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The Rabbi of Lud
Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else.
As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it--or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.
As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it--or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.
277 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
10 people are currently reading
107 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Elkin
58 books125 followersStanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.
During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot.
His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip."
About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."
During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot.
His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip."
About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 23, 2016
Not sure how much interest there will be in this one for those non-Jews out there, or, at least, those without a pretty decent knowledge of jewish culture/religious practice/jokes etc. Very much a book about Jewishness and the fluctuations between the secular and the Orthodox.
Regardless, only Elkin writes rants like this, and it is for that I love him (or, at least, it is one of the MANY reasons I love him):
“Because, as I told my Connie, we’re not a chosen people so much as a marked one. Handles on us like signs over pubs. A called attention. This way to the Jews! The sounds of our titulars like cleared sinuses, the intimate throat and nose catarrhs. This way to the Jew! The blums, blooms, baums and bergs, the steins and itzes like a periodic table of the percussive, all the booms, snares and rimshots of baggy pants and low comedy. This way, this way to the Jew! All the landmarks, signposts, milestones. Our banners and gonfalons. The heraldry of our hair. The footprint of our faces. Something in our mien and countenance, at large in the lineaments like handwriting. The spectacle of the schnoz, the shrug like a broken code and an accent like a visible scar. Our outsize pores and busted profiles like difficult coastline. Some faint sweat and kasha scent and feel in the ambiance. And all the rest. Our farpotshkets, zaftigs, zhlubs, and shlumperdiks. The loksh’s unleavened life. Genug! Who said genug? Not genug! Step right up, right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the Jew! The ghetto and mezuzah. The menorah, the yarmulke, the golden chai. The inscribed gates. I mean, the lintels and frontlets – all the blood plagues, all the frog, the vermin and beasts and marred cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts and darkness and smiting of the firstborn – the Angel-of-Death-blessed, God-fingered children of Israel with their bloodied, odd-and-even, apotrapaically marked doors. This way, this way to the Jews! "
Regardless, only Elkin writes rants like this, and it is for that I love him (or, at least, it is one of the MANY reasons I love him):
“Because, as I told my Connie, we’re not a chosen people so much as a marked one. Handles on us like signs over pubs. A called attention. This way to the Jews! The sounds of our titulars like cleared sinuses, the intimate throat and nose catarrhs. This way to the Jew! The blums, blooms, baums and bergs, the steins and itzes like a periodic table of the percussive, all the booms, snares and rimshots of baggy pants and low comedy. This way, this way to the Jew! All the landmarks, signposts, milestones. Our banners and gonfalons. The heraldry of our hair. The footprint of our faces. Something in our mien and countenance, at large in the lineaments like handwriting. The spectacle of the schnoz, the shrug like a broken code and an accent like a visible scar. Our outsize pores and busted profiles like difficult coastline. Some faint sweat and kasha scent and feel in the ambiance. And all the rest. Our farpotshkets, zaftigs, zhlubs, and shlumperdiks. The loksh’s unleavened life. Genug! Who said genug? Not genug! Step right up, right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the Jew! The ghetto and mezuzah. The menorah, the yarmulke, the golden chai. The inscribed gates. I mean, the lintels and frontlets – all the blood plagues, all the frog, the vermin and beasts and marred cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts and darkness and smiting of the firstborn – the Angel-of-Death-blessed, God-fingered children of Israel with their bloodied, odd-and-even, apotrapaically marked doors. This way, this way to the Jews! "
July 16, 2017
Seventy percent of the book has been read, but a man, even a Jewish one, can only take so much suffering.
I would re-circumcise myself, with my own hands, before reading one more dreadful word.
I renounce all that I did not think I was anyway and I am buying a plane ticket to Lhasa.
I have a meeting with a Buddhist Monk, if I can find the cave where he lives, at 4 am, before the community chanting.
I checked Craig's List and I can buy a hut, two bedroom/zero bathrooms, for about 500 RMB. Four-dog powered sled and two orange togas included.
A good deal for a Nouveau mendicant.
和平
(peace)
I would re-circumcise myself, with my own hands, before reading one more dreadful word.
I renounce all that I did not think I was anyway and I am buying a plane ticket to Lhasa.
I have a meeting with a Buddhist Monk, if I can find the cave where he lives, at 4 am, before the community chanting.
I checked Craig's List and I can buy a hut, two bedroom/zero bathrooms, for about 500 RMB. Four-dog powered sled and two orange togas included.
A good deal for a Nouveau mendicant.
和平
(peace)
April 3, 2017
As a goy, it was fated that a lot of subtleties were going to go missed in The Rabbi of Lud. With the Yiddish-to-English ratio at a strong 2:5 and holding, unless it was laid out by the context (or was something that has penetrated the popular lexicon) I had no hopes of understanding every nuance of what our good rabbi was on about. Plus, I misplaced my Yiddish-English pocket dictionary so I was doubly-screwed. Considering the missing dictionary and not having been born one of the Chosen People (Catholic School oddly not focusing on Hebrew/Yiddish very much), I think it’s a mitzvah nonetheless. There was only one Elkin, and he was one of the great tragi-comic writers of our time.
Rabbi is typical of mid-later period Stanley: still oozing impeccable sentences like his buddies Gaddis and Gass; his temperament, however, unmistakably honeyed by the passing of time. Any Elkinite can attest that his relationship with God is complex and was a recurrent theme in a great deal of his work. How lucky we are to witness the internal struggle for reconciliation laid bare on the page.
I am really starting to err on the side of ‘80s Elkin—seems to be when he hit his greatest stride of blending his aesthetic and spiritual sides into one big, munificent bundle of Stanleyism. His best work, if I may be so bold, has an undeniable tenderness at its core that his early efforts lack. Call me sentimental—the guy was just Stan-tas-tic! (Okay, that one was the proverbial straw. I’ll find the door.)
Oh, and the ending is absolutely disarming. Have someone nearby that you love; you’re really going to want to express it when you finish. Actually, revise that: just have somebody nearby that you love. To quote the greatest band of my generation, “ain’t that enough?”
Rabbi is typical of mid-later period Stanley: still oozing impeccable sentences like his buddies Gaddis and Gass; his temperament, however, unmistakably honeyed by the passing of time. Any Elkinite can attest that his relationship with God is complex and was a recurrent theme in a great deal of his work. How lucky we are to witness the internal struggle for reconciliation laid bare on the page.
I am really starting to err on the side of ‘80s Elkin—seems to be when he hit his greatest stride of blending his aesthetic and spiritual sides into one big, munificent bundle of Stanleyism. His best work, if I may be so bold, has an undeniable tenderness at its core that his early efforts lack. Call me sentimental—the guy was just Stan-tas-tic! (Okay, that one was the proverbial straw. I’ll find the door.)
Oh, and the ending is absolutely disarming. Have someone nearby that you love; you’re really going to want to express it when you finish. Actually, revise that: just have somebody nearby that you love. To quote the greatest band of my generation, “ain’t that enough?”
April 17, 2019
'I had no editor on that book, and I needed an editor on that book—I needed somebody to say “pull your horns in here, go slow, don’t show off here.” Though editors mostly leave me alone—except for Joe Fox, the editor I had at Random House, I’ve never had to answer to an editor—”Rabbi of Lud” was a book that could have used one, somebody to come in with a whip and a chair and say, “get back, get back.”' -- Stanley Elkin in "A Conversation with Stanley Elkin By Peter J. Bailey" From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Summer 1995, Vol. 15.2
Elkin's self-assessment is largely correct; the shtick is at times excessive. Shelly's (what I call Pig-Yiddish, similar to Pig-Latin) adding the Yiddish diminutive suffix "leh" to English nouns eventually becomes an irritant. Also, Elkin gets a Judaism detail wrong: Yom Kippur never falls on a Sunday.
Having noted the above, this is an entertaining novel by a writer with a terrific ear for language about the consequences a parent's vocational decision can have for a child.
Elkin's self-assessment is largely correct; the shtick is at times excessive. Shelly's (what I call Pig-Yiddish, similar to Pig-Latin) adding the Yiddish diminutive suffix "leh" to English nouns eventually becomes an irritant. Also, Elkin gets a Judaism detail wrong: Yom Kippur never falls on a Sunday.
Having noted the above, this is an entertaining novel by a writer with a terrific ear for language about the consequences a parent's vocational decision can have for a child.
June 30, 2020
Look (as one of his characters might begin a book review), Stanley Elkin is an acquired taste. You either love his lush, multi-metaphored sentences rich in nouns, adjectives, examples, and Jewish kitsch, which garland his equally extravagant satire -- or you don't.
Although I appreciate his art, it's not my cup of chicken soup.
Even Elkin fans may not be familiar with "The Rabbi of Lud." In this novel, Lud, N.J., is a town of cemeteries, and the sole job of Jerry Goldkorn, the eponymous rabbi, is to officiate at funerals when the mourners have no one better to ask.
Jerry is vaguely dissatisfied with his job, sensing that he might be seen as not quite a legitimate rabbi. His eulogies can veer in dangerous directions, maybe comparing one corpse to the messiah, or launching into a litany of his own sins.
Luckily, he's more than happily married: Jerry and his wife, Shelley, frequently push aside their preteen daughter, Connie, in order to jump into bed together. However, that just adds to the misery that Connie feels as the only living person under the age of roughly 30 in the town.
Shelly also has a habit -- which even Jerry admits is annoying -- of adding the Yiddish suffix "e-le" to almost every word, in order to sound (she thinks) more like a rabbi's wife.
The book finally develops a page-turning plot around two-thirds of the way through. (Plot is never the point of an Elkin novel.)
Elkin is unique, and every fiction reader should try at least one of his books. So what can it hurt?
Although I appreciate his art, it's not my cup of chicken soup.
Even Elkin fans may not be familiar with "The Rabbi of Lud." In this novel, Lud, N.J., is a town of cemeteries, and the sole job of Jerry Goldkorn, the eponymous rabbi, is to officiate at funerals when the mourners have no one better to ask.
Jerry is vaguely dissatisfied with his job, sensing that he might be seen as not quite a legitimate rabbi. His eulogies can veer in dangerous directions, maybe comparing one corpse to the messiah, or launching into a litany of his own sins.
Luckily, he's more than happily married: Jerry and his wife, Shelley, frequently push aside their preteen daughter, Connie, in order to jump into bed together. However, that just adds to the misery that Connie feels as the only living person under the age of roughly 30 in the town.
Shelly also has a habit -- which even Jerry admits is annoying -- of adding the Yiddish suffix "e-le" to almost every word, in order to sound (she thinks) more like a rabbi's wife.
The book finally develops a page-turning plot around two-thirds of the way through. (Plot is never the point of an Elkin novel.)
Elkin is unique, and every fiction reader should try at least one of his books. So what can it hurt?
July 29, 2018
Stanley Elkin, that indefatigable bleeder-out of high-octane high-performance prose, was indubitably one of All Literature's All Time Top Five peddlers of palaver. As he was the very best kind of riotously-inventive windbag, we are talking about a species of palaver that can take out city blocks, fell entire counties. In the case of THE RABBI OF LUD, the county is is New Jersey, that gardeniest of American states. Of course whilst failing to go strictly forward we also fail to strictly confine ourselves to New Jersey. Chicago, Alaska, a distant atoll. Our best storytellers get carried away and carry us away in kind. There are authors out there to whom it may well prove nigh impossible to do adequate justice without simply quoting them at length. Elkin is just such a one, a fine and hale scribbler of this breed. As THE RABBI OF LUD is a novel about a rabbi who happens to preside over a cemetery-speckled kingdom of the silently and decidedly dead, why not transpose whole cloth here a passage from right at the end of the book concerning grief: "I atoned, not quite grieving but getting warmer and aware of the immense, twisted tonnage of complex grief in the world at any given time, in any given place, some tight amalgam of woe and rue and complicity and fear. Grief like a land mass, like the seas, complicated as weather seen from high space or the veiled, tie-dye smudge of the alloy earth itself." Ah, yesiree. If not an outright burial plot, that right there is a very fine micro-parcel of Stanley Elkin real estate, and if it is made up of dirt than it is certainly dirt with which the alchemists have already had their way. Language alchemist: it might very well be what it says on Elkin's business card. The fact that the above quotation contains the word "veiled" also finds me musing to myself (and now you) that perhaps we might like to think of Elkin as a writer who sets Word and Idea dancing, unleasher of a whirling blitzkrieg Salome. Yes. It is alchemy, it is sorcery, slight of hand and shroud, never too hilarious to be profound nor vice versa. If you didn't know it, Elkin, author of such marvels as "Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers" and THE RABBI OF LUD, is a son of the ten-or-twelve-or-whatever tribes of ol' Israel. Holder of the Judeo quill. Perhaps in his rising-up-rising-down (peering beneath the gown) of American worlds Elkin has often, as though an embedded spy, done much to muddy the bathwater of the goyim. THE RABBI OF LUD, o ten-or-twelve-or-whatever tribes, keeps it in the family. In the family? Then what is the Holy Mother doing here? Well, muddying the bathwater, naturally. If GEORGE MILLS, the most ambitious of Elkin's teeming masterpieces, ended in a Christian house of worship, THE RABBI OF LUD (it's double?) ends in the house of the Goddamn Right Chosen People. You should probably already know -- and if you don't I am telling you now -- Elkin is among the top couple comic masters of High Literature EVER and you are gonna wanna make like me and (stop me if you've beat me to it) get busy mincemeating the motherfucking ouvre, friend. THE RABBI OF LUD is the fifth novel I have read by Elkin and the first written in the first person. Of course, it is written in the same Jack-H.-Harris-presents-THE-BLOB voice as the other Elkins. And the characters each and individually, proudly and at length, expound volubly in Elkinese. Sometimes they tell us the finest things we have ever been told. Literally. Look to THE RABBI OF LUD. Listen to blind Edward Tober tell us of his dreams. Literally among the most totally amazing things I have ever been told, parceled out judiciously like some Holy Recipe, religious affiliation unknown.
January 7, 2017
I can't even finish - and I get the Jewish humor I Just Can't Finish ! This is the last book I ever paid full price for and has made me never do that again !
June 7, 2022
For a certain kind of reader, this book is probably going to be hilarious. Unfortunately, as a Capricorn, I am very hard to please in the humor line. Jerry Goldkorn, the protagonist who barely managed to train for his bar mitzvah, somehow managed to be ordained in an "offshore" rabbinical academy, and finds a job as the resident rabbi of Lud, New Jersey, a cemetery community (maybe like Colma, California). I cannot help but wonder if the Lud of the title is also a joke -- I live near Lod (Lydda to New Testament readers) in Israel, pronounced Lud. Zev Vilnay, the Israeli geographer tells us that the residents of Lod were like the residents of Chelm in Jewish folklore, credulous and folksy.
The book is extremely wordy, in a kind of Borsht Belt comedic way, but to appreciate the jokes, you need to be very acquainted with the Bible (Tanakh and New Testament), the Jewish prayer book, and have at least an introductory knowledge of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Talmud. A smattering of Yiddish (at least what is included in the vocabulary of New Yorkers) would suffice.
I wanted to like this book, I really did, but the author is trying too hard to be both funny and profound. Someone unacquainted with Judaism would probably find it incomprehensible. Maybe it was meant for the New York/New Jersey audience.
Better luck next time, Stanley Elkin.
The book is extremely wordy, in a kind of Borsht Belt comedic way, but to appreciate the jokes, you need to be very acquainted with the Bible (Tanakh and New Testament), the Jewish prayer book, and have at least an introductory knowledge of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Talmud. A smattering of Yiddish (at least what is included in the vocabulary of New Yorkers) would suffice.
I wanted to like this book, I really did, but the author is trying too hard to be both funny and profound. Someone unacquainted with Judaism would probably find it incomprehensible. Maybe it was meant for the New York/New Jersey audience.
Better luck next time, Stanley Elkin.
July 18, 2023
I am not Jewish, but I do live in New York. This is about the funniest book I ever read I still think of parts of this book and laugh. The part where his daughter speaks to Mary seems almost real. A joyful wacky romp. Just read it.
Want to read
August 27, 2012This looks promising
January 24, 2015
Wickedly funny
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews