Great Scott!

A Stockholm herring-savant and a Dublin sausage-poet share a claustrophobic Brooklyn delicatessen where marble slabs sweat garlic and every rye loaf harbors ancestral dread. Their children—she a skylark in a pinafore, he a reedy violinist with flour in his eyelashes—are promised to one another like two hams trussed in brown paper, the betrothal sealed by a dowry of imported cheeses and the ghost of a 1903 refrigeration bill. Into this perfumed prison bursts a cyclone of interruptions: a runaway hearse horse galloping past with a wedding wreath snagged on its harness, a Prohibition agent disguised as a nun, a crate of live eels mistaken for linguine, and Teddy the Dog—an existentialist terrier who stares into sausages as if reading Schopenhauer. The fathers, frenzied by collapsing profit margins and the specter of American modernity, chase invoices through boroughs that melt into Expressionist cardboard; the children, suddenly aware of the yoke, stage a delicatessen opera using cheese wheels as footlights and bologna as scenery. In the bravura twenty-minute finale, timed to the pneumatic hiss of a coffee urn, every object in the shop—brine barrels, meat slicers, even the pendulous hams—rebels against destiny, waltzing out into the street to join a Mardi Gras of immigrants who have forgotten which country they fled. When the dust settles, the betrothal contract has been devoured by Teddy, the store sign now reads ‘Great Scott!’ in mustard-yellow crooked letters, and the fathers, stripped to long johns, waltz off into a sunrise that looks suspiciously like a fresh slice of mortadella.