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three, his face a starched white”), who declares roundly, “I am a full-fledged, proud Jew. … I have nothing to be ashamed of.” There are also “one-star” marginal Jews like Luther Glick, “a thin man in his mid-fifties, with a beard and a mustache, his grey hair forming a ponytail in the back, held together by a rubber band,” who is into “cosmic consciousness” and a Buddhist sect that meets in a church attic in Westchester.

Not surprisingly, it is Luther who is the subject of Mr. Evanier’s compassionate, humorous, highly individualized sketch (more humorous, I found, on a second reading than at first). In fact, compassion, humor, individualization— these or variations upon these qualities are characteristic of all 14 stories in this collection. They are found in the longest of them (“The One-Star Jew,” which runs forty pages) as well as in the shortest (“A Safe Route on 83rd Street,” which is less than three pages.)

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three, his face a starched white”), who declares roundly, “I am a full-fledged, proud Jew. … I have nothing to be ashamed of.” There are also “one-star” marginal Jews like Luther Glick, “a thin man in his mid-fifties, with a beard and a mustache, his grey hair forming a ponytail in the back, held together by a rubber band,” who is into “cosmic consciousness” and a Buddhist sect that meets in a church attic in Westchester.

Not surprisingly, it is Luther who is the subject of Mr. Evanier’s compassionate, humorous, highly individualized sketch (more humorous, I found, on a second reading than at first). In fact, compassion, humor, individualization— these or variations upon these qualities are characteristic of all 14 stories in this collection. They are found in the longest of them (“The One-Star Jew,” which runs forty pages) as well as in the shortest (“A Safe Route on 83rd Street,” which is less than three pages.)