Review by New York Times Review
FOR MANY OF us, "The Godfather," book or movie, ushered us into a second boyhood, teaching that the incorrigible vitality of a first-rate gangster story could temporarily inoculate us against adult sanity. For readers of a like mind, Tod Goldberg's "Gangster-land" will arrive as a gloriously original Mafia novel: 100 percent unhinged about the professionally unhinged. After the "legendary" hit man Sal Cupertine wipes out a room full of "Donnie Brascos" - i.e., undercover feds - here's how the mob responds (and tell me this isn't precisely what came to mind, because it's so totally the mob): They make Sal memorize the Jewish Great Books during six secluded months of face-altering plastic surgery, then install him as associate rabbi in a suburban Las Vegas synagogue as the linchpin of a twisty money-and-body-laundering scheme. I know what you're thinking: "Whole lotta detail work, man. Just drop Sal overboard to Big Pussy's locker. Saves time. Cleaner." Sal himself would probably have preferred a dependable back-of-the-head blammo over this rabbi gig with his new face and a new name that revolts him: "David Cohen? That wasn't a tough guy. That was a guy who fixed your glasses." But we're in "buy the premise, buy the bit" territory, and since this book is torridly funny, go with it. Ultimately, the novel swells with a spiritual but jazzy tone. Dig. Legendary button man becomes a rabbi. Gets good at it. And maybe gets good because being a hit man makes you a better rabbi? "Gangsterland" asks us to consider if we are all inside ourselves rabbis and hit men, both. Perhaps only in becoming fake - as Rabbi Cohen - can Sal become truly authentic for the first time. It's not that there's anything so much more authenticating about being a rabbi versus being a hit man; the book is pretty clear that there isn't. But Sal, who has always known the price he gets for death, now grapples with being left alive. It's tricky. Pretending to be a rabbi, fine, doable, absolutely, but being a rabbi, officiating as a rabbi, in a long con Sal resents in part because it turns him into an undertaker - including burials of the Mafia's "war dead" - now that's degraded. "And they're all ... Jews?" David asks. "They are when they get in the ground," his boss replies. Goldberg first approached this material in the story "Mitzvah" in his collection "Other Resort Cities" (2009), to which this book is essentially a prequel. Goldberg's 1998-era Las Vegas is an inbred white-tiger town populated by felons he describes as "just idiots at cellphone stores trying to act tough," who repeat stuff Bugsy Siegel maybe said and lick their lips envisioning crime's golden future: video-poker grifting or dealing meds in AOL chat rooms. David's initial guide through the plunderworld of Temple Beth Israel is the not precisely incorruptible head rabbi, Kales, who teaches Sal to deflect nosy questions with quotes from the midrashim of oldies radio. Sometimes he turns his self-loathing on David - "Do you understand what you've read, or do you just memorize?" he asks after David complains about his studies. "I get what I get," David shrugs. "Some things, they just seem like weird stories that someone came up with after a meth run." But Kales also, and inevitably, helps his charge become a better rabbi. Rebuking David for his reluctance to visit the sick, he elicits an apology ("David tried to remember the last time he had actually apologized to anyone"), then snaps an order as stirring as Wyatt Earp telling his brothers to take up arms: "Then get your yarmulke and your Torah." The dual person that is David and Sal helped me think kindly of associate anythings, the half-esteemed, including my own associate rabbi, who once told a roomful of 6-year-olds that if we read Hebrew with vowels, our parents had lied and we weren't real Jews. I dedicate this sentence to him: "Gangsterland" will also appeal to anyone, like me, who's fantasized about going back in time to have his associate rabbi hit. To be clear, "Gangsterland" isn't one of these schmuck-bait moral journeys. David is surely changed by the "pathways" the holy texts open in him - he says Kaddish when he spots a chai pendant on a particularly gruesome hit, accepting suddenly that these are his people now - but he keeps doing hits. And we're O.K. with that: Who wants a hoodlum book without a body count? Bodies will undoubtedly continue to heap in a sequel, though Goldberg's subversive last sentence contains the phrase "Never again," solemn to Jews. (I do not believe it, either way.) When Rabbi Kales starts to fear for his own safety around Rabbi Cohen, he breaks into a sweat: "But you are aware that the orders are coming." "Rabbi Kales," David says, "they are always coming." In this starkly hilarious moment, David's faces and callings merge. Seeing Judaism, Vegas and himself from the inside, Rabbi Cohen begins to redeem himself, and becomes his own Donnie Brasco. CHARLIE RUBIN writes and produces for television and movies, and teaches at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sal Cupertine, the Chicago Mob's go-to hitman, expects that his Mob-boss cousin, Ronnie, will have him killed after Sal kills three undercover FBI agents. Occupational hazard, thinks the thoughtful killer; his biggest concern is for his wife and young son. So he is surprised when he is spirited out of Chicago to Las Vegas and, after a series of surgeries, is told that he will become David Cohen, youth rabbi at sprawling and prosperous Temple Beth Israel. In due course, he is counseling synagogue members with nuggets of wisdom from the Torah and Talmud, and, occasionally, paraphrased Springsteen lyrics and reading the Kaddish for dead gangsters from all over the country who are interred as Jews in the synagogue's cemetery. Back in Chicago, the fired FBI agent responsible for the loss of the undercovers is sure Sal is alive and determined to find him; Rabbi Cohen is scheming to reunite with his family and wondering who is the bigger gangster: the synagogue's founder, Rabbi Kales, or Bennie Savone, strip-club owner, synagogue benefactor, and Kales' son-in-law? Sal's transformation and intermittent edification into Rabbi Cohen is brilliantly rendered, and Goldberg's careening plot, cast of memorably dubious characters, and mordant portrait of Las Vegas make this one of the year's best hard-boiled crime novels.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Complex characters with understandable motivations distinguish this highly unusual crime novel from Goldberg (Living Dead Girl). When a sample of some particularly fine heroin causes Sal Cupertine, a hit man for the Chicago Family, to abandon his usual careful methods and execute three undercover FBI agents in a downtown hotel, Sal is certain that the Mafia will make him disappear. What he doesn't expect is that, months later, after multiple plastic surgeries and much study of Judaic holy texts, he will reemerge into the light of day in Las Vegas as Rabbi David Cohen. Back in Chicago, FBI agent Jeff Hopper is determined to track Sal down and make him pay for killing his team of agents. All Sal really wants to do is get to his wife, Jennifer, and their toddler son, William, and then disappear. Goldberg injects Talmudic wisdom and a hint of Springsteen into the workings of organized crime and FBI investigative techniques and makes it all work splendidly. Agent: Jennie Dunham, Dunham Literary. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Targeted by both the feds and his bosses in the Chicago mob after messing up on the job, a prolific hit man hides out in Las Vegas as, of all things, a rabbi. Sal Cupertine has been offing people for more than 15 years without being seen or leaving a spot of evidence. But on a bad day in 1998, he kills three FBI agents"Donnie Brascos"in a hotel room to avoid capture. The mob wants Sal's head for ruining an unspoken arrangement with the feds that lets it buy heroin from the Mexicans. Sal's older cousin in the "The Family" secretly transports him to Vegas, where, his face surgically altered, the hit man is trained to become Rabbi David Cohen. Meanwhile, Jeff Hopper, an underachieving FBI agent whose lack of planning is blamed for the deaths of his colleagues, is in pursuit. Suspended for refusing to go along with his superiors' acceptance of a burned corpse as Sal's, Hopper has his big moment dressing down mob enforcer Fat Monte, who proves wiser and more sensitive than he looks. Clearly influenced by the great Elmore Leonard, Goldberg puts his own dry comic spin on the material, with perhaps a bit more self-reflection on Sal/David's part than Leonard would allow. While anyone with an Italian last name is grist for a crime columnist in late-'90s Vegas, the Kosher Nostra is quietly making its own big scores, running illicit schemes out of a local synagogue. With a memory that earned him the nickname Rain Man, Sal is great at spouting quotes from the Toraheven as he eyes his next victimbut has a tendency to mix those words up with Bruce Springsteen lyrics. Clever plotting, a colorful cast of characters and priceless situations make this comedic crime novel an instant classic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
