“Henry Kreisel calles his collection of stories “The Almost meeting”.

Geometrically, the name of Henry Kreisel's assemblage of short stories, The nearly gathering, could mention to a hyperbola or the disappearing issue of two aligned lines, an significant likeness in his two novels. Biographically, the name can be glimpsed as the convergence of the European and Canadian familiarity in Kreisel's background. Thematically, the name points to the malfunction of individual features to get simultaneously, as in The wealthy Man, where Jacob Grossman encounters Tassigny and his own Austrian family but falls short to communicate the truth, or in The Betrayal, where the meeting of Held, Lerner, and Stappler has tragic consequences.

The first article, "The Almost Meeting," depicts a near encounter between two writers, Alexander Budak and David Lasker. Having obtained an encouraging note from Lasker, who he has substantially adored, Budak endeavours to agreement the elder poet and novelist on a visit to Toronto. Throughout his failed quest the doppelgänger motif reverberates much as in Kreisel's second novel, The Betrayal. Kreisel, Lasker, and Budak all explore the same theme: "fOften in his writing people of different nationalities came together and almost touched, only to find themselves pulled apart again" (Kreisel 12). This thematic magnet has a functional equivalent, for the external Lasker-Budak contrive is cut off by the details of Budak's first innovative, in which an immigrant by the title of Lukas (an amalgam of Lasker and Budak) weds Helena against her family's wishes. Her dad disowns her and her two young kids, but they are reconciled after Lukas forsakes her. Torn between his love for his grandfather and the need to find his dad, the boy, who is actually David Lasker in this autobiographical innovative, explorations across North America for his dad, but falls short to rendezvous him. After this recount of the innovative, the outer border is refurbished by quotation to Lasker's note: "An almost meeting is often more significant than the meeting. The quest is all" (Kreisel 17).

Despite the note, a telephone call, and a visit to Lasker's house, Budak does not do well in confronting the man who is evidently his dad and whose Kafkaesque deferments frustrate his son's hopes. Indeed, the repeated description of Lasker's handwriting as "the intricate web spun by a long-legged spider" (Kreisel 17) suggests the snare of an almost meeting. In Toronto, Budak has "the strangest feeling of déjà vu": "That shop looked precisely like a little food shop shop up in Yellowknife where I one time waited for my father. Someone notified me he habitually came there at a certain time, but he never displayed up" (Kreisel 20). Thus, through a sequence of opposite but not touching mirrors mirroring ad infinitum, and through a synecdochic inner contrive that recapitulates the bigger border of the story, Kreisel does well in creating a mise en abyme for the standards of opposing generations of immigrants.

The resisting standards in the next story, "Chassidic Song," belong to a liberal Jew, Arnold Weiss, and ...