New Book: The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern

Next Tuesday sees the (printed) publication of Steve Stern’s new novel, The Frozen Rabbi, which, indeed, involves a rabbi frozen in a middle-aged husband-and-wife’s basement freezer.

Algonquin Books is publishing it as a hardcover, but Tablet Magazine already published it as a ten-week online serial.

Reviews are coming in for the printed version. Here’s Mark Athitakis:

“The Tale of a Kite” is a very Stern-ian Stern story, typical of the kind of fiction he’s been writing for the past three decades. It’s funny, tinged with magical realism, concerned with the particulars of Judaism, and fixated on the collision between millennia-old spiritual traditions and contemporary American life. (It also takes place in Memphis, where most of his fiction is set.) This is no recipe for commercial success. In 2005 the New York Times ran a feature about Stern and his career, which has been long on critical acclaim but short on sales. The novel he was promoting at the time, The Angel of Forgetfulness, seemed poised to change his fortunes, thanks to especially glowing reviews and the support of a major publishing house. No dice: Apparently the audience for smirking literary fiction about Jewish-American life is limited to Elkin, Singer, and the “funny” Roth of the 1970s.

Critics may mourn this, but Stern seems unfazed. His potent, slyly provocative new novel, The Frozen Rabbi, insists that commitment to a theme isn’t the same thing as being in a rut. In essence, the novel is a super-sized version of “The Tale of a Kite,” expanded to address themes of assimilation, love, and anti-Semitism. And like that story, it’s built on an absurd yet appealingly simple premise. Bernie Karp, a 15-year-old boy, discovers that the freezer in his parents’ basement contains the body of a rabbi who’s been encased in ice for more than a hundred years.

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