No New Jokes: A Novel Book

There's something the matter with Izzy, the central character of Steven Bloom's debut novel, No New Jokes. "It could be I'm not normal," he says at one point in the book; "I have the feeling whatever's happening, it's not really happening to me." In fact, Izzy is not normal--as a child, he watched his father murdered by a mob; as a young soldier in World War II, he received a head wound so severe that he became eligible for a 90 percent disability pension. Now Izzy spends his days listening to jokes in Brooklyn luncheonettes or playing his concertina for pennies in apartment house courtyards. Bloom has set his novel in the Brooklyn of 1949, a time when Jackie Robinson had broken baseball's color barrier and civil rights were just on the horizon; when the Cold War was heating up and the horrors perpetrated against their people during the war years were still fresh in the minds of Jews everywhere. The neighborhood Izzy lives in is a Jewish one, and the jokes he listens to are Jewish jokes. Certainly they're funny, but the angst underneath the humor seeps into the fabric of No New Jokes, making this first novel a bittersweet reading experience.Read More