The voluble trickster Kornblum is a host of rascals in himself.įrancis Iles, Daily Telegraph, January 17 1936 We get good, rich, salty, comedy-farce of the Ben Jonson type, in this account of greasy, greedy, cowardly humbugs tumbling from one disaster to another, and talking, talking, talking.! If the account were presented as a study of a race, it would be grotesquely untrue as a comic picture of a few persons, it is grand. But unfortunately the Leonoffs, besides playing a smaller part in the narrative, are less convincing and less interesting than the Ratner brothers, of whom it may be said, roughly and broadly, that, coming into their father’s fortune, made out of the bakery business, they throw it away in ridiculous attempts to make sweets and to make books (the betting, not the literary kind), and in another adventure which even more reveals their incompetence. He is concerned, not with a community, but with a family and not with the rich varieties of human nature, but, for the most part, with odious fools, whom one cannot help regarding (no doubt very unjustly) as all the more odious because of their folly’s grossness! It is true that there is at least one fine, even magnificent character, Mark Leonoff, tailor by trade, adventurer by disposition, and idealist by conviction: his son John too has honesty, strength and dignity, and there are some sympathetic minor characters.
He, too, is in complete control of a conversational method brilliantly, and somewhat disconcertingly, lifelike.
With a smaller canvas, Mr Kersh displays much the same qualities of raciness and reality.
For each of Kersh’s books published in the UK and US, I have listed some reviews.Īt present, I have not found any US reviews for Men Ar e So Ardent, Nightshades & Damnations, and The Angel And The Cuckoo.
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