The Prison Minyan
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3.8 • 16 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Welcome to Otisville, America's only Jewish prison...where a new celebrity inmate is about to shatter the peace.
'Erudite, trenchant and touching'- Michael Arditti
'Delectable... glorious... this most cherishably Jewish of books.' - Jewish Chronicle
The scene is Otisville Prison, upstate New York. A crew of fraudsters, tax evaders, trigamists and forgers discuss matters of right and wrong in a Talmudic study and prayer group, or 'minyan', led by a rabbi who's a fellow convict. As the only prison in the federal system with a kosher deli, Otisville is the penitentiary of choice for white-collar Jewish offenders, many of whom secretly like the place. They've learned to game the system, so when the regime is toughened to punish a newly arrived celebrity convict who has upset the 45th president, they find devious ways to fight back. Shadowy forces up the ante by trying to 'Epstein' - ie assassinate - the newcomer, and visiting poetry professor Deborah Liston ends up in dire peril when she sees too much. She has helped the minyan look into their souls. Will they now step up to save her?
Jonathan Stone brings the sensibility of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to the post-truth era in a sharply comic novel that is also wise, profound, and deeply moral.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thriller writer Stone (the Julian Palmer series) delivers a puckish Philip Rothesque satire of a Jewish community, specifically the members of the Otisville, N.Y., prison population. He imagines a diverse microcosm of miscreants at the low-security prison: there's Phil Steinerman, serving nine years for fraudulent blood testing clinics; Marty Adler, who is doing nine years for matrimonial fraud; Rabbi Morton Meyerson, sent there for five years for embezzlement; and others, forming the eponymous minyan. Pithy character portraits are folded into the first half of the novel, blossoming later into amusing episodes. The writing workshop, "a staple of federal prison," spawns several delightfully dizzy verses. The abrupt elimination of rugelach and blintzes leads nearly to a revolt and prompts the inmates to try to take over the food deliveries. On this level, the novel feels like a season's worth of amiable sitcom episodes. But Stone offers more, thankfully, than low-hanging comic fruit. He skillfully digs into the challenges and trials of his inmates and their incarceration as they undergo soul-searching and examine their lives, all without abandoning his effective one-liners. As Adler gratefully observes about guards turning a blind eye, "Anti-Semitism finally workin' for us." The accounts of their schemes and scams, before and after their incarceration, keep the episodic romp afloat.
