Sunday Jews » (~)

Hortense Calisher has written more than twenty books. Past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand[ing] vividly with Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried history of this extraordinary—and very American—family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously disappeared.

Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

Book Magazine

Calisher, whose prose has always alternated between the breathtakingly original and the just plain obscure, appears to be entirely undaunted by the prospect of being read by people who like a little clarity, a little forward thrust, a little resolution in their fiction. Opening with the cacophony of a crowded family gathering, whipping back and forth in time, dropping in and out of its predominantly third-person voice on apparent whims, the book seems to drift toward whatever occurred to the author at the time of writing. There's no point in trying to spell out a plot; Calisher's interest lies in presenting a sprawling family whose matriarch, Zipporah (aka Zoe), is an intellectual Jew and whose patriarch and children represent all variety of faith and meaning. The book feels ripe, portentous. Too many sentences burst wide open into absolute pandemonium, and the success of too many scenes depends on one's ability to hold a thousand interrupted thoughts in one's own head. And yet the language in some sequences is truly stunning; the end, which depicts Zipporah's death, reflects the genius of this most mystifying writer.