When Ilka arrives at the Concordance Institute, she is almost at a complete loss. She doesn’t know anyone and she doesn’t know the first thing about meeting the other members of the faculty or, more important, becoming a colleague and a friend of them. Fortunately she falls in with the Shakespeares. Leslie Shakespeare is the new director of the Institute and his wife, Eliza, is viciously intelligent, a bit extreme, and, ultimately, painfully sad. On the other hand, Ilka’s had a bit of a rough start to life herself, having been got out of Austria via the Kindertransport prior to the Anschluss. Indeed, there is a fair bit of sadness in almost every corner of Concordance. It seeps in, even in the midst of the funny, almost absurd, happenings of the Institute. How can anyone, or anything, survive such sadness? Only love could have the strength to rescue you, and love, it seems, is Ilka’s one great resource.

Lore Segal’s collection of stories paint a complex and moving picture of a post-war émigré academic community in America. Ilka is the quirky and moving focus, but we learn to care for many here, a virtual concordance of types and kinds. It’s very hard to treat these as independent short stories since they collectively form such a coherent whole. But there is a range here. And a development. And finally it becomes clear that Ilka has been at the heart of Shakespeare’s Kitchen from almost the first moment she was invited in for brunch.

Pleasingly wrong footing and awkwardly sentimental, I have to say that I fell for Ilka and Concordance completely. So easy to highly recommend. ( )

2007. These interconnected stories follow Ilka from "Her First American" to her life after Carter Bayoux in Connecticut. She gets a job at the Concordance Institute, a think tank on the campus of Concordance University. Her ongoing search for friends and family and understanding Americans is just as amusing as before. Some of the characters from Segal's new book, "Half the Kingdom," make their first appearance here. It's a community of mostly secular, Jewish intellectuals with a few WASPs thrown in. Ilka gets married, has a baby and embarks on an affair with her best friend's husband. The others have marital spats and struggle to publish their books. They have endless dinners and cocktail parties. What makes it so good is Segal's acute observations about people's behavior. I would compare her to Raymond Carver, except less masculine and not working class. Awesome stuff. ( )

Pretty, poignant and kind of pointless--but in a wonderful way. An assortment of lovely vignettes focused on life's little triumphs and tragedies. Segal's sardonic descriptions of polite society's awkward moments are priceless. ( )

Picked this up after hearing a Lore Segal piece “The Reverse Bug” featured on the New Yorker fiction podcast. That story is in this collection, and it is far better than all of its companions. Unfortunately I couldn’t relate to these characters and the stories are downright boring for long stretches. ( )