SOURCE: Review of Fabulous Small Jews, by Joseph Epstein. Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 10 (15 May 2003): 699.

In the following mixed review, the anonymous critic views Fabulous Small Jews as “Epstein's most successful foray into fiction yet.”

Their turf [in Fabulous Small Jews] is Chicago, and their characters are middle-aged to elderly urban Jews bedeviled by waning or vanished physical and mental powers and the further debilitating spectacle of encroaching mortality. Visions of Bellow's loquacious hustlers and Singer's morose, sardonic retirees dance through the reader's head in such generously detailed stories as “Felix Emeritus,” about a Holocaust survivor and literary scholar whose considerable experience of life is unexpectedly broadened when he enters an old-age home, and “Family Values,” which incisively contrasts an aging underachiever with his charismatic, compulsively dishonest older brother. Epstein's clarity and directness are also reminiscent of Louis Auchincloss, particularly in two subtly convoluted stories focused on both the legacy...