How This Night Is Different: Stories by Elisa Albert

From the Publisher

In her critically acclaimed debut story collection, Elisa Albert boldly illuminates an original cross section of disaffected young Jews. With wit, compassion, and a decidedly iconoclastic twenty-first-century attitude, in prose that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, Albert has created characters searching for acceptance, a happier view of the past, and above all the possibility of a future.

Holidays, family gatherings, and rites of passage provide the backdrop for these ten provocative stories. From the death of a friendship in "So Long" to a sexually frustrated young mother's regression to bat mitzvah — aged antics in "Everything But," and culminating with the powerful and uproariously apropos finale of "Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose," How This Night Is Different will excite, charm, and profoundly resonate with anyone who's ever felt ambivalent about his or her faith, culture, or place in the world.

Publishers Weekly

Titled to reflect the customary question asked at Passover, these 10 stories by debut writer Albert explore traditional Jewish rituals with youthful, irreverent exuberance as her characters transition into marriage and child-rearing. In "Everything But," dutiful daughter Erin finds herself, after her mother's death, disturbed by the lovelessness of her marriage. In "So Long," Rachel has become "born again" as an Orthodox Jew and resolved to have her head shaved before her marriage, as per custom; the narrator, Rachel's maid of honor, struggles to suppress her sarcastic disbelief. "The Mother Is Always Upset" plays on the familial chaos of ritual circumcision (the bris): tearful mother Beth cowers in the bedroom, while exhausted new father Mark takes his cue from the sanguine mohel. And Albert, writing as nice Jewish girl Elisa Albert, becomes a cocksure writer determined to have the last word in the hilariously vulgar postmodern final story, "Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose"-an unabashed autobiographical fan letter to Philip Roth, "the father of us all." (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

These two debut collections examine Jewish themes but take widely different approaches. In How This Night Is Different, Albert explores such themes as Jewish life-cycle events, family holiday celebrations, the Holocaust, and becoming observant by embellishing the raucous, overindulgent, overbearing aspects of Jewish life-the family at a child's ritual circumcision replete with foreskin jokes, a friend incredulous at Rachel's preparing for her Orthodox wedding after having been secular much of her life. A letter to Philip Roth idolizing his take on an earlier era and offering to have his child is actually rather funny. This collection is recommended for readers who think Jewish self-deprecation in the 21st century is still relevant. In the four stories that make up Awake in the Dark, Nayman explores the lives of children whose parents were Holocaust survivors. She delves into the psyche of her protagonists as they struggle with their own identities and the need to ferret out their parents' secrets. In "The House on Kronenstrasse," for instance, a woman buries her German mother in New York, travels back to Heidelberg, and uncovers an unbelievable past-she is not the person she thought she was. Further and more unusual unraveling of the past occurs in "The Lamp," "Dark Urgings of the Blood," and "The Porcelain Monkey." There's breathtaking storytelling here, replete with psychological detail and stunning clarity; recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.]-Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Jewish rituals-some timeless, some contemporary-give thematic shape and emotional texture to this debut collection. A bris, a bat mitzvah and a funeral. A high-school trip to Auschwitz and a stint as a Hillel peer counselor. These are just a few of the rites of passage that Albert's characters must negotiate. Religion brings people together in her tales, but it also exposes and exacerbates the fissures that separate parents and children, husbands and wives, or best friends. The title story is representative of the author's sharp insight and dark sense of humor. A woman helps her parents rid their house of leavening in preparation for Passover while constantly-and miserably-conscious of a raging yeast infection. Not only does this affliction make her a walking, talking source of contamination, but the itch and burn physically echo the psychic discomfort she feels in the presence of her extended family. Albert is a spectacularly efficient writer, able to reveal more about her characters in a few well-chosen, beautifully phrased sentences than some authors can manage in an entire novel. She seems to always know the precise detail that turns a character on a page into a real person, and she keeps her narratives moving at a lively pace. Each story is well-made, and the book as a whole has a pleasingly coherent structure. Just as religious observance lends shape and meaning to life's most important moments, Jewish ritual gives these stories their focus and form. Albert captures her characters at liminal moments, and little windows of sacred time open onto scenes of worldly but soul-deep disarray. This collection will no doubt have special resonance for Jewish readers, but its appeal doesn'tstop there. The author's command of her craft should impress anyone who appreciates short fiction, and her characters are so singularly human that their power to charm and engage transcends religious affiliation. An exciting debut: sincerely touching, mordantly funny and superbly assured.

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