The Attempted Destruction of Herr Neumann - Stories

Brothers pull in different spiritual directions, unable to let one another go. In a Saxony pub, two old men fight a war that ended decades before. ＂The Attempted Destruction of Herr Neumann＂, Ezra Olman’s debut short story collection, explores the seam at which holy and secular converge, and along the way examines what is broken and whole in contemporary Jewish life. The scope ranges from an antediluvian quincentenarian’s search for companionship (＂Ard＂) to a struggling biblical theme park (＂Bibleworld＂), from a young ultra-Orthodox woman furtively tearing through the streets of Jerusalem (＂Running Bayla＂) to the new guy who joins the baseball-crazed old-timers at the local Dunkin’ Donuts (＂Home Run Herschel＂). In ＂Endgame＂, a lonely widow tries to help the Jewish State in unconventional ways, and in ＂Memoirs of a Boy Leader＂, a precocious child uses imagination to transport himself beyond life in a seedy beach town.Other topics include the fraught relationship of expatriate Israelis to their native land (＂Bingo＂, ＂Roundtrip＂) and a Runyonesque paean to Baltimore (＂Shabbos Preakness＂).

Ezra Olman’s fiction has appeared in Maggid, A Journal of Jewish Literature; Elysian Fields Quarterly; JewishFiction.net, and other publications. He is a 2004 graduate of Bar-Ilan University’s Creative Writing MA program, and earned a BA in Journalism in 1995, just in time to witness the death of newspapers. Originally from Baltimore, he lives in Israel with his wife and their four children.