The Secret Table
168 pages, 5 1/4 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:01 Jan 1975
ISBN:9780914590118
Two novellas of young men embracing a mystical past
In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.
In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.
Mark Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up on Blue Hill Avenue which runs through the former towns of Dorchester, Roxbury and old Mattapan. He attended the Boston Public Latin School, Harvard College and Stanford University. He is the editor of Fiction and an Assistant Professor of English at The City College of New York. His stories and articles have appeared in The New Directions Annual, The Progressive, The Boston Sunday Globe, The New York Sunday Times Book Review, The Washington and Partisan Review.
