupe before he settles down as a hermetic Jewish-studies scholar. The many intersections between the stories of Nathan, Mocky, Nachman and Saul suggest the timelessness of a certain Jewish variant of male alienation, as the protagonists struggle-and usually fail-to assimilate and find themselves torn between the carnal and the spiritual. The novel's greatest strength is its colorful depiction of life in a turn-of-the-century Jewish New York full of gangsters, whores, shopkeepers, socialists, artists and yellow journalists, which Stern renders with a piquant Yiddish inflection and a light dusting of magical realism. Somewhat out of place is the story of Saul, a Portnoy-esque figure desperate to lose his virginity, both obsessed with and repelled by the countercultural sexual carnival whirling around him. Stern serves up vivid characters and atmospherics and an often poetic picaresque, but never integrates the novel's complex structure into a satisfying whole. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The bright humor, colorful characters, and potent blend of realism and Jewish mysticism found in Stern's earlier work, particularly The Wedding Jester (1999), attain deeper resonance in his enrapturing new novel. A far-roaming serial bildungsroman, it encompasses a century and links the amazing adventures of an angel called Mocky, who ensures that newborns forget "their prenatal knowledge of paradise" until he falls in love with life on earth; his half-human son, Nachman; Nathan, a proofreader for the Jewish Daily Forward circa 1910 who is at once blessed and cursed with a gift for storytelling; and misfit Saul, who comes to New York from Memphis to attend college in 1969 but who learns the most from an aging relative, the chain-smoking painter Keni. Like the Tree of Life in the Jewish mystical tradition, Stern's vividly picaresque and ingeniously plotted novel intricately meshes earth and heaven, past and present, body and soul as it captures the spirit of the now fabled Lower East Side, with its packed Yiddish theaters and fierce Jewish gangsters; a hippie commune in Arkansas; and a haunted synagogue in Prague. Stern's magical, sexy, suspenseful, and cleverly metaphysical saga brilliantly contrasts the lure of the imagined world with the greater promise of life itself. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
When Steve Stern appeared on the literary scene The New York Times Book Review hailed him as "a prodigiously talented writer who arrives unheralded like one of the apparitions in his own stories." In his new novel, The Angel of Forgetfulness, he interweaves three stories about characters who take flight from their ordinary lives and are plunged into extraordinary circumstances. At the center of it all is an unfinished manuscript—an adventure about a fallen angel named Mocky and his half-mortal son Nachman, who both take up residence on the Lower East Side of New York circa 1900. Their story has been written by Nathan Hart, a timid proofreader for The Jewish Daily Forward, who woos a young woman named Keni with his exotic tale. Seduced by the power of his own imagination, Nathan is drawn deliriously away from Keni into the world of his story, the Jewish underworld of arsonists, horse poisoners, and thieves. More than half a century later, Keni, on her deathbed, gives Nathan’s now-tattered manuscript to her young nephew, Saul, with the injunction that Saul complete the story himself. Saul’s evasion of the task prompts a journey into the crucible of the sixties, one fueled by sex, drugs, and the dust of a golem in the attic of a medieval synagogue in Prague. Dexterously juggling the narratives of Saul, Nathan, Mocky, and Nachman until they all merge in the novel’s satisfying close, Stern has created a magical tour de force of the storyteller’s art, one that celebrates the turbulent romance between past and present, art and obsession.

About the Author
Steve Stern is the author of several short story collections, including The Wedding Jester (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter (winner of a Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award and an O. Henry Prize), and Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction). He has also written three novels and two books for children. He teaches creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.


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A dying woman hands on an unfinished manuscript to a young student, in a murky, prolix tale by Stern (Plague of Dreamers, 1994, etc.). Saul Bozoff is 19 when, in 1969, he arrives in New York City. From Memphis, this neurotic, virginal, self-pitying character also steps straight from the pages of Woody Allen, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Feeling alienated at NYU, he looks up his aunt, Keni Shendeldecker, on the Lower East Side. As the two walk neighborhood streets (Stern etches them sharply in their grimy, late '60s glory), it becomes clear, as reality blends with fantasy, that Aunt Keni literally sees the fabled "Lower East Side of antiquity"-the bakeries, restaurants, and butcher shops of the early 1900s. Before long, Saul as well sees literal manifestations of the past and becomes intrigued by Keni's account of a brief marriage to Nathan Hart, proofreader at the Forward and author of an unfinished manuscript. Hart's story, Keni says, was "a screwball affair. . . about an angel that comes to earth and has by a human girl a child." As Keni dies, she gives the manuscript to Saul, urging him to finish the story. Nathan's tale thereupon comes to life, as does his narrative of the angel Mockie and his earthly son Nachman. Saul, meanwhile, in surreal and picaresque sequences, shares a commune, explores Prague and, finally, at 35, settles down to finishing Nathan's story. The time periods of the three narratives offer Stern rich potential, and therein lies the problem: He seems never to have met a detail, character or subplot he didn't like, unleashing a torrent of verbiage that obscures and overwhelms his considerations of art and reality, heaven and earth. Some will savor the abundance ofperiod detail and the mordant wit that lace the author's melancholy tale. Others will wish he'd get on with it.


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