Prayers for the Living

OTHER BOOKS BY ALAN CHEUSE

FICTION

Candace and Other Stories

The Bohemians

The Grandmothers' Club

The Light Possessed

The Tennessee Waltz and Other Stories

Lost and Old Rivers: Stories

The Fires

To Catch the Lightning

Song of Slaves in the Desert

Paradise, or, Eat Your Face

An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories

NONFICTION

Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey across Russia

The Sound of Writing: America's Short Story Magazine of the Air
(Edited, with Caroline Marshall)

Listening to Ourselves: More Stories from “The Sound of Writing”
(Edited, with Caroline Marshall)

Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing

Seeing Ourselves: Great Stories from America's Past
(Editor)

Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction
(Edited, with Lisa Alvarez)

Literature: Craft & Voice
(with Nicholas Delbanco)

A Trance After Breakfast and Other Passages

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1986 by Alan Cheuse as
The Grandmothers' Club

Copyright © 2014 by Alan Cheuse revised as
Prayers for the Living

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC, Bedford, New York

www.FigTreeBooks.net

Jacket design by Christine Van Bree;

Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

ISBN 978-1-941493-01-4

Distributed by Publishers Group West

First Fig Tree Books Edition

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1

The author would like to acknowledge Gregory Rabassa from whose translation of M. A. Asturias's
The Green Pope
(New York: Delacorte, 1971) he has adapted several paragraphs on
page 335
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use lyrics from the song “Mood Indigo” by Duke Ellington, Irving Mills, and Albany Bigard, copyright © 1931 by Mills Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgment is also made of the usage of lyrics from “Light My Fire” by the Doors, words and music copyright © by the Doors, copyright © Nipper Music ASCAP.

To T. D. C.,

and the memory of her mother,

and her mother's mother,

and for P. Z., again, with thanks—

and for Kris, so much since then

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

BOOK ONE: AFTERNOON

A Mother's Prayer

BOOK TWO: TWILIGHT

A Daughter's Prayer

BOOK THREE: EVENING

A Former Virgin's Prayer

BOOK FOUR: NIGHT

Prayer for the Living

In your name, Mothers, who in boundless space

dwell enthroned in eternal solitude,

though still gregarious. About your heads there hover,

moving but lifeless, images of living things.

Resplendent glories, now no more,

are stirring still, for they would be eternal.

And you, in your omnipotence, assign them

to light's pavilion or the vault of darkness.

—
GOETHE

Faust,
Act I

Here is the root of the former word.

Here is Quiche by name.

Here we shall write then,

Here we shall set out the former words,

The beginnings

And the taproots

Of everything . . .

The decipherment,

The clarification,

And the explanation

Of the mysteries . . .

We
shall save it

Because there is no longer

A sight of the book of Counsel,

A sight of the bright things to come

From beside the sea,

The description of our shadows,

A sight of the bright life . . .

—
POPOL VUH

FOREWORD

When a recent move required me to pack and unpack all my books, I took it as an opportunity to reassess my literary real estate. I flipped open worn paperbacks to long-beloved first sentences, to see if I still valued them as I once did. I rediscovered books that had gone unread, obstructed behind other books. I spread stacks of books across the living room floor, spending an impractically long time plotting out possible ways to order them, in search of a sort of personal Dewey decimal system. I paid careful attention to who might do well living next to whom, as though at night, while the inhabitants of my house slept, these books might slip out and engage in fervent, perhaps heated conversation with their neighbors. I situated the books I love in prime real estate; other books were sent to the outer-neighborhood shelves. In the Jewish part of town, a selection of Yiddish writers gave way to the great American Jews; Israelis reside one shelf away, and to assuage my discomfort at shelving Jews only with Jews, these clusters are interrupted by a row of favorite novels, their primary link to one another only the fact that I love them most of all.

I read
Prayers for the Living
the same weekend this arranging took place, asking myself:
Where does this book fit in the landscape of American and American Jewish fiction?

Prayers for the Living
could live happily next to Philip Roth's
American Pastoral
for its intensity and scope; in its portrait of familial unraveling, it would make a fine neighbor for Richard Yates's
Revolutionary Road;
with its rendering of immigrant experience, it ought
to dwell in proximity to Anzia Yezierska's
Bread Givers;
its rich descriptive power suggests that it would share space well with Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections. Prayers for the Living
is a novel with the weight of legend, the feel of myth. In this story of the rise and fall of Manny Bloch, a rabbi turned business mogul, Alan Cheuse explores the shedding of tradition and the return to it; the travails of the immigrant; and the complexities of success, which brings its own burdens. The novel asks a dazzling array of questions about living a life of the spirit or of the world, about order and randomness, about the long shadow of the Holocaust, about silence in the face of injustice, and about families connected and estranged. At the heart of this book is Minnie Bloch, mother of Manny, grandmother of Sarah, whose voice is supple and rich and utterly commanding. She speaks in a Yiddish-inflected, Jewish mother's voice that is funny and endearing; it feels familiar without veering into stereotype. It is a voice that moves seamlessly from the quip to the deepest emotional registers, and that it can do so in the space of a sentence or two speaks to the ability and necessity, in life both on and off the page, to live in humor and sadness at once. As Minnie says, she has arrived at an age when “we can eat and weep at the same time.

”Some of what Minnie tells is based on recollected conversation. Some information is based on letters her son Manny sent while away at school, and other material is gathered on the sly, for which Minnie expresses no apologies. Reading the private writings of her daughter-in-law, for example, she says, indignantly, “What do you mean you don't want to snoop? This is not snooping, snooping is something else. This is learning.”

The narrative is so sure-handed, so seamless, that the question of whether Minnie is to be trusted as a narrator seems a matter of small consequence. There is little distinction between knowing and creating, and I can imagine Minnie looking me squarely in the eyes and with a shrug of the shoulders silencing such a silly inquiry. A mother knows, she would surely say to me. In this book, a mother occupies a hallowed space, and a grandmother even more so. But Minnie is more than just a well-informed matriarch. In her role as omniscient
narrator, she places herself on par with an all-powerful divine figure. She casts the story of her own life in mythic terms as well, telling how, when she was a young woman in Europe, her parents chose for her a scholarly bridegroom who, in her olfactory estimation, smelled like “a dead dog.” Unwilling to marry him, she ran to the river where she happened to meet Jacob, “a bulky-bodied, hairy-chested, strong-armed man.” She chose the man of the field over the man of the book. “Because if until then my life was just the story of a country girl, here it becomes poetry. A miracle takes place!”