TALES OF UNKOSHER SOULS

Uneasy Jewish people wrestle with their sins in these tragicomic stories.

Margolis’ tales mostly explore life in Russian shtetls and the tarnished “Promised Land” of America as well as souls journeying from life to afterlife, with improbable swerves along the way. In “Moshko’s Lovers,” a rabbi’s daughter rejects a village cobbler because he had a vision of eating nonkosher food during a previous incarnation as a courtier to Henry VIII; in “The Dybbuk of Brooklyn,” a New York City liquor salesman pays a rabbi to exorcise a wandering spirit who has taken up residence in him and shouts obnoxious comments; and in “Lilith’s Daughter,” a St. Louis man obtains a female golem who changes from docile servant to an independent woman with feminist beliefs. The soul of a poor man waits centuries to enter heaven only to discover the price of celestial efficiency in “God’s Sabbatical”; an angel tells a rabbi to promote a local shepherd as the Messiah, which makes his congregation giddy with delight until the Chosen One makes unpleasant demands in “Two Goats and a Dog”; and in another story, a dinosaur in the Garden of Eden eats the forbidden fruit along with Adam and Eve and watches the punishment unfold. Margolis’ fiction mixes magical realism with a rich vein of Jewish humor, featuring shady rabbis, plenty of kvetching (“He just sits there, staring at his plate as if he might find a wife there, and suddenly I’m supposed to marry him?”), and a prosaic approach to ethics that extends into divine bureaucracy (“Well, you stole that bag of candy from Kaminski when you were a kid, and then there were the seventeen apples and eight pears that you pilfered from Goldstein’s fruit stand….But that’s not enough to get you into Hell”). But underneath, there’s a tenderness that makes the author’s funny, ironic view of ordinary life feel luminous, as well, as when a man who lost his wife to cholera calls her “the greatest of angels…who would listen to all that a talkative Jewish man had to say even when he becomes boring.”

Raucously entertaining yarns whose wry wit carries a subtle moral resonance.