Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things — Edition Insights

Dialogue as Argument: The Partners' Verbal Tics

Glass builds nearly every scene around a single rhetorical pattern: Abe delivers a long, winding complaint, and Morris punctures it with a dry rejoinder. Abe's speeches are packed with hypotheticals, digressions, and itemized grievances—for instance, a rant about Postmaster-General Burleson's handling of mailed bombs spirals into a calculation of per-diem steamship costs. Morris, by contrast, speaks in short, ironic setups: "Some people is willing to get in a knock at Mr. Wilson without even so much as an orange-phosphate tax for an excuse." This asymmetry creates a comic rhythm where Abe's anxiety is both the engine and the butt of the joke. The partners rarely agree, but their arguments never escalate beyond exasperated sighs, suggesting a durable partnership built on mutual irritation.

Taxes, Tariffs, and the Price of Everything

No political issue escapes being reduced to a dollar-and-cents calculation. Abe's monologue on the luxury tax on shirts—"ten per cent. is only collected from the purchasers of men's shirts of the value of three dollars and upwards on amounts in excess of three dollars each"—is typical. Glass uses these fiscal tangents to satirize how public opinion is shaped by petty economic grievances. The partners discuss the League of Nations, bomb plots, and presidential travel not as matters of principle but as line items in a national budget. This relentless focus on cost turns abstract policy into something tangible and absurd: the peace conference becomes a problem of feeding delegates and managing hotel bills.

The War as a Punch Line: German Names and Patriotic Roasts

Glass treats the recent war as a source of linguistic and culinary comedy. Abe's indigestion from a "liberty roast" at Wasserbauer's—formerly known as "Koenigsburger Klops"—points to the awkward rebranding of German things during wartime. The partners never discuss battles or casualties; instead, the war appears through its aftermath: canceled orders, renamed foods, and the logistical chaos of demobilization. This oblique treatment allows Glass to mock patriotic fervor without denying its reality. When Abe imagines the public complaining about President Wilson's steamship, he ventriloquizes a voice that is both absurd and recognizable: "Must he got to have a whole steamboat?"

The Unreliable Narrator: Who Is Really Speaking?

Though the novel is written in third person, the narrative voice is almost indistinguishable from Abe's. Descriptions are sparse; the text consists almost entirely of dialogue and interior monologue. This technique creates a claustrophobic, opinionated world where every event is filtered through Abe's anxious, conspiratorial mind. When he speculates that the police will arrest innocent men for the bomb plot because "nobody is going to miss such fellers," the reader is left uncertain whether this is dark satire or genuine cynicism. Glass never steps back to offer an objective frame, forcing the reader to judge the reliability of the partners' worldview from the inside.

Readers should approach Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things as a period satire that demands attention to its verbal texture rather than its plot. The novel's humor depends on recognizing the gap between the partners' narrow perspective and the global events they discuss. Glass's ear for dialect and his willingness to let arguments run long reward patience; the comedy accumulates through repetition and escalation. For those interested in American Jewish literature, wartime popular culture, or the history of business satire, this book offers a vivid, if partial, snapshot of how ordinary New Yorkers talked about the peace.

I’ve often thought Glass’s garment-district partners, for all their squabbling, shared a wary affection built through shared burdens, much like those frontier families in A Daughter of the Sioux: A Tale of the Indian frontier — Themes and Context found their own language across vast silences. Both books whisper about making peace with a world that refuses to stay neatly settled. A quiet kinship, truly.