Sprawling and incident-packed ... It’s such an intimate and detailed portrait of Orthodox Jewish life in the old country between the wars ... A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny ... So tightly written that the action moves at a crawl. If it were a car, only first gear would work. And perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but Grade died before this novel’s completion ... Grade’s female characters are wonderfully realized.
Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns ... Masterpieces.
Magisterial ... An elegiac portrait of a bygone life, in which each chapter feels like a fully realized story and the many characters are depicted in compassionate detail. It’s an enormous achievement.
