Finding Heaven on Earth

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

AN HOUR IN PARADISE
By Joan Leegant
160 pages. Norton. $23.95.

LITTLE EDENS
By Barbara Klein Moss
288 pages. Norton. $23.95.

According to the old Yiddish proverb, even an hour in paradise is priceless. In Joan Leegant’s warm and expansive collection An Hour in Paradise we catch ten fleeting glimpses of lives bearing out the truth of this claim. Paradise in these stories is not a place, but a moment—generally a moment of genuine and uninhibited communion with another person or people.

In "The Seventh Year" paradise wells through the scuffed linoleum of a Jerusalem apartment building during an instant of surprising sympathy between two mismatched neighbors. Three women floundering with faith and identity are brought to their moments of grace simultaneously in "The Lament of the Rabbi’s Daughters" through the intervention of their long-dead sister, who for years has been petitioning to "come back and try to make things right."

In both "Lucky in Love" and "Henny’s Wedding" women snatch hungrily and recklessly at the heavenliness of the immediate present, and, though one is old and taking her last chance at romantic fulfillment and the other young and taking her first, there is something movingly similar in the urgent selfishness with which they go after their men. In "Lucky in Love" one gets the sense that in Leegant’s world paradise cannot linger: it would not be paradise if it did. When two aged lovers finally marry after decades of illicit longing, the man’s diabetes suddenly begins acting up, threatening to kill him, "Like it was waiting for him to finally be happy."

Leegant’s greatest strength as a writer is the kindness she shows her characters. With a keen and forgiving eye, she can draw a tremulous adolescent and a baffled old rabbi with equal vivacity. She even seems to feel genuine sympathy for details of setting, writing endearingly about an "ever-present beef smell hovering just outside the kitchen window like a nosy relative" or land that, "like a person, might get tired."

Unfortunately, these stories do not stick to such small and quiet observations; they also harbor a strange, tentative sort of mysticism that never seems able to sink into the texture of the writing. There is the already-mentioned dead sister returning like an otherworldly Dr. Phil to knock her siblings into shape, a pair of Siamese twins who may or may not be angels in "The Tenth," and an episode of mystical transfiguration on a Safed street in "Seekers in the Holy Land." Perhaps the reason these flights of fantasy never feel quite right is that these stories, just like the paradises they describe, are light and fleeting in tone. The ease and naturalness with which they are told is part of what makes them so enjoyable to read—you glide through them like water—but they are not places one would choose to linger. There are no linguistic or emotional crevices to get snagged on. When mysticism tries to emerge from Leegant’s straightforward sentences, it seems forced.

The slippery lightness of Leegant’s paradises become particularly apparent when contrasted with the elysian thickets of Barbara Klein Moss’s Little Edens. A quiet divinity illuminates even those of Moss's stories that are entirely earthbound. These miniature worlds are rich and luxurious—you can spend whole minutes wandering around in one of Moss’s sentences—and when, for instance, a son begins to tenderly haunt his mother in the title story, you accept it as a gift.

Unlike the paradises found in Leegant's stories, which are appreciated in the present, Moss’s edens tend to reach out from the past (or, in at least one story, "The Interpreters," from the future). Solid and lasting, these paradises grow and deepen in the characters’ imaginations, and make the present glimmer. In "The Rug Weaver," the safe and easy life of an Iranian Jewish refugee, living with his boorish son and daughter-in-law in the United States, is made bearable only by the memory of the transcendence he experienced in his jail cell while mentally weaving a rug, "replicating the grand design of God." In "Interpreters,"a woman trapped by her love of a man whose emotional range extends from petulance to contempt finds relief in contemplating a future that actually took place centuries before. Even when Eden does invade the present, as in "The Palm Tree of Dilys Cathart,"it retains the sort of polished permanence that can only come from something not entirely accessible.

This last and longest story is probably the best in Moss's consistently strong collection. On its surface it is an unusually sensual tale of love between an Orthodox Jewish butcher and an English minister’s daughter. They are brought together when the butcher starts to hear the mystical "attributes of God" in musical form, and approaches his pianist neighbor for help in their transcription. (It is unusually sensual because it manages to be sexy despite the fact that the main characters never touch.) As the tale progresses, it harbors a fugue-like complexity, seamlessly weaving the coming together of two people with the coming together of music and thought, flesh and spirit, God and humanity.

Sometimes Moss even manages to further each of these separate love stories in a single sentence: "Not until they united the parts, hours later, did she understand how the second attribute embraced the first, warmed and humanized it, made pure thought comprehensible by sheltering it in flesh." "The Palm Tree of Dilys Cathart" is a sort of Eden in itself—one of those rare pieces that forces you to stop and remember what the point of a short story is in the first place.