Only two people remain until the bitter end: Avishai Lazar, a retired district judge, and Eurycleia, a midget who sometimes serves as a medium. “A man’s voice grunts through the silence: ‘Listen, buddy, bottom line – are we going to get any comedy here tonight or not?’” One by one, the men and women in the audience, fed up with Dov using them “to work out his hang-ups,” begin to walk out, abandoning him on his shabby stage. He tells his audience, “Even the animals around the neighborhood made fun of me.”Īs the performance drags on, the audience – that is to say, we readers – becomes ever more repulsed by Dov’s story and at the same time ever more seduced by “the temptation to look into another man’s hell.” He has been a failure in his three marriages, and his five children loathe him. What begins as a more or less normal, though caustic, routine, in which Dov badgers and insults his audience to comic effect, disintegrates into a semi-coherent confession of unresolved family conflict and painful recollections of emotional and physical abuse.ĭov’s act is increasingly one of demonstrable self-loathing. Dov Greenstein, an over-the-hill stand-up comic, who has turned 57 that very day, slowly unravels both psychologically and physically during his performance. The narrative unfolds during the course of a few hours on an August night in a basement dive in a gritty industrial section of Netanya, a medium-size coastal city between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The book, which was published in Hebrew as “ Sus Echad Nichnas L’Bar” in 2014, was translated by Jessica Cohen. Knopf, 2017), won Great Britain’s prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2017.

His most recent novel, “A Horse Walks into a Bar” (Alfred A. 1954) is one of Israel’s most highly regarded writers.

Horae walks into a bar joke