From Lud to Alaska: A Spiritual Odyssey
Lynn, David H.
From Lud to Alaska: A Spiritual Odyssey The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin Charles Scnbner's Sons, 1987.256pp. $1795 Reviewed by David H. Lynn Nothing may be so essential to the history of the...
...But always, in the memorable characters of Singer, Bernard Malamud, even Philip Roth, there is something more— a spark of intensity, wisdom amidst the simple, humor amidst darkness, even the cold-flame shock of mundane evil that redeems the most lowly of characters and redeems the reader's interest, the reader's heart and soul...
...The small community of the living in Lud is a collection of grotesques: the owner of the cemeteries, ever plotting to increase the profits from his real estate...
...but for a brief encounter at a funeral for the same pilot months later, Goldkorn never sees the holy man again...
...Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn, the narrator and central character of Stanley Elkin's new novel, takes his place in that tradition even as he steps outside it in important ways...
...For the entirety of his story there is no real story after all, but a collection of events and crises strung together...
...He is not a man of great sensitivity, wisdom or depth...
...I was taking my life in my hands there...
...His life and emotions are ruled by the raging of his glands for his wife Shelley, a babbling naif who adopts a pidgin Yiddish as her notion of the proper sound and substance of a rebbelzin...
...From the Pentateuch to the Chasidic tales to the stories of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jews have turned to narrative as a tool for encasing truths, mystery and suffering...
...His congregation is made up of the dead and their mourners, who listen to the rabbi patching together eulogies from scraps cadged from brothers, wives and daughters...
...And beginning to believe God's all there is, and that all He ever made was weather, conditions to test your mettle, ice to suffer by and humiliate your character...
...Sterno, for example, simmering beneath good old-fashioned home cooking...
...Jesus, kid, I'm a licensed, documented rabbi...
...The rabbi strolls through the cemeteries with his daughter (who learns Hebrew by studying headstones), creating histories for the names they chance upon...
...It isn't...
...Weren't you...
...You were right there beside me, you heard me...
...But now spring's come and I remember all I've been missing—the amenities that make all the difference...
...This long excursion is nothing less than a tour de force...
...The lengths I went to...
...All wheedle one minute, all smart ass, up-front I-Thou confrontationals the next...
...That is no surprise...
...Yes, Goldkorn is human...
...A tzaddik wearing a hooded parka, knit cap and insulated boots, with a beard of living flowers...
...And weakness, simplicity and lewdness are no strangers to the stories of Jewish writers...
...To that end, a strange and powerful interlude occurs as Rabbi Goldkorn arranges a one-year leave of absence in Alaska while his family remains in Lud, and goes to discover whether being the Jewish chaplain of remote oil fields is an attractive alternative...
...David H. Lynn is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C...
...Civilization...
...1795 Reviewed by David H. Lynn Nothing may be so essential to the history of the Jews as love of a good story...
...More problematic is the case of the Goldkorns...
...they could survive nowhere else...
...The comforts and the mod cons...
...As modern readers we are hardly shocked by such form or formlessness...
...And Lud simply isn't fertile ground...
...These characters belong in Lud...
...Gone so long, in all that cold and dark, wearing the same mittens and snowshoes weeks on end, you forget what it's like...
...and the virulently anti-Semitic stone carver who has assumed control of his shop from its Jewish owner, a sufferer of Alzheimer's disease, innocent of all memory...
...Yet it also reflects the weaknesses of the narrator and, finally, of the novel...
...But in sacrificing the truths that inhere in the shaping of a tale, an author bids us harvest other sorts of truth...
...Goldkorn is always telling tales...
...Didn't you hear me...
...Goldkorn, as narrator, breaks from tradition in one other peculiarly modern way...
...he and the pilot are lost and alone, huddling in the damaged plane for days...
...As we know he must, the old man mysteriously repairs the airplane and flies out with them...
...Goldkorn accepts the epiphany without hesitation, falling all over himself in wonder and obsequiousness...
...But early in that adventure, Goldkorn's plane makes an emergency landing...
...Narrators in the Modern Novel, is to be published this year by St Martin's Press Use coupon at left to order the books reviewed here...
...That is the end of it...
...Nor does the intense spiritual experience work any lasting illumination or change on the rabbi...
...In the end, however, Jerry Goldkorn is no more than a whiner, an all too familiar shlump: "Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot...
...His new book, The Hero's Tate...
...Who—or what—should appear but a wandering Jew to beat all wandering Jews...
...Both history and story spring from the same impulse—to make sense of experience, to shape and understand it and, most important of all, to pass the story/history within a community and from generation to generation...
...The trip to Alaska and the encounter with the tzaddik are disconnected from the rest of the novel, except in the most tenuous thematic ways...
...The central tension of the novel arises from whether the rabbi, his wife and daughter belong in Lud or whether, to save their souls, they should flee...
...The stranger rattles an amalgam of wisdom and nonsense: "Yes, sir," he said, "you start to look forward, you really do...
...The narrative is all middle—there is no true beginning or end...
...the barber who maintains a shop, chair and barber pole as a front for his true occupation of preparing new arrivals (many of whom, he claims, are imposters, victims of the mob's professional dispatchers...
...Goldkorn is the rabbi of Lud, New Jersey, an eerie, vast wasteland of cemeteries, reminiscent of the desolate stretches beyond Manhattan in The Great Gatsby...
Vol. 13 • July 1988 • No. 5
