Bad Jews and other stories

the long version

"Leo Spivak is a bad Jew. So are Shifman and Rosenthal and Suskind. They drink, they smoke, they lust in their hearts; they stagger blindly into one promised land after another. Bad Jews and Other Stories is a nuanced and comic vision of life, love and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews."--BOOK JACKET. "Cut off from the array of character-building hardships their parents and grandparents endured, unable to reach the safety and comfort of faith because of their inability to believe in much of anything, the characters of Bad Jews and Other Stories meander through the moral landscape of their lives in a kind of loopy navigation of the Children of Israel's route home. Along the way, they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And, as often as not, they find redemption as well as disaster - redemption that comes when it's least expected, from the most improbable sources: the flight of a flock of homing pigeons, the deeply satisfying ache of a broken nose, the soft caress of a dying woman."--BOOK JACKET.