The Old Religion
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Mamet’s intellectual rigor is evident on every page. There is not a wasted word” in this novel based on the wrongful murder conviction of a Jewish man (Time Out).
In 1913, a young woman was found murdered in the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. The investigation focused on the Jewish manager of the factory, Leo Frank, who was subsequently forced to stand trial for the crime he didn’t commit and railroaded to a life sentence in prison. Shortly after being incarcerated, he was abducted from his cell and lynched in front of a gleeful mob.
In vividly re-imagining these horrifying events, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Mamet inhabits the consciousness of the condemned man to create a novel whose every word seethes with anger over prejudice and injustice. The Old Religion is infused with the dynamic force and the remarkable ear that have made David Mamet one of the most acclaimed voices of our time. It stands beside To Kill a Mockingbird as a powerful exploration of justice, racism, and the “rush to judgment.”
“Mamet’s philosophical intensity, concision, and unpredictable narrative strategies are at their full power.” —The Washington Post
“In this historical novel, playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Mamet presents disturbing cameos of Jewish uncertainty in a Christian world.” —Library Journal
“The horror of the story is beautifully countered by the unusual grace of Mamet’s prose.” —The Irish Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A master of masculine dialogue who finds power struggles, humor and poetry in the way ordinary guys shoot the breeze, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Mamet tends to stumble when he forces his men (or the women around them) to take on issues bigger than the next promotion, the latest scam, the scramble for respect and self-reliance. Yet even his less successful works--like this overly philosophical historical novel based on the 1915 murder trial of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Atlanta--have a certain undeniable attraction: there is only one source of Mametese, and fans can't help but welcome every addition to the canon. Replaying a familiar Mamet theme, the novel subjects an assimilated Jew to the hidden ferocity of his anti-Semitic neighbors after a gentile woman is murdered in the pencil factory that he owns. Exposing the fragility of the Jew's place in a Christian society through a series of conversations and interior monologues (which tend more to the abstractly philosophical and religious than to the political), Mamet clearly hopes to write with the force of parable, but by straining for parallels between 1915 Georgia and the present-day problems of Jewish assimilation, he weakens the force of his material. And he is a reluctant historian, whose protagonists admire crystal from "Czechoslovakia" three years before the country existed and--in matters of race and sex--think and talk like Joe Mantegna in his most enlightened roles. Indeed, Mamet's petit bourgeois Jews show all the softhearted sophistication of late 20th-century intellectuals--overimpressed with their own musings on fate, faith and the human condition but somehow untouched by the turn-of-the-century bigotry that surrounds them. This is heroic history, and the heroes look suspiciously like their gifted, meditative but undisciplined creator.
