Max Apple’s short stories are part of the long list of Jewish-American works in the genre, and a very late entry. His predecessors and contemporaries are as distinguished as possible: Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Ozick, Delmore Schwartz, Wil Eisner; more recently, Nathan Englander, Steve Stern, Ben Katchor.
Apple differs in that the others deal with Jewish history, patterns of thought, Biblical, historical and spiritual allusions, and a set of anxieties and beliefs which make their work recognizably part of something with spiritual implications that a people have had in common for a thousands of years. Apple’s work has a looser allegiance to all that, but are in the tradition nonetheless. They focus on the inevitability, actually the comedy, of assimilation. As for comedy, there are as excellent as Steve Stern’s (and Harry Golden’s). Read More
Apple differs in that the others deal with Jewish history, patterns of thought, Biblical, historical and spiritual allusions, and a set of anxieties and beliefs which make their work recognizably part of something with spiritual implications that a people have had in common for a thousands of years. Apple’s work has a looser allegiance to all that, but are in the tradition nonetheless. They focus on the inevitability, actually the comedy, of assimilation. As for comedy, there are as excellent as Steve Stern’s (and Harry Golden’s). Read More