Jewish Lightning

When it’s time for lunch, the old men strut naked to the cold showers for a rinse. Their hot, bony feet, arches flattened by the tonnage of fat knees, are somehow immune to athlete’s foot or whatever virus crawls in the bathy fray. Disease lives on the wood slabs of the sauna, in the cracks of broken shower floors, between the toes of barrel-chested men who somehow can’t contract Giardia. Aging bodies roast silently in gold jewelry they refuse to take off, chest hair singeing under six-pointed stars and Chais, little pinkies burning too. Inside these perspiring men are cold operators, and to be shamelessly naked is the Yiddish art of war. Welcome to Jason Diamond’s debut novel, Kaplan’s Plot, set in a Chicago underworld where business is done in the shvitz. Where you know that no one’s wearing a wire.