Dying Man, Dead Mouse and other Stories
by: Lazarre Seymour Simckes
January 26, 2025 Self published
121 pages
review by: Mark Andres
“A story is a ship that takes passengers where they don’t know they are going,” says one character, a grandiose, young aspiring writer, in what could be a description of the collection Dying Man, Dead Mouse: a ship of fools whose passengers obsessively recount their agonies or deceptions or betrayals or quarrels with God. This is a book that will take you to places you don’t know you are going. That is the thrill of reading it. Don’t be put off by the tile; this collection of stories about death and dying is full of life.
Take for example the titular novella, Dying Man, the story of a hopelessly
depressed 50 year-old academic named Issac Teppel with three PhD’s but not an ounce of sense who lives with his unflappable, ever resourceful Rebbitsin mother; she is determined to get him to rise not only out of his bed but to find him a wife to start a family! A strange stand-off between mother and son commences: Issac stubbornly refusing to leave his bed claiming he only wants to die, and the Rebbetsin’s ingenious series of deceptions designed to con a cast of neighborhood characters, from the mailman to a group of senior citizens, into being Isaac’s unwilling and unwitting students. The characters who show up in Issac’s bedroom for schnaps, cake and a lecture are vividly and affectionately drawn, though neither their comical quibbling nor the creepy promise by one old man to fix up Issac with his granddaughter can get Issac to choose life. In the end a fan letter from a scholar who has fallen in love with Issac through his academic articles promises a happy ending, but the one Simckes gives us is not the one we hope for, but a more mysterious and transcendent Passepartout that serves to open doors to yet other unknown destinations in this short but miraculous book.
These stories chronicle a lost Jewish world with one foot in Eastern
Europe and the other in modern America, a world of junk men, unravelin professors, afflicted therapists, psychiatric patients, betrayed rabbis, treacherous cantors. Shuttling between fiction, parable and midrash, the cast of Simckes’ stories include the biblical Job (who gets the once-over from a tough cop), a talking moose, a hapless undercover narc who brings his wife and infant disastrously to one of his stake-outs, not to mention all the humans and animals on Noah’s Ark (who debate whether to save a drowning creature excluded from the ship’s manifest), and last but not least, God and Satan. While some of these stories are deeply satisfying, others present a rich, fictional world only to abruptly shut it all down, their plots left unresolved, an eerie reminder of God’s own dissatisfaction with creation. This risky strategy rewards the reader not with plotting but with the ancient joy of surrendering to a narrative voice that can hold their audience in suspense with language that seems always in the process of invention, informed by abiding affection and horror for humanity. Simckes’ narrative voice is a unique and unforgettable blend of midrash and Franz Kafka.
This collection heralds the return to fiction of L.S. Simckes, author of two
previous novels Seven Days of Mourning (Random House) and The Comatose Kids (Fiction Collective) after a long hiatus during which he was a playwright translator from Hebrew, family therapist and teacher of creative writing. The return is auspicious, and I hope it will lead to more.
Mark Andres is a visual artist, writer and animated filmmaker living in
Portland, Oregon.
The reviewer received a free copy of this book from the author.