The Rabbi in the Attic: and Other Stories

by Eileen Pollack

About the Book
The Rabbi in the Attic: and Other Stories

In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the “City of Five Smells” in America’s heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators look back on their pasts. But don’t expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted. And to be moved.

Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties of youth. As the narrator of the first story discovers when “barbarian” rock fans invade her town, it can be terrifying to be knocked from the “tiny fixed orbit” of conventional life. But if a person can stretch her imagination far enough, she might also be able to glimpse an “elsewhere” beyond the boundaries of ordinary human limitations.

This battle between the real and ideal is taken to mythic heights in the title novella, in which a novice rabbi must try to evict her Orthodox predecessor from the house provided by her prickly congregation. Only when she tempers her enthusiasm for the new ways with compassion for those who follow the old ways can Rabbi Bloomgarten begin to care for their souls.

Eileen Pollack writes from a Jewish point of view, but her subject is the search for principles that we must all undertake in a world in which religious truths are no longer handed down from parent to child.

Just as one of her characters decides to become a “value assessor,” the author herself helps us to sort through the jumble of objects, ideas, and memories in our own attics. In doing so, she appeals to our minds and our hearts. Her characters teach us that imagination and empathy are our best hope if we are to understand—and perhaps transcend—the pain in our world. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic, and lush. The images in her stories—a chef’s severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunk beneath a reservoir—will stay in your mind long after you have finished her book.

About the Author
Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack was born and grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist. A graduate of Yale University with a BS in physics, Eileen later earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship.

She is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories, a novel, Paradise, New York, and a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which won a 2003 WILLA finalist award. Eileen's essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many periodicals; her innovative textbook and anthology, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings, was published in January 2009 by Wadsworth/Cengage. A new collection of stories and novellas called In the Mouth was published in 2008 by Four Way Books and was named the winner of the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which is presented annually to an American writer whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew, in addition to being shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature, chosen as a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Award, and awarded a silver medal in ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Awards.

Eileen's second novel, Breaking and Entering, was published in January 2012 by Four Way Books and soon after was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection; the novel follows the experiences of Louise and Richard Shapiro, who, with their young daughter, Molly, move from ulta-liberal Marin County, California, to a quaint, rural town in the Midwest, only to discover that most of their neighbors belong to the Michigan Militia.

Eileen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, SubTropics, Agni, and New England Review. Her novella "The Bris" was chosen to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King, while her stories have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, the Cohen Award for best fiction of the year from Ploughshares, and similar awards from Literary Review and MQR. She lives in Ann Arbor and is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.