Stones

STONES is a novel simultaneously serious and comic. It takes place in one day as its protagonist, Jack Berke, accompanies his aged mother Rachel to visit the family graves  in Brooklyn, Queens, and further out on Long Island. As Jack negotiates the congested expressways  from cemetery to cemetery, he contemplates the tombstones, the lives of family members who lie under them, the stones that, according to Jewish custom, he places on those tombstones, and the stone that has for a lifetime resided in his own heart.