Word: kugel
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...appreciate The Crucible without actually going to it (and if you haven't gone already, for Heaven's sake don't), you have to have savored a potato kugel heartburn. Potato kugel is a greasy dish made of ground potatoes, egg, and too much chicken schmaltz. Going down it is very smooth, but it keeps on insisting how good it tasted all evening long...
...student Twirckoff, Yom Kippur was always a day of dread." Thus begins Mark Mirsky's short story, "Lukshin Kugel" (in English that's noodle pudding). Twirckoff's dread--What does it mean to be a Jew?--sets the tone for this second issue of Mosaic, a literary magazine published by the Hillel Society...
Mirsky's story, a humorous parody of the recent space of identity crisis fiction, unfortunately is marred by most of the major flaws of recent American Jewish fiction--not to mention a few offenses that are uniquely Mirsky's. "Lukshin Kugel" is sloppily sentimental, affecting an uncritical nostalgia for the ghetto, and is narrated in a shoulder-shrugging Yiddish tone that is not maintained consistently. In one moment, the narrator sounds like a much-oppressed peasant from the Russian Pale ("Myself, I say, you never know when a pogrom is going to come along. One minute you're in Minsk...
...Yiddish words; his extraordinary stress on Jewish self-abasement, passivity, and lamentation in Twirckoff's response to crisis; his condescending attitude toward his protagonist; and the intrusion of a phony mystical hallucination at the end to get Twirckoff off the spiritual hook--all of these flaws keep "Lukshin Kugel" from creating any unified effect...
...understand Yiddish, you will soon realize that the Boston censor probably cannot speak a word of it. But even if you don't know a bagel from a kugel, an evening spent at Bagels and Yox will be thoroughly enjoyable...