Goodbye, Evil Eye

The stories in Goodbye, Evil Eye revolve around the tensions between Sephardic Jews-whose multilingual roots lie in Spain, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East-and U.S. urban life. With their superstitions, myths, and contradictions, the characters fight to retain the old ways or struggle to free themselves of them, sometimes with bizarre consequences: a female corporate executive agrees to perform the evil eye exorcism to rid her mother of depression; a father impersonates his son as a job applicant; a woman's belief that she is descended from Christopher Columbus colours her life. The Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain is still an immediate memory for many of these people. They try to recapture the Golden Age by clinging to Ladino, their archaic language, and by enthusiastically appropriating anything that resembles their former lives in the Ottoman Empire: a view of the sea, a mode of dress, courtship rituals. Unable to assert themselves in their patriarchal families, the women must resort to innuendo and subterfuge. Ruled by the constraints of ancestral mores and an often-shaky sense of reality, it is they who transmit a rich cultural heritage to their children, a process that sometimes backfires. The life of the Sephardim has hardly been noted in American fiction. This collection will reveal to the public some exotic yet familiar characters. Kirchheimer's stories address the particular experiences of women, immigrants, and Jews in a pluralistic society, while at the same time assuming universal coloration and stature.