The portraits offered in this collection are of human life being lived. Often times, the stories need no explanation, but other times, the daily lives of these characters are so packed with meaningful interactions and circumstances that the meaning leaps off the page. What all the stories share is the narrative beauty of a human life, and although the characters in the stories are typically Jewish, the diversity of that culture is a symbolic nod to the diversity of the human experience.
The Jewish question is raised most clearly in the title story, where a Hasidic Jew, a sect known by the broader Jewish community for being particularly harsh and stringent, is angry at his wife for having a period that has continued for a long time. Because of his religious beliefs, he has not been able to have sex, and so he is asking permission from the Rabbi so that he can sleep with a prostitute, and the anecdote becomes a humorous and enlightening portrait of how imbalanced patriarchal, rule-oriented religious practices can be. Notice that no one seeks to console or consult the woman whose life is being torn apart by "uncleanliness" that is not her fault.
So in light of these human dramas, is Judaism the only common thread? No—there is another common thread that ties the stories, and this thread is most clearly depicted in Stalin's oppression against 27 writers in "The Twenty-Seventh Man." The patriarchal injustice is now in full bloom, and it isn't just women who are oppressed; it is writers, Jews of all kind, and human beings in general. In light of this universal oppression, a theme rises like a defiant flower from the soil of injustice. The scene where a person reads his story to an audience for applause has the makings of transcendence. The point here is the narrative quality of life, which is of course plainly obvious in the Jewish scriptures.
