The Hand Before the Eye

Farbman is a hustling New York lawyer with a shiska wife and two kids, living beyond his financial and emotional means. Dunned by his creditors and distressed by an undiagnosed malaise of the soul, Farbman embodies the conflict between our altruistic impulse to help others and our selfish desire to elbow our way to the front of the line. The novel begins on Forty-Second Street in New York City. Farbman is on his way to an out-of-town funeral. He is rushing from a meeting with his unforgiving banker, to his chaotic office, to his parents' home, and then to the airport. Running late, Farbman considers canceling the trip, but doesn't. After the funeral, his lust for a fellow mourner leads him to an encounter with a mystic rabbi. The Hand Before the Eye is the often comic story of a contemporary man. With energetic and ironic prose, Donald Friedman take us into Farbman's world of law and medicine. Through Job-like suffering, Farbman gains enlightenment, learns the spiritual lessons of justice and healing. Finally , he understands that the good life offers us two true gifts: meaningful work and the love of another.

Lawyer David Farbman is a scrambling, perpetually desperate debtor, uninspiring father and dreadful husband. In this intentionally understated and earnest first novel, Farbman is the prism through which readers glean the pervasive anomie and avarice characterizing both domestic and business life, including, unsurprisingly, law offices in midtown Manhattan. Partnered with his friend Marco Marucci, Farbman works at a law practice that serves a pathetic, motley and relatively low-income lineup of clients who insure the protagonist is forever scurrying away from bankers and collection agents. Farbman hardly knows his two kids, Jennifer and Jason, and he hasn't been intimate with his wife, Ann Marie, for too long, but doesn't know how to get the fire back. Furthermore, Farbman's father, an enterprising dentist, self-made real-estater, and jerk, has no respect for his nearly middle-aged son. At a funeral in Illinois, Farbman meets and sleeps with Leah Stein, a hopeful actress who is as connected to the abundant rituals of Judaism as Farbman is remote and aloof from them. Their relationship is profound if sporadic, but the crucial plot twist occurs when Farbman, the hitherto obligatory Jew, discovers the sacred Jewish notion of baal teshuvah (master of the turning) and resolves to transform his hollow life. This intention proves untenable, and before long Farbman finds himself tending to a cancer-stricken wife, a failing business and multiple, blossoming betrayals. Suddenly, the "ordinary unhappiness" he was suffering seems like manageable misery against the inferno he now endures. Friedman sympathetically portrays this much-taxed every-guy while running him through a gauntlet of blunders and cruelties. Farbman's humiliation and loss have a redemptive effect on him, so what is primarily a careful chronicle of workaday shortsightedness concludes moralistically. As the book moves squarely toward the beatific blessedness its once-flawed protagonist has earned, there's a heartening, old-fashioned epiphany and an impassioned finale of spiritual redemption. (Dec.) FYI: This novel won the Mid-List Press First Series Award.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An earnest debut, winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for the Novel, about the spiritual malaise and gradual awakening of a New York attorney,. David Farbman is the kind of Jew who would identify with Job if he ever read the Bible. Which, of course, he doesnt. Once idealistic, in a 1960s sort of way, Farbman is now basically an ambulance-chaser, way behind on his mortgages and stuck with a coterie of clients who seem to have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon. His firm is on the verge of bankruptcy, his Christian wife Ann Marie hasnt slept with him in years, and his banker is about to call in his loans. Can things get any worse? Well, lets just say they can get worse before they get better. At a funeral in Illinois, Farbman meets and has a one-night stand with Chicago actress Leah. A secular Jew like himself, Leah has come under the influence of Hasidim, and she takes Farbman to meet the charismatic Rabbi Sholem. Farbman doesnt exactly feel the Spirit of God hovering over the rabbi, but he is intrigued and begins to wonder how his life would change if he had faith. Back in New York, however, he finds himself faced with the news that his wife has developed cancer. Talk about guilt: he even comes to believe that he gave it to her. Eventually, it all becomes too much to bear. Farbman walks away from his marriage, his family, and his career, and goes off to the country to become . . . a sheep farmer. In the process, not fully believing it himself, he also becomes a Jew. And in the end, he receives the reward of the just, which is far more than he could have hoped for. A bit two-dimensional in a Sunday-school kind of way, Friedmans story is refreshingly earnest and free enough of pretense to win over most doubters. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Middle-aged lawyer Farbman, who hustles personal injury cases and defends shady characters in New York City, is estranged from his shiksa wife, Ann Marie, and spends little time with his two children. When Ann Marie becomes critically ill, Farbman reevaluates his life and what is truly important. He studies the medical literature to secure the best treatment for her and takes an active role in the lives of his children. As Farbman becomes increasingly ethical in his behavior, his circumstances worsen until he loses virtually everything. He leaves the madness of urban existence to pursue a deeper spirituality, finally finding passion and meaning in his life. A heartening story of an individual making a dramatic and successful transformation. [This first novel won the publisher's First Series Award for the Novel.AEd.]AKimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.
-AKimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.