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 wall-to-wall carpeting, Greenberg lets the premise generate a condition that quickly wrenches it from the rational, the mundane, the commonsensical. Aunt Bessie's abrupt decision affects an entire family, because it was her turn to host the Passover Seder…. (pp. 511-12)

At times one suspects that too much has been sacrificed for endings that would have made crackjack installments on the old "Twilight Zone" T.V. show. "Like a Banner" is such a tale, with its composite of James Thurber's Walter Mitty (in this case, an ambulance driver who fantasizes himself as the dashing, glamorous Dr. Life) and Nathanael West's ersatzsavior, Miss Lonelyhearts, and its predictable lesson. "Flight Pattern" is another, in which a bumbling dope smuggler is hounded by a very persistent angel.

Also: One suspects there is a self-conscious, bookish character to much of Greenberg's dabbling in the supernatural, the cabalistic, the Judaically occult. On the other hand, a less encumbered story like "Merging Traffic" (a tale of separate reunions, of lives that did not touch in a high school that divided the Beautiful and the Lucky from those made of unheroic stuff, and lives that will not touch even years later) is more immediate, more powerful and much more poetic.

Nonetheless, High Crimes and Misdemeanors is worth reading and, more important, it warrants re-reading. Its stories have the rare ability to first surprise and then convince. That sort of high praise is usually restricted to very good poems. Greenberg's collection makes an impressive case that it is also appropriate to the short story. (pp. 512-13)