“It’s a daunting thing to publish a retrospective book,” says novelist and short story writer Steve Stern, referring to his new collection, The Book of Mischief: New and Collected Stories (Graywolf Press), which draws from work throughout his 25-year career. Six of the stories have never been collected before; all have Jewish themes. “My writing friends say, don’t get excited, it’s just a book of stories. But I’ve never been so excited about the existence of a book. I would like to honor it with events that might promote it. I’ve always been good at discouraging people from reading my work. With this one I’d like to find lots of readers.”
Less known than other writers who have tilled similar fields—his publisher refers to him as being “quite famous for being unknown”—Stern has won awards and a loyal readership, but he also finds himself ghettoized in bookstores under the fiction/Judaica category and wonders, “How did that happen?” “I still ask myself that,” he says. “I don’t write for a Jewish audience. Stories are stories. I use the Jewish experience as a filter, but the stories are meant for a universal audience.”
Yiddish writers I.L. Peretz and Isaac Babel are major influences on Stern’s work, though his ability to read Yiddish is very halting, Stern says. “I read in translation. My love of the tradition was my first encounter with Isaac Babel’s Odessa stories, where he evokes his childhood in a Russian slum amid poverty and grotesque oppression, but he writes with a richness that I coveted. I loved the elasticity of writing that could deal unflinchingly with grim reality while bending into magical directions. The magic didn’t exclude the reality, and reality didn’t exclude the magic. I hadn’t seen that before in fiction. Now people take magical realism for granted. In those days it seemed like something new.”
His lack of non-Jewish readers is unfortunate, Stern says. “I didn’t grow up in an observant home, and I am still not an observant Jew. I love Dickens as much as I love Babel, Grass and Calvino as much as Malamud. If there are influences, it’s as much Dickens as it is Philip Roth. But I’ll take whatever readers I can get. At times I’m surprised I have any audience at all.”
