The Peace Process

October 26, 2015
This collection of Friedman's madcap stories is replete with tricky plots, wacky traps, and characters who ensnare themselves in their own ridiculous choices. In "A Fan Is a Fan," the standout story, Nazi Reichminister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels phones up prominent Jewish satirist Max Winterman and attempts to commission a piece for the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's newspaper. Winterman considers his options: "He hated every bone in the man's body, and the ground he stood on. Yet there was no denying the Reichminister's prominence." The prose-poem "Orange Shoes" is a much-needed moment of emotional resonance in the cheeky collection. Friedman's characters have plenty of personality. Tension built from racing between plot points occasionally creates a feeling of unmoored chaos, but even the most disorganized stories are funny, sometimes brutally so. In the novella "The Peace Process," which closes the collection, William Kleiner is visiting Jerusalem to scout film locations, and he ponders an actual move to the city. He has "few ties to the Statesâa fading career, a paper-thin marriage... Still, a move would mean a farewell to Scotty Pippin, not to mention Dan Rather, Puerto Ricans, and Kevin Spacey." The peace process involved in this novella, as Kleiner gets away from his assumptions and helps a local Arab man attend a family wedding and pursue a career in film, is life affirming. Each time hardship forces Kleiner into a difficult situation, he faces the issue and creates new, more purposeful life for himself, an idea that radiates throughout Friedman's entire collection.

August 1, 2015
Friedman, now in his mid-80s, adds to his wide-ranging body of work with a sprawling comic novella about a faded filmmaker and stories about being old, lonely, and morally challenged. The novella relates the misadventures of William Kleiner, a once-respected director who goes to Israel for the first time in 1990 to scout locations for a Jewish Star Wars. For all the wonders around him, he's in a sour mood, and getting only cricket scores from Sri Lanka on the radio doesn't help. Nor does the presence of Mahmoud, a young Israeli Arab bellhop who repeatedly appears in his room without knocking and begs the American to help him get to his brother's wedding in New York. This Kleiner agrees to do after the kid comes to his rescue when he cracks his head on a marble slab of great religious significance near Christ's tomb. In America, Mahmoud pitches a great idea for a blockbuster and becomes a Hollywood player himself-not to mention close partners with "the big-breasted Borscht Belt beauty" of Kleiner's dreams. Larry David has nothing on Friedman in finding the absurd in ordinary situations, but the short stories here have a dark underside. In one of them, a Jewish writer numbed by Nazi terrors struggles with an assignment from Joseph Goebbels to write an entertaining satirical piece for the party tabloid. In another story, a former Iowa English teacher, asked to write stories in an afterlife where no literature exists, struggles to remember the plots of great books so he can pass them off as his own. Jewish humor lives in this frequently hilarious and thoughtful collection by the author of such classics as Stern (1962) and The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (1978).

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