Steve Stern: Memory Man of the American Jewish South – The Republic

Writer’s Institute student Shoshana Olidort has a review in the online book review of The Republic. Please read the excerpt below.

“The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories by Steve Stern
WRITING ABOUT THE past is tricky business. In contemporary Jewish fiction, in particular, there is the risk of slipping into a kind of sentimentality—for the lost world of the shtetl and the immigrant experience—that Irving Howe once called “memory tourism,” or a “nostalgia for the nostalgia of other people.” So how is a Jewish novelist, raised in an assimilated household in the South, who learned about Judaism in the library but nonetheless finds himself writing almost exclusively on Jewish themes, supposed to navigate this complicated terrain? Read More…“