Love and Other Games of Chance

by Lee Siegel

"The fantastic and flamboyant hero of Siegel's enchantingly playful new novel, Love and Other Games of Chance, is Isaac Schlossberg, circus performer, entertainer, and world traveler. The son of Jewish immigrants to America at the turn of the last century, Isaac spends his formative years in California, performing with his parents in traveling sideshows, Wild West jamborees, vaudeville, and early films. He travels to Calcutta in the 1920s and there assembles a troupe, Professor Solomon Serpentarius' Oriental Oddities and Indian Incredibilities, to take on tour to England. After playing in British music hall and variety theater, he later travels to Paris, where he works a stint in the Grand Guignol theater, and to Hollywood, where he finds himself starring as Ponce de Leon in a Hollywood movie produced by Jewish mobsters.". "Isaac organizes the tall tales of his past into one hundred chapters, or squares, as on the children's game snakes and ladders. As he travels geographically around