The Wedding Jester

Rich and wondrous, these nine tales confirm Stern's (A Plague of Dreamers) distinctive place in modern American Jewish fiction, as he continues to stake out his own unique territory where history and myth intersect, where Jewish legends, mysticism and ancient traditions implode into the everyday with dazzling and unforeseen consequences. ""Magic realism"" seems too facile a term to encompass these beguiling, multilayered stories in which a flying rabbi floats above houses and trolleys; a humble cobbler and his wife, transported to Paradise via extraordinarily ""ecstatic intercourse,"" enlist the aid of Elijah, prophet-turned-honorary angel, to return them to earth; and a voracious, man-hungry succubus steps from a mirror to seduce a terrified yeshiva scholar. Fervent dreamers, crackpot messiahs, bedeviled housewives, rowdy beekeepers, vagrant angels and wise fools fiercely pursue their obscure destinies in ingenious fictions that prismatically filter Jewish history, tragedy, consciousness, hope and despair through a modern existential lens. In the hilarious and outrageous title story, set in a Catskills singles resort, the bride-to-be--moments before she can say ""I do""--is possessed by a dybbuk, in this case the spirit of a wisecracking dead male Borscht Belt comedian. The narrator, a blocked writer who could be Stern's alter-ego, uses a kabbalist kissing technique to exorcise the unruly spirit-which then possesses him. This irreverent, classic story plumbs Jewish humor as a source of strength, a survival tool, a vehicle to resist cant and conformity. Stern's tales utterly transport readers into a fully realized world, whether the setting is the neurotic, Seinfeld-like milieu of a Manhattan writer (""Bruno's Metamorphosis""), or czarist Russia's Jewish ghetto and New York's Lower East Side (""Romance""), or Stern's favorite haunt, a Memphis, Tenn., Jewish community in uneasy coexistence with its gentile neighbors (""Tale of a Kite""). With empathy and bracing wit, Stern's enjoyable stories seismically chart the collision of the Old World and the New, of undying religious traditions and modern secularism, of lust and love, faith and doubt. (June)