Job Enters a Pain Clinic & other stories

by Roberta Kalechofsky

pbk.    214 pgs

Description

Dedicated to Amos, a Yerkes Laboratory Chimpanzee Who Gave His Life to Save the Human Race.

The dedication sounds the theme for many of these twelve stories, which examine the impact of modern medical technologies on the way we live and the way we die. About the lead story, "Job Enters a Pain Clinic," a grim spoof on the bibical Job, Cynthia Ozick commented: "You are one with Kafka, a perfectly terrifying story--& as you say, no God to speak out of the whirlwind. Truly a nightmare vision, meticulously articulated."

While many of the stories are grim, many are deliciously funny such as "Mary, Mary," a spoof on the Nobel Sperm Bank, and "Lady Death," which is about a dying ballerina's last performance as a corpse.

Some of the stories are based on true events, such as "My Poor Prisoner," the story of the 1930's Berlin cabaret poet, Eric Muhsam, and his imprisonment in Oranienberg in 1934, where the Nazis tortured a chimpanzee in order to drive Muhsam to suicide. Or the story set in Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp in the Nazi regime, where women where women of all backgrounds were sent: Jews, Communists, women who have been in the French underground, prostitutes, women who had committed "race defilement." Ms. Kalechofsky's fictional genius creates Magda, the beautiful but passive Aryan; Fonya, the bitter, dark-souled Jewish communist; Katerina, the "Russian ice princess"; and Resi, the defiant prostitute, who are thrown together by their selection for the hypothermia experiments, and by the fate of a modernity shaped by technology.

The pain clinic Kalechofsky's modern Job enters is modernity, its artificial atmosphere, and its omnipresent concern with disease and health. This modern Job suffers from an undiagnosable back problem and spends his days in a perpetual round of massages, jacuzzi treatments, acupuncture, and the pursuit of a pill to eliminate pain. He runs a website, <www.pain.edu>, which receives thousands of hits a week from similar sufferers. The story as Cynthia Ozick remarked, is Kafkaesque, a witty "nightmare vision." Job's wife is "Everywoman" married to an irascible sufferer.