Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Norman Ravvin’s award-winning first novel, Café des Westens (1991),
consisted of an evocative series of impressionistic stories that centred
on Polish-Jewish immigrants in Calgary and that offered a poignant and
convincing portrait of generational clashes, changing values, and ethnic
worlds in transition. The present collection of short stories is equally
well written and even more assuredly commands a wider range of tone,
style, and subject matter.

The arresting title appropriately catches the brittle, zany humor of
the opening story, but is somewhat untypical, since other stories catch
other moods—sadder, more anguished, through equally vivid. The
settings include New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Moscow—in
Ravvin’s version, unreal cities all. In one story, a mysterious
stranger is recognized as “an emissary from the State of Unreality,”
though the apartment in which he appears is rendered in gritty
naturalistic detail. Old World and New World are constantly in tense
confrontation.

The author’s fictive world is one of demolition, of earthquakes both
real and metaphorical. It is inhabited by displaced persons wandering in
alien cities, painfully and vainly searching— sometimes for ancestors,
sometimes for lost relatives, always for something firm, enduring, and
unattainable. Ravvin possesses a remarkable capacity to catch the feel
of the 1990s, of a world growing apparently smaller while differences in
national origins and lifestyles seem to become more conspicuous and more
threatening.

These stories are disturbing, elusive, haunting, and always
stimulating. The collection as a whole is compulsively readable.