“The Dinner Party”

By Brenda Janowitz

St. Martin’s Griffin (288 pages, $15.99 paper)

Sylvia Gold, an upwardly mobile doctor’s wife in Greenwich, Conn., is in a tizzy. Her overachiever med student daughter Becca finally has a boyfriend -- and he’s a Rothschild. Of the Rothschilds, the richest and most powerful Jewish family on earth. And he and his parents are coming for dinner. Not just any dinner, but Passover seder.

Quick, she has to redecorate the entire house, hire a chef, buy new table linens and plan the seating arrangements. This last chore is doubly complicated because her other daughter, Sarah, is dating an Italian auto mechanic, and he’s bringing his mother, a completely unpresentable person prone to hysterics. But Sylvia doesn’t know the worst of it yet: the mother has arranged a pre-dinner video chat with her husband ... from his cellblock in jail.

Oy gevalt!

Few writers could have more fun with this premise than Muttontown, New York, author Brenda Janowitz, whose satirical rendition of the aspirations, problems and prejudices of a certain class of American Jews is hilariously precise. She’s got Passover nailed: “... it can go one of two ways. It can be a long and somewhat depressing service. (Slavery. Ten plagues brought upon the land. The slaying of all the firstborn children.) Or, it can, in the right hands, be a joyous family celebration. (Four cups of wine. A children’s song about Moses floating in a basket. A sandwich made out of apples, walnuts, red wine and cinnamon.)” (TNS)