A Horse Walks into a Bar
SynopsisPlot
In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth—where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov’s childhood—Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian’s story of loss and survival.
Story
About this book
In a small club in an Israeli city, a middle-aged comedian named Dov Greenstein takes the stage for a night of stand-up. The audience includes Avishai Lazar, a district court justice who knew Dov decades earlier, when he was a thin, odd kid who walked on his hands to fend off local bullies. As the evening unfolds, Dov's act slips between comedy and confession, and what begins as a performance gradually turns into something far more personal.
Dov's routine circles back through his childhood. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, required constant care. His father, ambitious and harsh, had little patience for the boy's oddness or creativity. The set builds toward a week Dov spent at a military youth camp, where Lazar was also present, and where an event took place that would mark Dov permanently. David Grossman structures the novel around a single evening, compressing a lifetime of memory into one unsteady performance.
Lazar, watching from the crowd, is forced to confront his own connection to what Dov reveals. The book moves between the comedian's voice on stage and Lazar's quiet reckoning in the seats, holding both perspectives without resolving one into the other. Grossman is also the author of To the End of the Land.
