Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best Jewish fiction of 2008; shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal, selected by the American Library Association to recognize that year's "most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults," finalist for Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008.

“...an American talent” —Stephen King

“Funny, rueful, wise stories, steeped in absurdity, pain, possibility: the work of a writer who has lived.” —Gish Jen

“Eileen Pollack writes with great acuity, humor, and intelligent resignation [...] This book is terrific company.” —Lorrie Moore

Reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle

KIRKUS REVIEWS 3/1/2008

"Incisive, beautifully crafted stories about family relationships, focused especially on the dynamic between fathers and daughters.

"Pollack (Paradise, New York, 1998, etc.) looks lovingly and longingly at the way families work, particularly when death is impending. It’s hard to choose favorites here, for all are worthy. 'The Bris' examines the life of James Sloan, who has been living a lie, and now, on the point of death, charges his son Marcus with the task of finding a mohel who will perform a bris so he can be buried next to his wife in an Orthodox cemetery. As James’s health declines, Marcus’s anxiety and desperation increase, for the rabbi refuses to countenance the bris for both religious and personal reasons. (A competitive player, the rabbi won’t even consider the request until Marcus wins at least two games in a set of tennis.) Marcus is finally led to take matters into his own hands, as it were. 'Uno' introduces us to Heloise and Mitch, who on holiday at the Sunshine Lodge (where the food is so pure 'you needed a spiritual license to be allowed to eat') meet a family that includes Sarah and Meribeth, Siamese twins who help call into question Heloise’s tidy world. The longest piece is 'Beached in Boca,' a nuanced story that weaves together three narrative lines with great delicacy. Wendy has come to visit her father in Boca Raton only to find out that he has AIDS. Dealing with the jolt of this revelation, she examines her own sexual history and her inability to commit to her current lover, a 60-year-old professor from Montana. At her father’s condominium complex she meets (and is strongly attracted to) Adam Haber, whose father recently committed suicide because the body of a former lover was found in a barrel in the basement of his house.

"Delicate but dazzling."

Ploughshares, Fall 2008, Review

"In the Mouth, stories and novellas by Eileen Pollack (Four Way): How’s this for brave? One narrator, a son, is obsessed with fulfilling his dying father’s request for a belated circumcision, even at the son’s own hands. How’s this for unflinching? Another narrator, a mother, is troubled by something as normal but taboo as a kind of lust for her newborn son’s attentions. In the six stories and novellas that make up her latest collection, Eileen Pollack exhibits the fearless gift of taking the “un” out of unspeakable.

Best of all: she does it with precision. A nursing mother admits “vague irritation” at her newborn’s insistence at her nipple “as if a street-corner beggar kept pulling at her arm.” A young doctor reluctantly asking intimate questions of a woman patient is “shy as a boy whose mother has asked him to unhook her brassiere.”

Widening her lens, Ms. Pollack stares unblinking at the larger groups to which these all-too-human behaviors obtain. She scores Christians for being “stingy, not only with their money but with their love,” as well as a bunch of Hasidic Jews for channeling money for a camp for retarded teens into a getaway for themselves. (If anti-Semitism can ever be said to be funny, she tests its outside limit.) Even a well-meaning married couple, subset of a group we all recognize if can?t necessarily name, doesn’t escape the marksmanship of her pen: “They signed petitions. They volunteered. They were just a little too earnest. It wasn’t that their lives were untroubled... They saw heartbreak every day. But these troubles didn’t seem to trouble them. It was as if they were standing in the rain, talking about how wet they were getting, but you could see the water rolling right off their Gore-Tex shells.”

One senses that it’s anger as well as affection—and often a blend of the two, with grief for the human comedy tossed somewhere in the mix—that fuels her remarkable specificity. The shaggy head of an old man smells of “urine, sardines, and Vitalis.” Another who keeps the trunk of his car “cleaner than most people kept their mouths,” replaces a divot during a golf game with “the care a plastic surgeon might bestow upon repairing a young girl’s face.” In between forking bites of beef macaroni into his maw, yet another old-timer delivers a hug so monumental that it leaves him “as shaken as a soldier who has darted across a field to grab a fallen comrade.” Gentleness shares space in the heart with brutality.

Perhaps inevitably, nowhere is Ms. Pollack more fraught than in describing the act of making love between middle-aged people with parent troubles. In the final story, “Beached in Boca,” the woman is someone who prefers her beach water choppy. The man is a toy importer, someone whose father has scandalized his Florida retirement community with a particularly unseemly murder and who is endeavoring to care as little as possible about anything anymore. Nevertheless there’s this: “He pressed one hand against her breast while sliding the other hand up her thigh. For some reason, she was reminded of the flat wood box in which a person could slip a coin and make it disappear. All those years importing novelties seemed to have given Adam Haber the sleight-of-hand required to remove a woman’s underwear without taking off her shorts. He could palm her hand and make it vanish, and then, with a sideways smile, lay it back inside her ribs. It was a trick, but not a bad trick.”

—Daniel Asa Rose Daniel Asa Rose edits The Reading Room, a literary journal, and is the author of three books: the story collection Small Family with Rooster, the novel Flipping for It, and Hiding Places, a memoir."

Reviewed in Michigan Quarterly Review

When Marcus packed for Florida, he harbored no illusions about what would happen when he got there. His father’s liver soon would fail, and, without a transplant, he couldn’t survive the week. “Why waste a miracle on an elderly man like me?” his father scoffed. He pooh-poohed the new liver as if it were a slightly used sports car Marcus insisted he buy. “At least let me put your name on the waiting list,” Marcus said, but his father blew raspberries through the phone. “Give that same liver to someone young, and he or she could get another fifty years out of the goddamn thing.”

And so, with a heavy carry-on and an even heavier heart, Marcus flew to West Palm Beach. He rented a car and drove to the hospital in Boca Raton where his father had been taken after his last collapse. As he checked in at Registration and followed the arrows to the room, he prepared for the likelihood that in another few days he would be arranging his father’s funeral. What he couldn’t have predicted was that first he would be called on to arrange his father’s bris.

“Your bris, Pop?” Marcus laughed, although his father rarely joked; for a former hotelkeeper in the Catskills, he was a singularly humorless man. His request that Marcus find a mohel who would circumcise him before he died could only be an effect of the drugs
he was taking or the poison seeping from his liver. “Don’t worry, Pop. All of that was taken care of a long time ago.”

His father waved a bloated yellow arm. Hooked up to an IV, he reminded Marcus of an inflated creature in the Thanksgiving Day parade. “A lie,” his father gasped. “Everything has been a lie.”

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889, a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold onto land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Since the Sioux chieftain could neither read nor write English, he welcomed the white woman's offer to act as his secretary and lobbyist. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teen-age son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River. In recognition of her unusual qualities, Sitting Bull's people called her Toka heya mani win, Woman Walking Ahead.

Predictably, the press vilified Weldon, calling her "Sitting Bull's white squaw" and accusing her of inciting Sitting Bull to join the Ghost Dance religion then sweeping the West. In fact, Weldon opposed the movement, arguing that the army would use the Ghost dance as an excuse to jail or kill Sitting Bull. Unfortunately she was right.

Up to now, history has distorted and largely overlooked Weldon's story. In retracing Weldon's steps, Eileen Pollack recovers her life and compares her world to our own. Weldon's moving struggle is a classic example of the misunderstandings that can occur when a white woman attempts to build friendships across cultural lines and assist the members of an oppressed minority fighting for their rights.

"A wonderful poignance, a bittersweetness, the haunting loneliness of the plains hangs over this 'search' . . . a fascinating project."—Peter Nabokov

"A fascinating story, well told and engaging. It will be eagerly embraced in the area of women's studies and will find interested readers in history and anthropology, as well as a large general audience."—Raymond DeMallie

". . . this account is fascinating."—Great Plains Quarterly

". . . Pollack shows us that in the Victorian era, Weldon did indeed walk ahead of her time."—Gateway Heritage

"It is a fascinating historical side trip and a detective story full of false leads, tantilizing clues, and ultimate satisfaction."—The Explorers Journal

"Pollack's discoveries about Weldon are significant, and she restores this figure to her rightful place in history. . . Pollack provides an excellent overview of nineteenth century U.S. Indian policy and of white reform groups, and she spells out the complex political situation and life of Sitting Bull."—Michigan Quarterly Review

"Pollack's intriguing book is more than a biography of an Indian chief and a nineteenth-century reformer. . . Pollack satisfactorily fills in details about Weldon, her emotional relationship with Sitting Bull, and her motivations that drove her to involve herself in the lives of the Lakotas."—North Dakota History

"This study is an important addition to the history of women's work among the Indians. It has a wealth of information about various reformers including Lyman Abbot, the Blands, and Alfred Meacham, but most importantly it portrays the life of a remarkable Victorian woman who saw beauty in Sitting Bull's way of life."—Western Historical Quarterly

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, in 1970, as a nine-year-old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, Lucy tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt and running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of the season, Lucy battles her grandmother's attempts to sabotage Lucy's success, her parents' superstitious fears of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

Paradise, New York explores the comforts and complexities of American ethnic identity with a charming commitment to laughter and love.

"Pollack's first novel succeeds ... in taking on such large themes as racism and bigotry, love and loyalty."—The New York Times Book Review

"A novel long on wonderful writing, sharp details, and no-nonsense nostalgia."—Elinor Lipman, The Boston Sunday Globe

"A finely crafted ... first novel detailing the journey to wisdom of a young woman who grew up in a Borscht Belt hotel."—Kirkus Reviews

"Pollack will not disappoint readers with her first novel, Paradise, New York.... It is a stark and precise depiction of the psychological and cultural states of American Jewry, a narrative challenge that Pollack meets with legend, parable, sociology, history and old-fashioned storytelling."—Judith Bolton-Fasman, Washington Post Book World

"Paradise, New York is set in the Catskills, the area once known for false hilarity and exaggerated emotions. But there's nothing false in this story, just believable and sympathetic people together during a summer that they will not forget. Neither will readers of this lovely novel."—Max Apple, author of Roommates and I Love Gootie

"This first novel of 'the last Catskills resort' nearly bursts off the page. Eileen Pollack's characters crack wise, work hard, make loving trouble for one another, and then, as soon as they've got us laughing, they move on and break hearts. Eileen Pollack is a marvelous writer; and Paradise, New York is a sharply observed and poignant novel about the dangers of nostalgia and the willfulness of time."—Marcie Hershman, author of Safe in America

"In this funny and moving novel ... Paradise involves both the preservation of an ethnic identity and the transcendence of all ethnic identities through tolerance and love. Eileen Pollack has written an absorbing and beautifully fascinating parable about faith, and the forces of love and ambition that can bring it down."—Charles Baxter, author of Believers

In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the "City of Five Smells" in America's heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators are looking back on their pasts. But don't expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted. And moved.

Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties of youth. As the narrator of the first story discovers when "barbarian" rock fans invade her town, it can be terrifying to be knocked from the "tiny fixed orbit" of conventional life. But if a person can stretch her imagination far enough, she might be able to glimpse an "elsewhere" beyond the boundaries of ordinary human limitations.

This battle between the real and ideal is taken to mythic heights in the title novella, in which a novice rabbi must try to evict her Orthodox predecessor from the house provided by her prickly congregation. Only when she tempers her enthusiasm for the new ways with compassion for those who follow the old ways can Rabbi Bloomgarten begin to care for their souls.

Eileen Pollack writes from a Jewish point of view, but her subject is the search for principles that we must all undertake in a world in which religious truths are no longer handed down from parent to child. Just as one of her characters decides to become a "value assessor," the author herself helps us to sort through the jumble of objects, ideas and memories in our own attics. In doing so, she appeals to our minds and our hearts. Her characters teach us that imagination and empathy are our best hope if we are to understand—and perhaps transcend—the pain in our world. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic and lush. The images in her stories—a chef's severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunken beneath a reservoir—will stay in your mind long after you have finished her book.

"For readers who delight in gorgeous writing..."—Jewish Exponent

"Insightful, funny, and humane ... Pollack is keen on rich imagery and her work abounds with memorable visual effects..."—The New York Times Book Review

"...the dazzling title story is rich in humor as well as in real spiritual and personal insight. It has the depth and resonance of a distinguished sister story, 'The Pagan Rabbi' of Cynthia Ozick."—Boston Globe

"Pollack has a wonderful sense of humor as well as a sense of outrage."—Washington Post Book World, which selected The Rabbi in the Attic as one of its "favorite books of the last 25 years"

"These fine, lean, elegant stories share two traits that are becoming increasingly rare in contemporary fiction: high intelligence and absolute unpredictability. Like the air conditioner in the story of that title, they fall swiftly, and change the lives of their protagonists, but never in the way one think they are going to. I will find them hard to forget."—David Leavitt

"Eileen Pollack possesses a moral intelligence, one which enables her to celebrate the absurd in human situations with gentle, compassionate humor. Her people are morally brave and warm and forgiving in their quests to do some good, and to find meaning, in a fallen world. Eileen is claiming for herself the moral landscape left behind by Bernard Malamud. She is "listening to God with her own ears," and is giving us beautifully crafted stories based on what she has learned. The Rabbi in the Attic is the remarkable first step in what will inevitably become a noteworthy contribution to American literature."—James Alan McPherson

"Eileen Pollack's The Rabbi in the Attic is a wonderfully rich and thoughtful new collection, laced with wit and tenderness for human follies of all kinds. Readers cannot fail to see themselves in these stories that track today's stumbling quests for truth, integrity, and purpose."—Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"Eileen Pollack is a gifted new writer whose work will make you laugh and think. Don't miss her splendid book."—Dan Wakefield

Jesse doesn't understand what all the whispering is about, but it must be something important. The arrival of Uncle Josh to live with his family gives Josh a new hero to play with and talk to. When he learns that Uncle Josh has AIDS, Jesse takes part in the family's commitment to provide loving care during a difficult illness.