Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Stern, by Bruce Jay Friedman. This touching, low-key novel about being Jewish in a lawn-proud U.S. suburb artfully blends fact with fantasy, rue with mirth...
...scholarship, the two schools are more alike than different. With its 23 buildings on 92 acres, Reed is a tiny college of 789 coed students. With its low faculty pay and paltry endowment of $4,500,000, it is among the respectable poor of U.S. education. Yet by stern resolve and heroic dispensing of scholarship money ($250,000 a year), Reed is intellectually one of the nation's richest campuses. Reed has no other reason for being. "The only attraction here is intellectual activity," says one professor. "There is no other way to lead a satisfactory existence at Reed...
Worst of all is the man down the road, who refused to let his child play with Stern's ("No playing here for kikes"), and who gave Stern's wife a push that sent her sprawling and may (or may not) have allowed him a look beneath her dress. Fighting the "kike man,'' as Stern thinks of him, becomes a constant obsession; he takes to worrying all day about whether he will have the courage to drive home from the station by the route that leads past the man's house. And when he does...
...Little Theatrical." Stern develops an ulcer, ''a hairy, coarse-tufted little animal within him that squawked for nourishment," and is sent to a nightmarish rest home populated by a brilliant set of grotesques that might be right out of Hieronymus Bosch. Stern emerges to have a nervous breakdown, which Author Friedman manages to make both hugely comic and horrendously real...
...novel's only important lapse is its denouement-the fight with the kike man, which is written as if Friedman were trying to compose an allegory. When the man clobbers him on the ear, Stern "thrills with joy at still being alive," then feels "a warm shudder of sympathy for the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow." He walks bloodily home, purged at first, then puzzled to find that the old fear of his enemy down the road is beginning all over again...