Home > The Rabbi of Lud Summary & Study Guide

The Rabbi of Lud (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: Stanley Elkin
  • First Published: 1987
  • Type of Work: Novel
  • Genres: Long fiction

Jerry Goldkorn is the rabbi of Lud, a town in northern New Jersey where all the living residents are transients and all the permanent ones are dead, for Lud is a “company town” operated by the rabbi’s employers, owners of the town’s cemeteries. Goldkorn’s ministry is confined to burying the dead, a job that all too nicely fits the man, for Goldkorn, who never felt called to his vocation, was trained at an “offshore” yeshiva situated on the Maldive Islands and rather willingly accepts the fact that he is less a rabbi than a part of a burial package offered to the bereaved by the rabbi’s employers. Such a man in such a job must necessarily undergo the most absurd crisis of faith in all of literature: a schlemiel’s dark night of the soul, a considerably less than divine comedy.

In a flashback to the “sabbatical” year he spent as rabbi of the Alaska pipeline, the extent of Goldkorn’s absurd dilemma becomes even clearer as the gap between his benignly confident “rabbi mode” and his less professionally practiced and more human doubts widen: “Dread and awe ... were hard in such a awesome, dreadful world,” he learns, but no harder than in the suck-and-sell of his ironic hometown of Lud, where death is big business and fear is so rampant that AIDS victims have to be smuggled into their perpetual-care burial plots so as not to frighten off those who will be dying of less infectious causes. The absurdity of Goldkorn’s situation is matched, however, by its pathos, and Goldkorn turns out to be less an isolated case of living the safe life than an Everyman, or even a messiah, humiliating himself so that others may live and learn. Hedged in, quite literally, by death and by his own passive inconsequentiality, he cannot howl like Shakespeare’s tragic heroes but can only do what his creator does: spiel, finding a kind of oblique truth in the stubborn and uncontrollable flood of Elkin’s brilliantly conceived and utterly American language.

Saving the best for last, Elkin has his rabbi perform his only service for someone he actually knew, a woman he briefly loved and with whom he committed the seeming sin of adultery. “rabbi mode” altogether as his chaotic prayer for the dead ascends the scale from lamentation to thanksgiving without once lapsing into mere sentimentality. The closing pages confirm what the rest of the novel has already suggested--that THE RABBI OF LUD is not only one of the most amusing books of the past decade but also one of the most moving.