In a 2007 speech in New York City, Grossman spoke of how his son’s death “now permeates every minute of my life.” The power of memory, he said, “is indeed great and heavy.” His new novel explores the psychological and emotional damage memory can do, as the comedian goads his audience into acknowledging his grief and the experiences that have shaped him into the person standing before them: a 57-year-old man with a legacy of failed marriages and children who barely know him.

Through a brilliant literary device, the author employs Lazar’s emotional reaction to the performance as a conduit for the reader. When assaulted, he walked on his hands to protect his face. We learn that this son of working-class Holocaust survivors was small for his age and constantly bullied. In his nightclub act, Greenstein delivers an autobiographical monologue that becomes increasingly painful for both him and the audience. They hadn’t seen each other in more than 40 years, since they were both campers in Gadna, a military-themed program to prepare high school students for future military service. The two first met at age nine, when they shared the same after-school tutor.

Lazar accepts an invitation from Dov Greenstein, his childhood friend, to attend the Netanya performance. Grossman’s unsettling and mesmerizing narrative voice in the novel is Avishai Lazar, 57, a retired Jerusalem district judge and widower. This new work reminds us that humor, especially in a country with so many war victims, can help to smooth over tragedy, both individually and collectively, making life more bearable. Those who stay end up learning a great deal about what it means to be alive, to be hurt, and, above all, how difficult it is to remember.Īt first glance, Israeli novelist David Grossman’s new novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar, appears to be a radical change in tone and direction from his previous two works of fiction – emotionally heavy books that either indirectly or directly deal with the grief the author experienced when his son, Uri, a tank commander in the Israeli army, was killed in action 11 years ago in Lebanon. As people walk out in disgust, the comic adds them to the tally on his onstage chalkboard. On this night, however, he delivers a performance that subjects his audience to a barrage of disjointed squirm-inducing rants and insults. The audience sitting in a dingy Netanya nightclub expects more jokes of this genre from the popular stand-up comic, Dov Greenstein. After a while, he opens the door and the chastened parrot asks in polite, formal English, “What had the chicken done?” Threats prove futile, so he puts the bird in a freezer. When later questioned by the police, the bewildered mollusk replies, “It all happened so quickly.” Here’s another: There is this man whose parrot is excessively foul-mouthed. A snail is attacked by a couple of tortoises.

A horse walks into a bar review