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Simon and Schuster
April 2007
On Sale: April 3, 2007
464 pages
ISBN: 1416543422
EAN: 9781416543428
Hardcover
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Fiction
Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist whose seminal work is a
comic history titled Five Thousand Years of Bitterness,
recalls his childhood in a British suburb in the 1950s.
Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely
different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish.
His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called
Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High
Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous
nosebleeds, is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist,
unable to accept the God who has betrayed him so
unequivocally in recent years. But it is through his friend and neighbor Manny Washinsky
that Max begins to understand the indelible effects of the
Holocaust and to explore the intrinsic and paradoxical
questions of a postwar Jewish identity. Manny, obsessed with
the Holocaust and haunted by the allure of its legacy,
commits a crime of nightmare proportion against his family
and his faith. Years later, after his friend's release from
prison, Max is inexorably drawn to uncover the motive behind
the catastrophic act -- the discovery of which leads to a
startling revelation and a profound truth about religion and
faith that exists where the sacred meets the profane. Spanning the decades between World War II and the present
day, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson seamlessly weaves
together a breath-takingly complex narrative of love,
tragedy, redemption, and above all, remarkable humor. Deeply
empathetic and audaciously funny, Kalooki Nights is a
luminous story torn violently between the hope of restoring
and rebuilding Jewish life, and the painful burden of memory
and loss.
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