Old School
By Tobias Wolff
Knopf. 195 pages. $22.

What’s in a Jewish name?  Quite a bit, in some cases.  Just ask Bernard Schwartz, Issur Danielovitch, and Nathan Greenberg, who became stars as Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, and George Burns. 

Tobias Wolff never reveals the name of the narrator of his slim new novel, Old School, but it becomes relevant that it isn’t as unmistakably Jewish as, say, Levine. (more…)