He has also published several books of non-fiction, including interviews with Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Grossman has written seven novels, a play, a number of short stories and novellas, and a number of books for children and youth. 1954, Jerusalem) studied philosophy and drama at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later worked as an editor and broadcaster at Israel Radio. Leading Israeli novelist David Grossman (b. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth-where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov's childhood-Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival.Ĭontinuing his investigations into how people confront life's capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included). Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son.

In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up.

In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape-one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance. The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening's performance.

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