The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff And Other Stories [Paperback]

In his first collection of stories sinceFabulous Small Jews, Joseph Epstein delivers all the pleasures his readers have come to expect: stories of ordinary men confronting the moments that define a life, told with the bittersweet humor and loving irony encompassed in the title of the book. These fourteen tales map a very particular world—Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago—in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who “happens to possess a standup comic’s gift for punch lines” (New York Times Book Review), brings his emphatically grown-up characters to witty, rueful, and charming life.The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoffis a marvelous collection from a master of the short form and one of the most distinctive writers working in America today.

The Love Song of
A. Jerome Minkoff
Dr. A. Jerome Minkoff, family practitioner, three years a widower and coming up on his sixty-fourth birthday, met Larissa Friedman, two years into her widowhood and fifty-two, at a charity dinner at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago for ALS, dreaded, goddamn Lou Gehrig’s disease, from which both their spouses had died. Each had donated $25,000 to the annual national ALS fundraiser, where they were seated next to each other at the same table near the dais. Mrs. Friedman gave the few things he said full-court-press attention. She smiled. She agreed emphatically. More than once she touched his forearm, gave it a gentle squeeze.
 Since Marlene’s death three years ago, Minkoff had been considered, if not by himself then by friends, many patients, and all female acquaintances, a highly eligible bachelor. He had gone out with a few women, but nothing resembling a relationship came of it. He l£Á