Decline of Our Neighborhood

Wexelblatt ( Life in the Temperate Zone and Other Stories ) constructs rich stories that make heavy subjects dance weightlessly before the reader's eyes. In one tale, a writer who believes that under repressive regimes "art becomes . . . political against its will" gets a chance to live out the plot of a story he sketched when he suddenly becomes president of the republic. The nature of historical truth is considered when a professor replies to a graduate student who is trying to "cope" with history: he interprets the story of "The Savior, Ishl Teitelbaum," a Jew in a concentration camp who listens to a rabbi and a political ideologue debate the meaning of the Holocaust-- and is then gassed. A 92-year-old nursing home resident reflects on his days as a member of an artists' collaborative that challenged accepted notions of individuality and creativity. Even tales that at first seem conventional become luminescent and unsettling, as in the story of a writer who recalls a Saturday afternoon of games with friends when he was 10; the narrative is interrupted by a dialogue between the author and an inquisitor that explores memory, truth and the knowledge of death.