Mastering the short story: Twelve vignettes capture America’s Jewish world - book review

“Allow the story that you are supposed to be writing to flow through you and out of your hands in the form of typed, written words,” she writes. “Chances are that if you struggle, overthink, ruminate, and lose sleep over a project, it’s not really meant to be.”

Her 12 new stories are certainly meant to be. From somewhere deep in her imagination, she conceives, and then most skillfully presents a wide variety of characters and situations centered on Jewish Americans caught up in emotions and circumstances often not of their own making. They are authentic pictures that capture America’s Jewish world. For example, several mixed marriages are embodied in these tales, replete with yearnings, frustrations, illusions, love, and hate.

In the first story, from which the book takes its title, a third-generation Jewish American family is caught up in a common enough situation – boring lives in which people have secret hopes and desires. The reader is ushered into the account of their everyday existence, wondering if any of their yearnings will come to pass.

In “Every Blade of Grass,” Moses encapsulates one woman’s life in just a few pages. First, her protagonist Helen experiences the joy of romance in Israel, followed by disillusionment with the man she marries. She returns to America, and her second marriage is to an overly domineering widower. With her name now Hannah, religious observance becomes an integral part of her family life. Her husband’s death is a sort of release, and – the twist in the tale – she finds herself reconciled with her long neglectful mother.

“Summer Rental” is a beautifully shaped story with a mixed marriage at its core. Lauren is married to the Jewish Ed, and one summer, while the family rents a lakeside house, she is kept in the dark about terrible events taking place all around her. Twenty years later, she learns the truth and takes action.

“Mother” is a bizarre tale of a dysfunctional, nominally Jewish family. The unnamed heroine – if that is an appropriate term in the circumstances – informs us that her father hated her mother and despised her maternal grandmother, Annie, yet he slept with both of them. When the truth emerges, her father leaves, but her mother refuses to divorce him and, as Moses puts it, “doubled down on holiness,” wearing a wig in conformity with the custom of Orthodox Jewish women, and meticulously observing kashrut.

Our storyteller was sent to an inadequate Jewish academy and spent a wretched childhood and adolescence. But when her mother dies in her sixties and she is clearing the family house, she makes a poignant discovery.

“The Second Wife” is a touching, insightful vignette of Adam Singer, a desperately insecure TV actor, the child of a broken home, whose own first marriage to Caren disintegrates when he meets Grace. He leaves Caren for Grace, but the tale really turns on the relationship between Caren, Grace, and Adam’s mother.

Moses's strength lies in the depth with which her characters are conceived and brought to life. Integral to her vision are their past lives and their present problems.

Her imagination and vision are multi-dimensional. She sees her characters and their situations from all sides, and her skill is bringing their yearnings, frustrations, illusions, love, and hate to life for her reader. She achieves this superbly.