Book Review - The Jew Of Home Depot.......

Juicy Bites of Apple

THE JEW OF HOME DEPOT AND OTHER STORIES
By Max Apple
Johns Hopkins Univ. 170 pp. $19.95

Comic movies don't often get Oscar nods. In fiction, too, tragedy wears the capital L for Literature, whereas comedy -- good luck, happy endings, pleasure itself -- is deemed to be the fluffy stuff of chick lit and beach books. With "The Jew of Home Depot," his first collection of stories in two decades, Max Apple challenges the canard that misery reveals more about our identity than joy does. It's as if Apple has heard the complaint of one his characters, who demands, "Doesn't this family have any really happy stories? Didn't we have picnics or go on vacations or go fishing? Why is it always war and vengeance?"

The 13 delightful, utterly cynicism-free stories collected here are mostly tales of courtship, and as the title not so shyly suggests, they often star Jews. Polish pogroms are not even a distant memory for Jerome Feldman, a liquor store owner from Cleveland, and screenwriter Ira Silvers of Baltimore, whose mother was a third-generation Southerner from Savannah. As Ira's mother reminds him in "Threads," their family is so assimilated that "by the time I met him, your father had no accent and was already an accountant." In their far-flung, unlikely locations, Apple's mostly non-practicing Jewish characters meditate on the daily collision of cultures that is contemporary American life, for both Jews and everyone else. Indeed, one of the best stories, "Yao's Chick," concerns Chinese immigrants in Houston.

In "Indian Giver," Seymour Rubin of Muskegon, Mich., fires Alonzo, his most prized employee at Seymour's Salvage, for running a Muslim prayer meeting during Friday lunch. The two reconcile during a riotous discussion about Judaism and Islam in the basement of Seymour's house, where in his spare time he crafts "Jew stuff" -- steel Torahs and bagels. "So you ain't really one," Alonzo says. "A Jew. It's just a hobby?"
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In "Peace," a Korean entrepreneur tricks Jay Wilson into investing his life's savings in 600,000 "Star Wars" swords. "I'll hate you until the day I die," Jay says, but the Korean answers, "Maybe not." By story's end, Jay's disastrous decision leads to both love and lucre in a way that Apple makes utterly believable.

These stories celebrate serendipity: the path that brings a pharmacist to fall in love with a physicist he sees on a TV show, or a teenage daughter to want passionately to be an Olympic shot putter. What you can't predict in life, Apple reminds us, is a cause not only for trepidation but also for excitement. As Harold says when he proposes to Helen in "Stepdaughters," "she gave me a computer printout based on Prudential Insurance Company statistics that predicted the likelihood of everything from breast cancer to senility in her person during the next twenty-five years. . . . The tables were for death and disease, they left out love, health, and happiness, the things you seek in life."

The touching "Yao's Chick" offers a wink and a nod to Bernard Malamud's classic matchmaking story "The Magic Barrel." The 26-year-old Li En is so tall she thinks the only man in the world for her is Yao Ming. Here the marriage broker is not a Jew but a Chinese fortune teller who lives above a dollar store, much honored by Li En's mother, who works as a manicurist at Crystal Nail. Li doesn't nab Yao, but she does find something to celebrate about being a Chinese Texan tall enough to dunk a basketball.

Three of these stories concern the same set of characters: Sidney Goodman, the carwash king of Las Vegas; his Mexican employees; and his 84-year-old mother, Jenny, who's in a nursing home. Only Apple could make stories about Alzheimer's this much fun. In "Adventures in Dementia," Sidney takes his mother to a hypnotist to help her remember her dead husband. "Though her son bombarded her with choices . . . ranging from Harold Goodman to Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare, Jenny merely wrinkled her nose at all the candidates, her husband as impossible to name as the nameless one, the creator of heaven and earth."

In the masterful title story, Jerome Baumgarten of Marshall, Tex., phones the Chabad organization of Hasidic Jews with this request: "I'm eighty-five and dying, and I'm surrounded by Gentiles. If you can send me a bunch of real Jews, I'll pay their way and make it worth their while." Reb Avram heeds the call, moving his wife and eight children across the country into Baumgarten's manse -- now the last remaining owner-occupied house on a fraternity row. From his bedroom window, the 18-year-old son, Chaim, lusts after a girl who visits the fraternity brothers. Closing his blinds doesn't help, and when the girl comes to visit him at the Home Depot, where he works in the lumber department, Chaim finds his faith sorely tested.

The story ends with a haunting -- and transformative -- act of anti-Semitism. Readers can assume that Apple knows about the 1997 anti-Semitism lawsuit against Home Depot in Colma, Calif., but the story doesn't feel topical. Despite the slanginess and brand names, the tale is timeless, fable-like. If a lot of contemporary short fiction falls into the category dubbed "Kmart realism," Apple needs his own category. Call it Kmart magical realism.