The House of Moses All-Stars
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
Here is the story of an all-Jewish basketball team traveling in a hearse through Depression-era America in search of redemption and big money. A hilarious road novel, The House of Moses All-Stars is also a passionate portrayal of a young Jewish man struggling to realize his dreams in a country struggling to recover its ideals. Charley Rosen gives us basketball as a metaphor for life.
Aaron Steiner, the protagonist of The House of Moses All-Stars, is a man very close to the edge. The former college basketball star has watched his dreams of being a successful player fall apart, his marriage disintegrate, and his baby die. In desperation he accepts his friend’s offer to join a Jewish professional basketball team—The House of Moses All-Stars—which is traveling on a cross-country tour in a renovated hearse. Aaron’s teammates—a Communist, a Zionist, a former bank robber, and a red-headed Irishman who passes for a Jew—are, like Aaron, trying to escape their own troubled pasts. As the members of this motley crew travel west to California through an anti-Semitic land that disdains and rebuffs them, they discover a nation grappling with social and economic collapse and fear of foreigners, in conflict with its own democratic ideals of tolerance and opportunity. Told with a rueful eye, The House of Moses All-Stars looks critically and lovingly at what it means to be an outsider in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a premise that sounds like an urban legend, college basketball coach Rosen launches his seventh book on basketball (after the novel The Cockroach Basketball League), taking readers on a wild road trip in a renovated hearse with "seven jumbo Jews." In the midst of the Depression, Aaron Steiner joins a Jewish professional basketball team, the House of Moses All-Stars, on a cross-country tour from New York to California. In addition to Aaron, who joined the team after losing his baby, his wife and his dreams of basketball success, the players in the hearse include a Communist, a Zionist, a bank robber and a redheaded Irishman posing as a Jew. All are running from problems at home and hope to be "an example or something." But the boys get lost before they leave N.Y.C.--and, unfortunately, so does the reader. Set against the hardship and fear of the times, the novel seems to hope to explore what it means to be an outsider in America. Yet, while Rosen is long on road-trip atmosphere (bored waitresses, lukewarm bowls of oatmeal and dank locker rooms), he is short on character development and plot. A string of racial epithets and stereotypes, for example, is what constitutes an exploration of racism here. The narrative is littered with sophomoric sex jokes and lame vulgarities: "Looking back, I can hardly recall anything that I learned in my classroom. Oh yes... from my anatomy class--the handbone connected to the dick bone"--a joke that provides an apt, if unfortunate, metaphor for the spirit of this novel.
