RaveThe RumpusMolly Antopol challenges her readers’ willingness to simplify bygone times and read into them easy moral rights and wrongs. Characters’ idealized pasts in distant lands butt up against the mundaneness and dissatisfaction of the actual. No one is a hero, no one is a victim ... The Unamericans is graced with an unpretentious prose style and plainspoken humor and insight ... The stories...inevitably recall Nathan Englander’s wry undercutting of Jewish stereotypes and the Yiddish-inflected cadences of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Antopol has an ear for the kind of off-diction that can set a character in a certain time and place and round him out better than any physical detail ... There is a mordant simplicity to these characters’ foibles, which are never judged by the author or even particularly mourned by the characters themselves ... A vital text for us today.
