Greenberg, Joanne (Goldenberg) - Sanford Pinsker
SANFORD PINSKER
The ten stories of High Crimes and Misdemeanors often dazzle and always delight. They are worthy companions to the stories in Miss Greenberg's earlier collection, Rites of Passage (1972), full of the moral concern and magical twists we have come to associate with Greenberg's best work.
At least half of these most recent stories are intriguing additions to that slippery category known as American-Jewish fiction. In her stories, Jewishness is less a cultural condition than it is an unacknowledged spiritual realm. In short, she takes Jewish ideas—and more important, the Jewish God—seriously. "Certain Distant Suns" begins on a note that one would never find in a story by, say, Philip Roth: "In the end we found out that Aunt Bessie, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and three weeks before the Seder, had stopped believing in God." Rather than satirizing Aunt Bessie, by listing the contents of her refrigerator or the weave in her...
[The entire page is 465 words long]
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