Camp Jeff
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An old New York Catskills hotel is converted into a Reeducation center for star #MeToo offenders in a story full of cunning and craft, double meanings and doppelgangers.
A finalist for the National Jewish Book Award strikes again with another brilliant satire—a treat for readers of Philip Roth, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and others.
Somewhere in the Catskills there’s a camp, it’s called Camp Jeff. The place is named for Jeffrey Epstein, not that Jeffrey Epstein, this is the good Jeffrey Epstein, a benefactor who wants his name on the building, though the bad one’s not entirely irrelevant to this story. Tova Reich’s newest novel, on the heels of her award-winning Mother India is a raucous and biting tale of a reeducation camp for alleged sex offenders. Reich’s verbal blade is sharp and she slashes with it, but not without the sensitivity that such incisiveness requires. Camp Jeff is a work in Reich’s signature satirical mode, an unhindered indictment of both #MeToo and therapeutic culture, and at the same time is also a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and an examination of love, faith, and affection in American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this barbed if uneven satire, Reich (Mother India) takes on the #MeToo movement and the contradictions of Orthodox Jews. In February 2020, 10 people facing sexual misconduct allegations arrive for rehabilitation at Camp Jeffrey Epstein, a former Catskills resort converted by the "good" Jeffrey Epstein, a businessman who wants to distinguish himself from his notorious namesake. Chief among the guests, of whom nine are men and seven are Jewish, is unrepentant "public intellectual" Gershon Gordon, who has taken to using a wheelchair to gain sympathy. At the camp, he abandons the manuscript he's been attempting to finish for decades and sets out to write a nostalgic account of time spent in the company of the "bad" Jeffrey Epstein. Eventually, Gordon marries rehabilitator Hedy Nussbaum, a meek and masochistic Talmud scholar, after she's fired for neglecting her duties, and conceives a plan to take down the camp. Reich's critique loses focus as the novel eviscerates the moral failings and physical appearances of all the characters, but there are some inspired moments, such as the increasingly chaotic first meeting between the female rehabilitators and their recalcitrant charges. Fans of absurdist comedy ought to take a look.
