Prayers for the Living: A Novel

by Alan Cheuse, Tova Mirvis (Foreword by)

Overview

Prayers for the Living is a novel both grand in its vision and loving in its familiarity. Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory, but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control.

As Manny’s fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter, traumatized by a sexual scandal at college, makes Manny the target of a plot to shatter his newly-found empire. The devoted family matriarch, Minnie, observes and recounts the tragic downfall of her family, unable to save them from themselves.

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941493014
Publisher:	Fig Tree Books LLC
Publication date:	03/17/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	665 KB

About the Author

Alan Cheuse has been reviewing books on All Things Considered since the 1980s. Formally trained as a literary scholar, Cheuse writes fiction and novels and publishes short stories. He is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories and novellas, and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University near Washington, D.C., spends his summers in Santa Cruz, CA, and leads fiction workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Tova Mirvis, author of the foreword, has published three novels, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Book One: Afternoon

But he sees it. Him. His father lying stretched out in the pond of milk, fingers curled around half-moons of yellowish-brown sheaths from which the fruity pith has been squashed as flat as his chest. His eyes are open – looking directly upon Atlantis.
What does his son do next? What would anyone do? He doesn’t know what to do. And as the crowd follows the sound of the moaning – before the horse’s, now his – he kneels on his father’s awful chest, and then reaches out into the mess of milk and muck and – I’m telling you, and afraid I’m telling – the blood that spilled there, too, and up comes his hand with a piece of six-pointed glass. Here, give me another napkin, I’ll show you what.
“And this is how he lost his father?”
Yes so look.
With the lipstick, it’s messy. But I’m glad I use lipstick so I could show you. Today they don’t use it – Sarah wouldn’t be caught dead wearing lipstick, and your grandchildren, besides your one the youth leader, the girls? Well, whatever. Here. Look. The star. The six points. And if you can believe that glass shatters in a design – and who can say it can’t because it did – then listen to what happened next. The way a life breaks. The way life goes. The pieces. The pattern. What happens next.
He’s now kneeling, my Manny, and now he’s crying, moaning, the shock has hit him, the shock is setting in. And around him he hears voices – oi, they will become so familiar!
“Help him up, you idiot!” a man’s big booming order.
“Pa, he won’t ...”
“Help him, damn it!”
It was the cabby’s fault, it was the cabby, the cabby, he hears a woman jabbering alongside the rangling of the men.
“Help him. Oh, you schmuck, here!”
And a strong arm lifts under his and Manny is up on his feet, as loose-limbed as a puppet from a puppet show in his misery, his shock.
“Your father?” the man asks.
Manny looks up to see this balding man in a fine suit and overcoat, nose like a hawk, eyes like a fox, and the arm that holds Manny belongs to this man.
“His father all right,” a taller, younger man also balding says.
“How are we doing here?” comes a cop along to say.
And Manny, who has never stood so close to a policeman before, studies his uniform, such heavy blue cloth, shining gold buttons, and then becomes distracted by the approaching sound of

bells bells BELLS BELLS BELLS

as the ambulance roars in the from the west.
And the man takes him by the arm away from the crowd, the policeman accompanying them, and they ask where he lives and he gives them his address.
And they open the door of the stalled taxi and help him into the backseat while they go on talking, talking outside.
And he sits in the cab staring straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of him, and he loses himself in the smell and design of the upholstery, like a snail’s whorl of a shell, spinning around and around into a tighter and tighter knot, and he’s fingering the star-shaped shard until all the doors appear to open at once. A man climbs in, the smell of the street on his coat, the younger man in a suit, a big boy, with a high, nasal voice, and the woman, still jabbering –“ shut up already!” says the hawk- nosed man, “shut up – don’t you dare!” the woman says back to him.
And he sniffles in the woman’s perfume and the odor of a cigar as the hawk-nosed man lights up.
And only then, his fingers responding to the sharp-pointed star, does he turn away from the pattern on the upholstery, lift himself up and out of the pattern (this was how he put it to me) and look to his right, on the seat to his right, and there he sees the little girl. When she got there he doesn’t know. She could have been there the whole time or she could have climbed in with her parents, her brother. But nonetheless there she is. Pale, pink, freckled face. Hair like wispy reddish cotton candy from a carnival, all done up in a knot. Like a doll’s hair. A little skirt she wears beneath her tiny fur wrap. White-stockinged feet that don’t reach to the floor of the cab. And as he stares at her some¬thing happens in her eyes – and she wiggles her nose in disgust – and that’s when he smells it too, and looks around for the source. An odor like the horse in its dying. Garbage. Manure. Filth of the gutter. And only when she opens her eyes wide – if a girl that small can feel horror, show horror – and points a finger at him, and cries out, only then, just as he lets another one go in his pants, does he understand what has been done to him, and what he has done.

“The poor child.”
Poor.
“And this is how he lost his father?”
This is how.
“And this is how you lost your Jacob?”
This is how.

Editorial Reviews

"It is a pleasure to recommend a novel this good and this wise." — Sanford Pinsker, Hadassah Magazine

"Prayers for the Living troubles notions of righteousness and forgiveness, madness, and fate, providing no easy answers while still leaving readers feeling edified. Cheuse’s is a challenging and intelligent novel, replete with beauty and heartbreak, and perhaps even containing a measure of redemption." — Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews

"Cheuse’s complex approach to storytelling via conversations, letters, and prayers is so much bigger than a typical narrative, as is this provocative story." — Denise Hoover, Booklist Online

"If this morally complex saga of one man's rise and spectacular fall in late 20th century America is typical of the quality of the [new] publisher's titles, its future is promising." — Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

"The tragic story...makes for an interesting, intense and unforgettable read.” — Caresa Alexander Randall, Deseret News

Praise for Prayers for the Living:

"[Prayers for the Living] deserves to live among the great novels of Jewish American experience. It is a book that bears the weight of something old, yet feels new and utterly alive at the same time." — Tova Mirvis, author of The Ladies Auxiliary, The Outside World, and Visible City (from the foreword)

“‘I want the world,’ shouts William Dubin, the biographer-protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives, raging at a life that thinks he should survive without passions. Meet Dubin’s kinsman Manny Bloch, the tormented, cursed hero of this fine novel by Alan Cheuse. At once tender and brutal, unsparing and wise, Prayers for the Living masterfully ventriloquizes not only the voices of Manny and the people he cherishes and destroys, but those of an entire America staring at itself in a cracked mirror.” — Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life

“A tour de force of voice, character, and psychology from an American master at the height of his powers. Minnie Bloch’s tale of her family’s slow disintegration echoes Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! recast in New York and New Jersey, a search for understanding and meaning amidst the wreckage of a life gone off the rails in pursuit of the American dream.” – Christian Kiefer, author of The Animals

"Cheuse enlarges the immigrant tale of aspiration and loss. His narrator, in a lyrically heightened dialect as bold and capacious as the voices of William Faulkner, propels the story toward its conclusion with a dire largeness of scope that deserves the word ‘tragic.'" – Robert Pinsky, author of Gulf Music

From the Publisher