Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud

I prayed to be pardoned for open sins and secret sins, for sinful meditations of the heart, for sins of evil inclination.

They stared at me.

And prayed to be forgiven for contentiousness and envy, for being stiff-necked, for tale-bearing, for vain oaths, for ensnaring my neighbor, for breach of trust, calling them off indiscriminately, guilty of some but not of others. Apologizing for slander sins and sins in business. (I remembered all I’d been told of Lud’s contraband dead.) And prayed to be let off for sins of scoffing, for wanton looks, for causeless hatred.

Some were irritated, stirring, grumbling. Charney and Klein were whispering together. Sal, God forbid something should happen in Lud and he not be in on it, moved closer to them. A few of the mourners looked around for their things.

“Hey,” I urged, “wait. We’re not finished,” and specially, suddenly, pled:

“For the sins we have committed against Thee by grandstanding,” I tried. “And the sins we have committed against Thee by seeking to lie low and maintain a low profile,” I told them, and had a vision of Rabbi Petch cowering behind the furniture jammed together in the southwest corner of his living room in Anchorage. And looked about, excited now, my sins as much in the public domain as if my fly were open. “And the sins we have committed against Thee by the hanky panky of the heart and flesh,” I rushed on, though even this didn’t cut into their murmuring. I wasn’t drunk, or crazy, or even much of a crank, but try telling them that.

“For the sins which we have committed against Thee by living in the wrong communities,” I said.

That wasn’t it. It wasn’t even more like it.

“In which we raised our children,” I amended.

“Our daughters,” I revised.

“My daughter,” I atoned, not quite grieving but getting warmer and aware of the immense, twisted tonnage of complex grief in the world at any given time, in any given place, some tight amalgam of woe and rue and complicity and fear. Grief like a land mass, like the seas, complicated as weather seen from high space or the veiled, tie-dye smudge of the alloy earth itself.

But why couldn’t I let them go? What was I up to, the offshore yeshiva bucher with the tiny haphtarah passage? What was I up to with my spilt-milk penitentials and public-domain regrets and all my deplored, gnashed-teeth, learned-my-lessons? With my sullied sympathy, giving out quarter like a drunken sailor? Pushing off my easy, condolent affections on them, laying on all my outstretched formulas of finessed sensibility and participatory grief, plea bargaining the world, fending God off with my sorrys and sorry-fors — sorry for Shelley, for Connie, the Cohens, for Shull and for Tober, for Charney, for Klein? What was I up to who had enough on my own plate, more than enough, all I could handle with just my own grievances, forget my swooping, all-embracing, crash-course sympathetics?

Several were standing now, edging toward the exits. I couldn’t let it bother me. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.

So, thinking of Connie, thinking of Shelley, and playing with Him for time, I prayed that we all be inscribed in the Book of Life for one more year.

I was calmer now, but just before I said the El Moley Rachamim for Joan Cohen, I recited some special blessings I’d learned in yeshiva. I offered the broches you say when you see a rainbow, when you eat ripe fruit, when you hear good news, when you laugh out loud, when you buy new clothes, when you kiss a woman, when you repair an appliance, when you touch a giant, when you smell sweet wood.

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review . Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Even though he was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life, Elkin continued teaching classes at Washington University until his passing in 1995 from congestive heart failure.

A one-year-old Elkin in 1931. His father was born in Russia and his mother was a native New Yorker, though the couple raised Stanley largely in Chicago.

Elkin in Oakland, New Jersey, around 1940. His parents, Philip and Zelda, originally met in this camp in Oakland, which lies at the foot of the Catskills.

Elkin as a teenager in Oakland, New Jersey. Throughout his childhood, Elkin and his family retreated to Oakland for the hot summer months, spending July and August with a group of family friends. His time there would later inform much of his writing, including the novella “The Condominium” from Searches & Seizures .