Sublime

filled with the kind of determined cheer that masked a deeper despair.

custodial

the kreplach joke

“My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air,” Gornick wrote in that memoir.

elegiac.

curmudgeonly

makes Jewish literature into a kind of anti-literature—one that should make everyone question what they want out of a work of literary art.