Review by Booklist Review
In the third novel in the Small Worlds series, Hoffman writes two seemingly unrelated stories. The first, "Royal Garments," is about Grisha Shwartzmann, who is a senior investigator for the Stalin purges in 1936. He keeps his Judaism a secret from the government, as he gradually realizes the corruption and evil he works to uphold. A letter from his father-in-law, Krimsker Rebbe, puts him back in touch with his Jewish roots. The second story, "The Strength of Stones," jumps ahead six years to the Nazis' murderous reign in Poland. A lonely Jew rides to his death at Treblinka. Years before, he had been exiled from his religion by Krimsker Rebbe. He meets up with an old childhood acquaintance, Itzik Dribble. Through Itzik, the man gains in death the love, family, honor, and faith he lacked in life. The historically interesting stories are linked by the presence of Krimsker Rebbe and by the common thread of a search for identity. Hoffman is an intelligent writer with a gift for satire. --Ellie Barta-Moran
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The third volume in Hoffman's Small World series (after Big League Dreams) implicitly emphasizes the trilogy's theme: that the far-flung former residents of the tiny Polish shetl of Krimsk are forever connected via their religion, their shared past and the intuition of the Krimsker rebbe. When a letter written by the rebbe in St. Louis is received in Moscow on Rosh Hashanah, 1936, it is a death warrant for Grisha Shwartzman, the character in Small Worlds who rescued the Torah from the burning synagogue and was rewarded with marriage to the rebbe's daughter. The then-idealistic Grisha returned to Russia and an unquestioning devotion to the Revolution. Now an NKVD colonel in the Lubyanka secret police prison, Grisha finds himself, on the first day of the Jewish New Year, brought to judgment for the crimes he has committed in Stalin's name. Grisha's painful moral awakening is a mordant depiction of a man without scruples in a society where morality and truth have been subverted by political tyranny. In the book's second section, a man being deported from the Warsaw ghetto on Yom Kippur, 1942, has another terrifying problem: he can't remember his name, though he can remember having been expelled from Krimsk as a heretic. When he meets another former resident of Krimsk, a gentle giant who needs protection, Yechiel Katzman's memory spontaneously returns, and the rebbe's prophecy that he would never leave Krimsk proves true. Unlike its two predecessors, this is an unrelievedly dark and painful work, its gallows humor swallowed in the tragic enormity of the events it describes. The tortured examination of Talmudic logic and Communist illogic may be more erudite and specific than readers desire. Yet the overriding message of these linked novellas is redemptive. Though the "two devils," Stalin and Hitler, claim two more lives, the morality and humanistic principles of Judaism prevail in an implied rebirth of the children of Israel. Editor, Sally Arteseros. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Hoffmans latest and bleakest workthe third in his Small Worlds cycle (Small Worlds, 1996; Big League Dreams, 1997)continues the saga of the disciples of the Krimsker Rebbe in the darkening years of the 30s and 40s. The duo of the title are a pair of offstage characters whose depredations can spell only disaster for the now-scattered Jews of Krimsk. In the first of the novels two parts, it is Rosh Hashanah 1936, and Rabbi Finebaum's own son-in-law, Hershel Shwartzman, is a worker in the sinister arts, a colonel in the NKVD whose primary duty is the torturing of political prisoners. But Grisha, as hes known, begins to suffer his own loss of faith as it dawns on him that the wheels of death he helps to run will inevitably grind him up also. As fear displaces zeal, he is drawn into the kind of self-examination that cant help but lead to his demise. The second (and shorter) narrative is set on Yom Kippur 1942 and reintroduces two of the major characters from Small Worlds: Yechiel Katzman, once the Rebbe's prize pupil, banished for apparent heresy, and Itzik Dribble, the sweet-natured retarded boy who was an integral part of that earlier novels climax. Now, both are in the clutches of the Nazi killing machine: Katzman, an inhabitant of the Warsaw Ghetto, is on a train to Treblinka; Itzik, who has grown to immense size and strength, is an uncomprehending tool of the SS. A master of the art of getting into his characters' heads, Hoffman creates intricate and thoroughly convincing monologues. And he hasnt lost his taste for the miraculous nature of the everyday, a fascination that makes him one of the logical heirs to the legacy of Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Author tour)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
