STEVEN BLOOMNo New JokesA NovelPowerful dialogue and biting humor characterize this seriocomic recreation of a suspended moment between two wars, when jokes were the best psychic defense. The time is 1949, just before the Korean War, a war that many believed would become World War III. The place is Bald Sam's luncheonette in Brooklyn, gathering place for a group of fam- iliars mostly trying to get along. As Archie Feinstein and Jack Goldfarb tell jokes about women and Benny Kubbleman worries about his job, fatherly Meyer Woolf tries to fix up Izzy with his niece Celia. "It's not my kind of situation," Izzy tells Meyer Woolf. Izzy has been a boxer and a soldier; he carries in his head not only shrapnel from the Battle of Monte Cassino but also the memory of a pogrom and his father lying dead on a muddy street in Poland. Izzy, now a street singer, plays his concertina in a courtyard. A woman who invites him up tells him joke after joke, the last one about God losing patience and vowing to send another flood. The punchline from the old rabbi is, "I'll tell you, we got only three days to learn to live under water." No New Jokes is about how Izzy and his pals tell jokes to keep their lives from collapsing, and how acts of kindness help them "live under water" in a world where God is apparently resting. Steven Bloom, born in Brooklyn, teaches at the University of Heidelberg and lectures throughout Germany. He is the 1995 winner of the Associated Writing Programs award for the novel and lives in Heidelberg, Germany. "This unusual novel gathers into a drama of a man who is terrifyingly decent in the fresh uncertainty of a new world."--Ron Carlson, AWP judge 1997 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-04047-X / 224 pages / fiction | |||||
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