Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter

by Steve Stern

Fiction. "Can't recall where it was I first came across ISAAC AND THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER and the alliterative no-nonsense monosyllables that gave me the name of its author. Recall only that I straightway made for a typewriter to whip off a love letter. Steve Stern is smart. Steve Stern is eloquent. Steve Stern is knowing. But the best of Steve Stern is the goodly heart whose imprint he impresses onto the page. Here is a mensch-and an artist"-Gordon Lish.

110 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1983

About the author

Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, the son of a grocer. He left Memphis in the 1960s to attend college, then to travel the US and Europe — living, as he told one interviewer, "the wayward life of my generation for about a decade," and ending on a hippie commune in the Ozarks. He went on to study writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, at a time when it included several notable writers who've since become prominent, including poet C.D. Wright and fiction writers Ellen Gilchrist, Lewis Nordan, Lee K. Abbott and Jack Butler.

Stern subsequently moved to London, England, before returning to Memphis in his thirties to accept a job at a local folklore center. There he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore. He published his first book, the story collection Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, which was based in The Pinch, in 1983. It won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and acclaim from some notable critics, including Susan Sontag, who praised the book's "brio ... whiplash sentences ... energy and charm," and observed that "Steve Stern may be a late practitioner of the genre [Yiddish folklore], but he is an expert one."

By decade's end Stern had won the O. Henry Award, two Pushcart Prize awards, published more collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction) and the novel Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, and was being hailed by critics such as Cynthia Ozick as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern's 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award, and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post.

Stern, who teaches at Skidmore College, has also won some notable scholarly awards, including fellowships from the Fulbright and the Guggenheim foundations. He currently lives in Ballston Spa, New York, and his latest work, the novel The Frozen Rabbi, was published in 2010.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorites. Steve Stern was my favorite writing teacher! Does not disappoint, as I re-read, through the decades.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very moving and enjoyable short collection of stories from a truly excellent writer. Being his first published work, it certainly has some flaws. However, the prose is often beautiful and exhilerating (though sometimes he overdoes it with the adjectives), and his plots, characterizations, settings, and imagery definitely position him as the (welcome) heir to Isaac Singer. All five stories deal with being an alienated outsider and how to rectify that position and find one's place in the world. More often than not, that means blending reality with a fabulist dreamworld, a dreamworld that is both better and worse than reality. These stories also consider how the past informs the present, again in ways both better and worse, often tragic and always inescapeable. Stern (a promising young writer at the time who fortunately did not perish in an apartment fire) infuses himself into his stories, showing how he sees himself personally and as a writer. I should expect that the themes and ideas that he introduces here will be more fully developed and explored in his later works - works I look forward to reading.