Shlepping the Exile

by Michael Wex

Book Overview

Svelte and supple as unleavened bread, Shlepping the Exile rends the shmaltz from Jewish fiction and replaces it with a pound of real flesh. It's the story of Yoine Levkes, a hassidic boy of the Canadian prairies, his refugee parents, and the Jewish community of Coalbanks, Alberta in the late 1950s. Confronted with dying people, an ailing culture, the perils of near-orphanhood and the allures of Sabina Mandelbroit, whose family doesn't keep the Sabbath,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312364636
• ISBN13: 9780312364632
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Strange Golus

Shlepping the Exile is a most unusual coming of age novels, and here Wex shows the same virtuosity at weaving incongruous elements into one fabric as he did in Born To Kvetch. Shlepping is written with near manic intensity, but the foundation of Wex's ideas are solid, and the even when he goes off the rails, almost writing in an argot of Yiddish and English, the effect is enchanting and unreal. Most of all, Wex documents an obscure corner of the Diaspora, long gone, Western Canada, where the impossible seems almost possible: Yiddish rubbing elbows against a "frontier" western town.

Amazing!

Michael Wex is a gift to a world that takes itself far too seriously. I first read this book many years ago when it was privately offered by the author under the original title, "Shlepping the golus". I was afraid I might injure myself I laughed so hard. As I wrote in another review ( Born to kvetch, CD version) the man is one of the creative geniuses of our time. I really don't care what he writes or records; I'll buy and enjoy it. What most people don't know is that behind all of the self deprecating, Rabelaisian wit and hysterical humor is a true scholar. The man is multi-talented and an absolute one of a kind. He has multiple graduate degrees, is a doctor of everything many times over, an expert in philology, medieval literature, popular culture and music, a rock musician, a stand up comedian and a real sweetheart. This is an autobiography unlike any that I have ever read. My only regret is that I didn't write it.

Ach, what a genius

This book is a must read for anyone trying to understand jewish identity and self perception in the western world. Its funny, irreverent, poignant, and above all, true.If you want to know American Jewish angst, read this. And if you just want to laugh a little, it's also not so bad. After all, you work hard all day, it's good for you to relax a little. Stay a while, have something to eat, ... oh, never mind.Michael, please, please, give us more.

out genius

Wex's book is daring, funny, outrageous, & irreverent - a sardonic kabbalistic wit, earthy and soaring. THIS BOOK IS FUNNY. Wex is a lamed-vovnik of humor- a hidden saint of Jewish comedy.

Brilliant hysterical tour de force

Author Wex has written a laugh-out-loud funny tale of coming of age with payus in Canada. It's a landmark novel...imagine a Catcher in the Rye for the Yiddish set. Awesome.