SOURCE: Aarons, Victoria. “Ancient Acts of Love and Betrayal: Ethan Canin's ‘Batorsag and Szerelem’.” Modern Jewish Studies 11 (1999): 15-36.

In the following essay, Aarons investigates the central thematic concerns of Canin's novella Batorsag and Szerelem.

“Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother.”

(Genesis 32:12)

Ethan Canin, author of the novels Blue River (1991) and For Kings and Planets (1998), as well as two collections of short stories, Emperor of the Air (1988) and The Palace Thief (1994), has, to date, escaped serious scholarly attention. The absence of any appreciable critical commentary is a remarkable oversight, since Canin's fiction, especially his short stories, lend themselves, as much as any short fiction being written today, not only to an analysis of complex narrative design and voice, but also of the tangled, often tortuous, disposition of middle-class American Jewish life, with its singularly self-revealing, often menacing, possibilities and requirements for living in the latter...