[Mark Helprin's] stories are an astonishment of imaginative virtuosity, written with measured and rather stately elegance about a prodigious variety of places, times, and persons. A Dove of the East opens with a Persian Jew in Israel who thinks he is the devil's prey, and it moves on to stories about a Spanish widow in the mountains of northern New Mexico; an American priest dying in Rome; a Civil War battle in Virginia; a cattle rancher in Jamaica whose herd is destroyed by a bull…. A number of the stories are extremely brief and too oblique to yield more than the feeling of a fragmented dream. Seven of the twenty stories have Jewish characters, and only "A Jew of Persia" touches in any way upon Jewish myth or legend, though even here Helprin may be thinking more of demonology than of religion. In any case, since Helprin makes...