So years ago a good friend of mine had seen the new Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man before I had and I asked his opinion. He liked it but added, “It’s very Jewish.” Which, now that I know the movie well, is accurate, but at the time I thought it was dismissive. There was an implication that only Jewish audiences would understand all of the film’s underlying meanings and themes. This may well be true. Coming from a mostly Anglo-Irish Catholic ancestry (with a smidge of Jewish forebears) I realize I may not appreciate and understand all the meanings, hidden or not, but I still consider it one of the Coen Brothers’ greatest films—and that’s a rarefied category, rubbing shoulders with Millers Crossing, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, and Barton Fink. Morris Collins’ new novel The Tavern at the End of History shares that distinction, and pithy summation: Yes, the story it tells is very Jewish. But it’s also a story that transcends ethnic and cultural boundaries. You feel for the people it describes, and follow them wherever they go. Which, oddly enough, is the state of Maine.
The first character we meet is Jacob, a man in trouble. Like Larry Gopnick of A Serious Man, Jacob is a professor—or, more accurately, was a professor. Both Larry and Jacob seem not to have handled their academic careers quite smoothly. In A Serious Man Larry’s tenure is in some doubt due to disparaging letters the tenure committee is receiving, while in The Tavern Jacob is fired for his clumsy dealings with a former student who tried to commit suicide. Both seem earnest, high-minded, and teetering on the brink of . . . something, most likely unpleasant and life-altering. Both have wives who are having affairs. Both have a quest: In The Tavern Jacob travels to an art auction to recover a piece of Jewish art stolen during the Holocaust, while in Serious Man Larry faces a temptation: He’s in financial peril and has a brother who needs an expensive lawyer, and has been offered a thick envelope of cash to fix a student’s failing grade.
About halfway through The Tavern it becomes something of a Country Manor narrative: Most of the novel unfolds on a somewhat-decrepit estate on the coast of Maine called Nod, which evokes the biblical Land of Nod, where Cain was exiled, but also suggests a sleepworld, a dreamworld, as many other references to dreams reinforce. Country Manor or Country House novels have a rich British tradition: Think Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), or better yet, Martin Amis’s Dead Babies (1975). At this estate in Maine Jacob and others are all gathered at the island home of Alex Baruch, the philosopher accused of falsifying his Holocaust-survivor memoir. A stranger arrives, Eli. He enters like a Ghost of Christmas Past. When his bad behavior at dinner is rebuked by Baruch, Eli launches into a story/fable (supposedly from the Talmud) about the need to accept strangers in your home and offer them kindness. It made me think of the Invisible Knight anecdote in Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, in which the quest for the Holy Grail is initiated from an act of violence in a castle: a Knight broke the covenant that a guest should not assault the lord in his own castle. (The Knight was getting revenge on the Invisible Knight, who had killed many.) Which is all to say Collins evokes a classic myth about the role of gratitude and hospitality, thorns and all, which is a recurrent theme. But Eli’s appearance also has striking similarities to the curious epigraph-like beginning of A Serious Man, in which a dybbuk arrives at a righteous man’s home and his wife recognizes him for what he is, rather than what he claims to be. But that intro/epigraph also ends with a mystery: The presumed dybbuk has been stabbed in the chest, but is he actually a dybbuk? Eli performs the function of a dybbuk at times in The Tavern at the End of History, with Baruch more than once insisting he’s a dead man. The novel ends with multiple twists and much fireworks not to be revealed here. It’s a mesmerizing book and a testament to remembering a past that so many others are trying to forget or to claim never existed. It takes place in 2017, during Trump’s first term, around the time of the Charlottesville white-supremacist riots. It’s as relevant in 2026 as it was in 2017 or 1945.