Beyu Caffe

Located at 341 West Main Street in downtown Durham, Beyu Caffe offers coffee drinks, cocktails, and Southern-influenced food. It is open seven days a week from 8 to 8 (8 to 6 on Sundays) and offers breakfast all day. Formerly a regular jazz venue, Beyu still offers occasional live music.

Beyu is pronounced Be You, and that sense of individual character permeates this cool and comfortable spot. Conveniently located and reasonably spacious, Beyu offers a comfortable ambiance: lively without being loud.

This character extends to the menu as well, which features names to remember (Dope coffee specialties, a Chuck Berry Parfait) and fresh takes on familiar dishes (i.e. chicken wings and French toast subbing in for chicken and waffles). Hungry and tired, my wife and I opted for coffee drinks (Mexican coffee and a Carver’s Peanut Butter) and lunch items (Satchmo Po Boy and Shrimp and Grits). Everything was ordered at the register prior to seating, and service thankfully proved expeditious.

Both coffee drinks were excellent. The Mexican coffee added cinnamon, nutmeg, and chocolate to the standard brew and made for a bold and rich concoction. The Carver’s Peanut Butter combined espresso, peanut butter, steamed milk, and honey. If peanut butter in coffee causes you to raise an eyebrow, a few sips of this smooth and tasty blend will make a convert of you.

Unfortunately, the food wasn’t quite up to the same standard. The Shrimp and Grits used Italian sausage in place of Tasso ham, an odd choice but not a poor one. However, the shrimp were just short of overcooked, and the grits needed copious stirring to reach the right consistency. Thankfully, the flavor still delivered. Meanwhile, the Po Boy – actually, a pair of fried catfish sliders – featured nicely breaded fish, but the accompanying side salad sported dubious-looking lettuce.

Given the atmosphere and coffee quality, I would not hesitate to return to Beyu the next time I’m in Durham, but I might think twice about ordering lunch.

Kaddish.com

Larry is the loutish, atheist son of Orthodox Jewish parents. When his father dies in 1999, he is tasked with saying the Kaddish – a prayer for the dead – every day for a year. However, Larry refuses the call and instead secretly uses the Web site kaddish.com to contract with Chemi, an Israeli student, to pray in his stead. Twenty years later, Larry (now going by Shuli) has returned to his faith and is a rabbi teaching at a religious school. A chance encounter with a student fills him with dread over his earlier shirking of filial duty, and he embarks on a desperate quest to track down Chemi and reclaim his birthright.

Part satire and part affirmation of faith, Kaddish.com is an odd duck of a novel that captivates while falling short of its ambition. Nathan Englander remains a talented writer well-versed in Orthodox practices and culture, and as with his short story collections, he is able to navigate them with a deft blend of humor (Shuli, furtively browsing a school computer, is stunned by how fast technology has become since he abandoned it) and sincerity (the burning desire to right a wrong). But even those skills cannot mask the absurdity of Shuli’s obsessive odyssey, which is wife, speaking for the audience, rightly condemns.

Kaddish.com continues a long tradition of exploring intersections and divergences between what is Halakhic and what is by other measures right and tries to update it for the digital age. However, that is an issue that needs more than the book’s 200 pages allow.

This Storm

In the early 1940s, as America goes to war, LAPD and Army intelligence officer Dudley Smith senses an opportunity. The cunning and ruthless Irish cop conspires to smuggle drugs as well as Japanese and Mexican laborers into the U.S. in military vehicles. His scheming is aided by a Tong boss restaurateur, a high-ranking Mexican Sinarquista, and by Hideo Ashida, a closeted and conflicted Japanese-American LAPD chemist. To thwart Dudley, his more straight-laced but equally ambitious rival, LAPD captain Bill Parker, recruits forensic biologist/Navy officer Joan Conville to work alongside and keep tabs on Ashida. Though distrustful of one another at first, a series of discoveries brings them closer together and puts them – as well as Dudley and LAPD officer Elmer Jackson – in pursuit of a Communist-Fascist conspiracy and a cache of stolen gold.

            The second book in James Ellroy’s Second LA Quartet, This Storm is all but inaccessible without having read the first book (2014’s Perfidia) and requires a decent understanding of WW II-era history to boot. A sprawling, character-laden six-hundred-plus page exploration of Ellroy’s favorite subject (mid-century American corruption), This Storm will appeal to a narrow band of patient, strong-stomached readers, and even then, it will test their commitment.

            As with Ellroy’s previous oeuvre, This Storm breathlessly catalogues the violence and sleaze lurking behind the veneer of respectability. Not only do characters like Dudley eradicate the lines between cops and criminals, but politicians and entertainers (chiefly, the real-life Fletcher Bowron and Orson Welles) are painted as indulgent and corruptible. “Fifth column’s fifth column” pops up as a refrain, and it works to capture the greed and thuggery that unite partisans of widely differing political stripes.

            All of this is delivered in Ellroy’s rapid-fire staccato style, which is as much a curse as a blessing. On the one hand, it suits the subject matter well and keeps a long book from being unbearably longer. On the other hand, it stands in the way of characters developing their own voices (excerpts from the journal of police pal Kay Lake notwithstanding). This is a shame because Ellroy has finally diversified his protagonists. The familiar corrupt white cop battling a greater evil is still present here in the form of Elmer (a redneck running a prostitution ring who foreswears white supremacy and murder), but Joan (who plays Bill and Dudley against one another as she looks for a means to avenge her father) and Hideo (whose growing attraction to Dudley clashes with his growing sense of guilt from enabling him) allow for new stories to be told. And yet, they are only fleshed out as much as the plot demands them to be, which is often not nearly enough.

            This Storm takes its name from a fabricated quote by W.H. Auden. “This storm. This savaging disaster” is repeated by various characters within the book, and it’s tempting to see it as a description of the text (relentless and unyielding as it is) itself. However, another frequent phrase is actually a better fit. “It’s all one story,” Joan notes as her cases begin to converge. Here, too, Nazism, Communism, theft, and murder are all viciously intertwined, to the detriment of anything else worth focusing on.