Mrs. Bloch, gathering with her friends at the local soda fountain each day tells the story of her son, a former rabbi and now a successful businessman

From Library Journal In these slice-of-life stories, we join characters progressing through critical, often life-changing experiences. Their magnetism is powerful, for despite the brevity of our time together, we as readers get involved with them and are concerned about their outcome once the story ends. In fact, finding that two of the stories contain the same characters, we are grateful for a second chance to try to understand how they arrived at their present situation and what they will do. These characters remind us that relationships can be transient--certainly Cheuse's most common theme. Interestingly, the stories, some of which have been published earlier, contain an unsettling mixture of both hope and despair, as if Cheuse has not made his final decision regarding the nature of the human condition.- Dorothy Golden, Georgia Southern Coll., StatesboroCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description Fourteen stories deal with the longing, insecurity, loneliness, and restlessness of those living in the new South

Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory, but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control. As Manny's fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter, traumatized by a sexual scandal at college, makes Manny the target of a plot to shatter his newly found empire. The devoted family matriarch, Minnie, observes and recounts the tragic downfall of her family, unable to save them from themselves.