Word: greenbergs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS by Joanne Greenberg...
...this collection of ten short stories, Joanne Greenberg seems eager to make things go bump in the daytime. Take the case of Aunt Bessie, a nice Jewish woman who one day stops believing in God. Watched by a cautiously admiring niece, Bessie goes on to renounce faith in banks, germs and electricity, although her unplugged television set somehow still carries whatever programs she wants to watch. Only when Bessie decides that all natural laws, including gravity, are myths does she receive her alarmingly literal comeuppance. Her niece finds her floating like a balloon about the house, being hectored and scolded...
Although the whimsy in this story is nicely done, Bessie's punishment strikes a censorious note that is less happily picked up throughout the book. Greenberg draws a number of characters only so that she can quarter them. A young man smuggles cocaine from Mexico into the U.S. and meets up with a malakh, a Jewish angel who subjects him to humiliating lectures: "Whenever the Lord has been convinced to widen His mercy or extend His patience it has been at the behest of a fool. You are such a fool...