Every family comes with its own peculiar baggage, but what the Karps carry includes The Frozen Rabbi (Algonquin, $13.95). Yes, a live, preserved 19th-century Polish rabbi. Eliezer ben Zephyr isn’t a blood relation of the Karps, but he’s their responsibility nonetheless. It all started back on a stormy day in 1889, when the rabbi went into a trance, was struck by lightning, and fell into a lake, which then froze. With the madcap logic of a tall tale and the literary charm of magic realism, Steve Stern interweaves the Karp family history with the rabbi’s long journey from the Old World to the New, the dual narratives meeting at the point where a power outage allows the rabbi to thaw and climb out of the freezer. He then adjusts to 21st-century Memphis better than anyone could have guessed, opening a mega-synagogue in a mall and becoming a media sensation, much to the consternation of young Bernie Karp, who’s trying to get used to adolescence and figure out what he believes.