A DOVE OF THE EAST

A collection of short stories, often short short stories, which travel all around the world but retain the same timeless constants. Revelations, memories, or "moments full of cognizance and dream vision"—these are strong undercurrents while death is never far behind or ahead. In the title story an "ill-fitting refugee" serves as a patrol in Israel where he is spooked into shooting a dove—a dove that dies alone and unattended, perhaps like the wife he has lost. The closest to fable is "A Jew of Persia" who comes down from his clear mountains to be enclosed in the heat and filth of Tel Aviv where he waits silently to make his long-anticipated confrontation with the devil. The aged appear in more than one piece—the old man who affirms that the greatness in this world is God's doing; or the elderly Father Trelew who goes from Arizona to Rome to die, too quickly to achieve a perspective on his life. There's the commemorative "Katrina, Katrin," remembered by the young man who spent her last night trying to fulfill her last wish; of the woman in "Shooting the Bar" whose resentment of her husband who had sailed all over is only appeased when he crosses that bar for the last time. "On 'The White Girl' by Whistler" contains the lines which truly define Helprin's talent and intent: a "man who traded all for essences and captured everything in color." All Helprin's stories deal with essences which lead from the heart, and his images are clean and sharp and bright.