Understanding the Past

...scaling flesh, dirty underwear, sour breath, dried sweat, they shared the croup, they suffered either diarrhea or constipation, their fingernails kept splitting off, and they could no longer really be depended on to remember anything Maybe once or twice a month Eliezar's mind would slip to one side a little, leaving a gap into which his memory vanished " That long lived memory reached back across the century to Napoleon, a hero to Lomza's Jews when he marched through in 1812 (Eliezar was then 17), because he represented the promise of a world without Cossacks and pogroms After Eliezar died, "a filthy remnant of a miniature French tricolor, carried by the Napoleonic troops as a souvenir for the rest of Europe, was found at the bottom of one of his armoire drawers, faintly inscribed in red ink, 'a Lazar Etienne Pouthm, 1812 ' " But the "tremors of history" soon subsided in Eliezar, overridden by the more demanding daily tragedies and pleasures of the bloodnest The triumph of Somewhere Else is its extraordinarily warm, vivid, detailed picture of Jewish family life in Lomza m the early 1900s, with all its tensions and jealousies, its complex permutations of enmity and celebration, love and duty, obedience and ambition And what gives Kotlowitz's description such dignity, poign-ance and power as it moves forward year by year, marriage by marriage grandchild by grandchild, is his brilliantly subtle undertone, conveying the inexorable fact that in this time and place, the safe provincial world was beginning to disintegrate, though it would not vanish entirely until World War II The pious, innocent ignorance of Eliezar's son Mordecai?so unworldly in one sense that he would not have known where to begin to look for London or New York or even Warsaw itself on a map of the world if it were thrust into his hands"?is doomed by the 20th century Lomza's narrow boundaries will no longer hold and satisfy the youngest generation the way they did their complacent elders When the children attain maturity, a few years before 1914, they begin to scatter, to loosen and break the family ties They become boldly skeptical of Jewish law, they eat oysters, hope for a socialist revolution They dream of going to America-not out of poverty, like so many immigrant Jews, for the family store had always brought them a prosperous living, but because they belong to the modern world Eliezar's favorite great-grandchild Mendele, who must be the author's father, emigrates to London around 1912 Once Kotlowitz's focus narrows to Mendele and his London years as a young Jewish immigrant struggling to make his way in a bewildering alien metropolis, Somewhere Else becomes less engrossing and seems less confidently written In fact, it turns into a predictable chain of episodes about a young Jewish man stumbling his way into maturity He changes his name to Maurice, sleeps with a shikseh, and guiltily broods, in dark moments, "What was the point of being a Jew if the Jews turned out to be like everyone else'" And that is exactly the point Kotlowitz's central interest is the exploration of his inherited past on its native ground The meaning of his book is rooted m the Polish scenes that are etched with radiant and compassionate lucidity, in the affectionate record of the strength and the mundane grandeur of family feeling that existed in an extinct kind of Jewish life His achieve ment is especially remarkable when one remembers that Kotlowitz was born and raised in the United States Anne Roiphe's new novel, Long Division (Simon & Schuster, 190 pp , $5 95), starts out promisingly with an angry rush of bitter hyperbole-What I'm doing in this car flying down these screaming highways is getting my tail to Juarez so I can legally nd myself of the crummy son-of-a-bitch "but that frenetic opener is the best sentence in the book The rest is a picaresque chaos of mock cynicism, adolescent metaphor, laborious bizarrerie, and, above all, boring self-indulgence After Mrs Roiphe's endearing Up the Sandbox', with its slyly comic dovetailing of housewife's knee and liberated fantasies, Long Division is a tired and shallow letdown Emily Johnson, nee Bnmberg, unexceptional product of the Bronx and Hunter College, tries to make the divorce journey to Mexico an educational tour of America for her surly 10-year-old daughter Sarah Between desperate or silly encounters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and New Mexico, the novel is a nonstop ruminative monologue by Emily on her yearning for love, her philandering artist husband, and her white liberal's guilt and confusion-the routine modern-woman litany about men, women, sex, children, and politics This familiar contemporary kvetching is given a particularly rancid air by Emily's quasi-ironic labeling of herself as "a wandering Jewess " Yet her Jewishness is incidental, a form of bitchy irritation, self-hate as irresponsible rejection Her distaste for her immigrant grandparents is less a matter of moral decision and defiance than a low-keyed whine on the order of complaining about Sunday school and the shape of one's nose Lacking both a real sense of her Jewish past and a human curiosity that goes beyond a tediously muddled resentment, Emily is in truth anti-Semitic as only a certain kind of tough, ambitious, egocentric Bronx Jewish girl can be, and no amount of pseudo-Biblical lamentation on the nasty role assigned to women by the Jews can disguise the fact that she is a self obsessed bore Robert Kotlowitz's family nobly struggles to maintain the Jewish heritage m Somewhere Else, Anne Roiphe's enraged divorcee can merely deface what she cannot be bothered to understand...

...Writers & Writing UNDERSTANDING THE PAST BY PEARL K BELL An American writer of Jewish descent is not necessarily a Jewish writer For every Bernard Mal-amud, in whose best work one can find an identifiably Jewish attitude toward human experience and destiny, there is a Herman Wouk, whose novelseven though he is a practicing Orthodox Jew-have more m common with Margaret Mitchell than with Sholem Alei-chem The irony, self-mockery and tension between the serious and the comic revealed in a Jewish writer like Henry Roth is reduced to parody and vaudeville m Bruce Jay Friedman Nor is the characteristically Jewish feeling and cadence of Saul Bellow's fiction to be found in Philip Roth's, whose Portnoy's Complaint, despite its abundance of Jewish jokes, food and idiom, is really about middle-class American life, not Jews Indeed, it is by now a commonplace that most American writers of Jewish extraction, rather than passionately accepting their unassimilable differentness, demonstrate a guilt-edged unease m their ambivalence and condescension toward their ethnic origins What is surprising is that those who might properly be classified as "Jewish writers" have exhibited little curiosity about the life their East European-born parents or grandparents left behind With all the talk about what it means to be a first- or second-generation American Jew, it is odd that so few of our novelists have made fictional use of this rich vein of experience This paucity of interest in Jewish antecedents seems all the more strange when one remembers that the great Yiddish writers who emigrated to the United States?Sholem Asch and the Singer brothers, among others?wrote huge and vibrant novels about Jewish family life m Russia and Poland after they settled here Such books as The Brothers Ashkenazi, Three Cities, The Family Moskat, and more recently Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor and The Estate are readily available in English translation, they are a fascinating source of information about Jewish Europe So far as I know, however, until now only two novels by American-born writers have seriously described the European life of Russian and Polish Jews before World War I, and in each case the authors were pursuing other ends In Sam Astrachan's An End to Dying, the Russian episodes served mainly as prelude to the American protagonist's rediscovery of his Jewishness, in Mala-mud's The Fixer, the persecution of Yakov Bok is presented as a melodramatically extreme case history in Russian anti-Semitism, not a representative experience That is why Robert Kotlowitz's fine new novel, Somewhere Else (Charter House, 375 pp , $7 95), is unique it is a beautifully authentic recreation, for its own sake, of Jewish life in the small Polish town of Lomza, m the 19th and early-20th centuries Admirably free of sentimentality or the distorting blur of synthetic nostalgia, Kotlowitz's account of one family-his own, surely, though he suggests the connection almost maudibly-is rendered with loving and yet sharp ly attentive verisimilitude The most amazing member of this family, the great-great-grandfather Eliezar, dies in 1899 at the age of 104, burned to death one Friday evening while dozing over his Talmud The patriarch had spent his last feeble years wheezing, grumbling, praying away the days m a small house he shared with his 75-year-old son and daughter-in-law, and Kotlowitz's portrait of the household is superb "They probably all had lived too long They smelled of old...