No New Jokes

Jokes, specifically Jewish jokes, are an integral part of this entertaining first novel set in Brooklyn in 1949. The rather generic male characters-Archie Feinstein, Jack Goldfarb, Benny Kubbleman and their pals, all presided over by fatherly retiree Meyer Woolf-mostly sit around in a luncheonette where they argue and schmooze, discuss politics, women, their creaky marriages or jobs. The female characters, in 1940s fashion, tend to be brash, forward, sarcastic, assertive and highly sexed. Izzy, the only fully realized character, a street singer who plays a concertina, was a boxer before WWII, when shrapnel was permanently lodged in his head. Haunted also by memories of his father, who was killed in a pogrom in Poland, Izzy drifts from one babe to the next, having a fair amount of raunchy sex. The punchy, clipped dialogue, which exudes a comic-strip flavor, is riddled with jokes about infidelity, lawyers, nuclear war, the H-bomb, sex, Jewish women, God, Stalin, Hitler and the Holocaust. Set on the eve of the Korean War, the novel speaks volumes about Jewish humor-or any humor-as a survival mechanism to cope in an irrational world from which God seems to be on vacation. Brooklyn-born Bloom, who teaches at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, peppers the story with period references-Milton Berle, the Brooklyn Dodgers, etc.-that create a wonderful ambiance. Many of the borscht belt jokes are pedestrian; others are laugh-aloud funny. (Mar.)