cover image A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas

A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas

Steve Stern, B. Grossman. Scribner Book Company, $20 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19532-2

Stern's captivating tales of the inhabitants of the Pinch, a teeming Jewish community in Memphis, blend yeasty realism and soaring fantasy. The first of the three novellas, ``Zelig Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams,'' features a nerdy grocer's assistant who, by climbing an old oak, can tune into sleepers' dreams and even intervene in their dreamscapes. In ``Hyman the Magnificent,'' set in 1927, a stage magician obsessed with duplicating the stunts of Harry Houdini suffers repeated accidents, but wins over his girlfriend after a near-death experience. In ``Annals of the Kabakoffs,'' the book's most powerful story, Stern follows the fortunes of Itchy (Isaac) Kabakoff, a thief and ladies' man who rebels against his father, a hard-driving printer named Moses, and joins a traveling carnival in the late 1950s. Moses's illicit union with his seductive Aunt Laylah--a semimythic figure based on female demons of Jewish lore--drives the printer to self-exile in a hippie commune. Then Itchy falls madly in love with Laylah, unaware of a secret in her past. The strongest characterization is Itchy's scholarly grandfather Yankel, who, kidnapped by thugs in the Ukraine, was forced to serve for years in the czar's army. While all the tales are beguiling, ``Annals'' suggests that one of these days Stern may be a worthy successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Jan . )