Mark Mirsky is a miracle worker. He has the tears of comedy, the laughter of tragedy, and the speaking voice of life — all in a stylization that lets us know instantly we are in the presence of a great teller of tales. I hope never to miss a word he writes.
The Secret Table
Mark Mirsky
Now in The Secret Table, Mark Mirsky sets side by side two novellas of young men embracing a mystical past. In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.