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Victorian Designs for Needlepoint [Paperback] [Jan 01, 1978] Kluger, Phyllis …
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Joanne Greenberg
46 books159 followersJoanne Greenberg, also known as Hannah Green, is a writer whose style lends itself to the mature reader yet simultaneously presents themes suitable for all ages. Greenberg addresses the persistent doubts that plague all of us by relating stories of others in need. Though the scenarios in which her characters find themselves may be unfamiliar to the average reader, the emotions they feel while enmeshed in the plotlines are universal in appeal and scope. Her works include magazine publications, short stories, novels, and a movie adaptation of her book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 4, 2023
written June 1994
Greenberg writes (in these stories at least) like no one else I've ever read. From talking to my Meredith colleague Suzanne Newton, I knew that these works would have theological themes or implications, but even that turned out to be different and more surprising than I expected.
Perhaps I'm just too WASPish for this book; the fact that the religious stories and customs and concerns are so unrelievedly Jewish took some getting used to for me. When I read I typically look for points of contact and similarity with my own life and questions; in reading of Greenberg's midwestern Jewish world I found mostly differences. And the magical realism of Esquivel and Naylor has become supernatural in this collection, in a way that I find disconcerting.
The first story began so matter-of-factly in its discussion of faith and the loss thereof that I was totally unprepared for the anchorless central character to start floating gravity-less around the room while being accosted by the Hasidic Jew on her unplugged tv. But that seems to be the world in which all these stories take place -- a world in which four friends steal Time for their rabbi, where a nice lady in a nice garden takes orders for murders and suicides, where the inmates take over not just the asylum but the mayor's and sheriff's offices, where the rescue squad technician has an imaginary counterpart Dr. Life.
Though the time-story ("Things in their Season") and the gravity-story ("Certain Distant Suns") will long linger in my mind, my favorites are the less weird ones:
-- "On Tiptoe They Must Leave, The Pious of Israel" in which the community's lone Jew extorts Jewishness out of a couple seeking to pass as generic WASPs;
-- "De Rerum Natura" in which a troubled parent writes to a famous scientist about the molecular physics of human relationships, which "change as fast as light traveling between sun and earth" (149) and are at least as much in need of study;
-- and "Merging Traffic" most of all, maybe because I just got an invitation to my high school reunion. I love the first paragraph of this story, which compares human relationships to traffic, merging without touching because touching causes serious damage. Then that theme is beautifully wedded to Greenberg's insights into the cruel adolescent hierarchies that live on for far too long deep within us. I am almost tempted to copy this story and send it to everyone on the reunion committee, except they are all what Greenberg calls "Alindas" (or were once). Then I wonder: how many of them thought I was one of them too?
I will read more of Greenberg's work, but I will be more careful now in my expectations. I will approach her stories like her EMT crews pulling up to an accident: "you never know when you start out which kind of run it's going to be" (162), so "even before we get to it we are looking for clues, trying to see the possible means of collision, the signals of injury" (164). These stories can do damage to a complacent middleclass WASP -- they can make you think.
Greenberg writes (in these stories at least) like no one else I've ever read. From talking to my Meredith colleague Suzanne Newton, I knew that these works would have theological themes or implications, but even that turned out to be different and more surprising than I expected.
Perhaps I'm just too WASPish for this book; the fact that the religious stories and customs and concerns are so unrelievedly Jewish took some getting used to for me. When I read I typically look for points of contact and similarity with my own life and questions; in reading of Greenberg's midwestern Jewish world I found mostly differences. And the magical realism of Esquivel and Naylor has become supernatural in this collection, in a way that I find disconcerting.
The first story began so matter-of-factly in its discussion of faith and the loss thereof that I was totally unprepared for the anchorless central character to start floating gravity-less around the room while being accosted by the Hasidic Jew on her unplugged tv. But that seems to be the world in which all these stories take place -- a world in which four friends steal Time for their rabbi, where a nice lady in a nice garden takes orders for murders and suicides, where the inmates take over not just the asylum but the mayor's and sheriff's offices, where the rescue squad technician has an imaginary counterpart Dr. Life.
Though the time-story ("Things in their Season") and the gravity-story ("Certain Distant Suns") will long linger in my mind, my favorites are the less weird ones:
-- "On Tiptoe They Must Leave, The Pious of Israel" in which the community's lone Jew extorts Jewishness out of a couple seeking to pass as generic WASPs;
-- "De Rerum Natura" in which a troubled parent writes to a famous scientist about the molecular physics of human relationships, which "change as fast as light traveling between sun and earth" (149) and are at least as much in need of study;
-- and "Merging Traffic" most of all, maybe because I just got an invitation to my high school reunion. I love the first paragraph of this story, which compares human relationships to traffic, merging without touching because touching causes serious damage. Then that theme is beautifully wedded to Greenberg's insights into the cruel adolescent hierarchies that live on for far too long deep within us. I am almost tempted to copy this story and send it to everyone on the reunion committee, except they are all what Greenberg calls "Alindas" (or were once). Then I wonder: how many of them thought I was one of them too?
I will read more of Greenberg's work, but I will be more careful now in my expectations. I will approach her stories like her EMT crews pulling up to an accident: "you never know when you start out which kind of run it's going to be" (162), so "even before we get to it we are looking for clues, trying to see the possible means of collision, the signals of injury" (164). These stories can do damage to a complacent middleclass WASP -- they can make you think.
October 7, 2017
1.5 stars
I quite liked Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden but this collection of short stories were a disappointment. They had the same strange atmosphere but the short stories just didn't have anything that gripped my interest/attention.
I quite liked Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden but this collection of short stories were a disappointment. They had the same strange atmosphere but the short stories just didn't have anything that gripped my interest/attention.
January 9, 2021
Angela Carter in a sheitel, Etgar Keret at 65. I feel like this was written just for me. Greenberg's a feather in the Jewish cap.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews