A Fool's Kabbalah

At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. Steve Stern's new novel, A Fool's Kabbalah, reimagines Gershom Scholem's quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his bosom friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died prematurely by his own hand. In a parallel narrative, a fable really, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behaviour, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village, fuelled by his love for Blume, the rabbi's beautiful daughter. A Fool's Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humour and a little magic.