What do you think?
Rate this book
The Secret Table
Two novellas of young men embracing a mystical past
In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.
In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.
168 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
May 27, 2018not to go after low-hanging fruit or anything but calling a work of aimless prose poetry "onan's child" is kinda the equiv of putting a "kick me" sign on your own back, right? even "dorchester" and the closing short stories, which hew a lot closer to thou worm jacob and blue hill ave (neither of which i can recommend enough), seem, like, tortured, in the sense that they use on project runway to describe stuff that's uncomfortably over-stylized. oh well we'll see how proceedings of the rabble & red adam go!
Displaying 1 of 1 review