In a glorious debut, a thirteen-year-old boy confronts queer lust, shame, the threat of wars and the plague of family on the day he becomes a man
At a banquet hall in Israel, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam braces for his special day mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction.
In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming of age: his newly devout father, with a past of mystic rituals he practiced on his son; his best friend Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khahlil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world.
At once tender and lustful, a work of scathing satire and piercing insight, Mazeltov is a wholly original vision of a young man’s quest to know his own heart.
