A Horse Walks into a Bar

February 27, 2017
Grossman (To the End of the Land) masterfully balances the neuroses and hard-earned insight of veteran stand-up comedian Dov Greenstein with a defining memory that’s 40 years in the shaping. The story of Dov’s life—his worship of a mentally ill mother who survived the Holocaust, his contentious relationship with his father, his awkward adolescence, and a brief stay at a military camp in Gadna—unspools over one evening in a basement club in the small city of Netanya, Israel, related through the observations of Avishai Lazar, a boyhood friend of Dov’s and, later, a respected judge. As Dov immerses himself in his act, the audience—many of whom eventually walk out in bewilderment or anger at Dov’s deeply personal (and often decidedly grim) revelations—come to understand that, amid the self-deprecating humor and good-natured banter, the comedian is, for the first time, recounting the formative event of his life. “For an instant, when he looks up, the spotlight creates an optical illusion,” Avishai muses as he watches Dov discover what has lain hidden for decades, “and a fifty-seven-year-old boy is reflected out of a fourteen-year-old man.” Grossman wrestles with questions of faith and friendship, fate and family, with empathy, wisdom, and acerbic wit.

November 15, 2016
Take my life. Take my life, please....Dov Greenstein is on stage in Caesarea--Hello, is this microphone working?--or somewhere, at any rate, any of a hundred dusty Israeli towns, marking time before the spotlights in a tiny bar. "Looks like my agent fucked me again," he says, and the audience laughs appreciatively. He throws out a few insults, a few jibes, and asks them, "Why are you dumbasses laughing? That joke was about you!" But he's no Don Rickles, not Dovelah. He's on the stage, it seems, to work out some personal issues and not a little bit of existential angst. To that end, he's invited an old friend, Avishai Lazar, a former judge, to attend. Avishai, the narrator, has known Dov since childhood and summer camp, and he's amazed at the amount of hurt the comedian has stowed away, the better to make jokes out of, perhaps, but enough to keep an army of psychiatrists busy. Besides, there's some payback in the offing for some long-ago slight: "The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to," Avishai thinks. Along the way, Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.) unveils scenes from Israeli history and society: through Dov, he jokes that one woman's hairdo was designed by the same engineer who built the nuclear plant at Dimona, and it's not long before the Holocaust is dusted off and worked into the bit. The comic patter becomes ever more fraught, ever less funny; as one audience member protests, "People come here to have a good time, it's the weekend, you wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur." Yes, and not a little Freud, too. The book is an assault on the reader, a provocation and a challenge; Grossman takes great risks, but in the end there is reward in a kind of redemption-- and in any event, thank the heavens, the bad jokes stop.Another thoughtful, if odd and caustic, story from one of Israel's greatest contemporary writers.

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September 15, 2016

Slightly faded comedian Dov Greenstein still holds the crowd at the joint he's working in a small Israeli city, taking his monolog closer and closer to the bone as he recalls his anguished Holocaust survivor mother, a deeply unempathetic father, and the crucial week he spent at a military camp for youth. From multi-award-winning Israeli novelist Grossman.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2017

.Winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, this harrowing story takes place in the span of only two hours and unfolds during the final show of stand-up comedian Dovaleh Gee. (LJ 9/15/16)

SEE ALSO: Grossman's Falling Out of Time (2014), To the End of the Land (2010), Lion's Honey (2006), Her Body Knows (2005), Someone To Run With (2004)

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.