A Sure and Sly Virtuoso

...Still, I eat what I want to eat, although before Queenie never pork, never shellfish, never deliberately a mixing of milk and meat...

...But Isler is so skillful, and so full of genuine good humor, that you don't ever feel hectored or teased...

...The narrative is vigorous and occasionally profane, the persecutors are drawn in outsized caricature...

...There is nothing overtly didactic here...

...Though some are amusing, this is the only point where Isler's antic side threatens to throw his collection off balance...

...Both pieces are loaded with colorful background types...

...Happily, life is not literature...

...Isler has a rare talent for being simultaneously erudite and obscene, professorial and giddy...

...But Sorge is drawn with sufficient emotional and psychological heft to interest the reader...

...No, better: a damsel with adulcimer...

...Reading the four in succession is like watching an accomplished singer run easily through a set of tricky scherzos...

...The former is more actively suspenseful, the latter more broadly comic than the stories that precede them...

...The characters' repeated defeats and humiliations over time hint at complex connections between the history being retold and the esthetic under examination...

...His stories are learned, yes, and classically formed, yet despite their erudition and technical virtuosity, they seek to engage rather than dazzle the reader...

...Bruno Sorge of "The Affair" seems the character most at peace with his failures and limitations...

...Isler's personal story is inspiriting...

...But these are not grave meditations on the nature and sorrow of life in the Diaspora...

...Much of "The Affair" is taken up with the script of Dreyfus: The Musical, mostly a pastiche of songs to be sung to the melodies of old show tunes...

...The Monster" has at its heart a wonderful conceit: a Shylock who speaks not in Shakespearean iambs but in the meandering rhythms of a classic Jewish tale...

...A dulcimer for a damsel," says the Coleridge figure...

...The musical is such a hit that its overture is played on every El Al flight...

...If the short stories lack the heartbreak of The Prince of West End Avenue, they mark a welcome rise in the grace and authority of Alan Isler's narrative voice...

...David Gladstone of "The Crossing" is younger than the heroes of the other three tales, and it is his lot to discover the sad sense of resignation that already suffuses their lives...

...and since Queenie, well, as I have said, I found it prudent not to inquire...

...But this mood is never so pronounced that it clashes with more wildly antic moments...

...The last starts with Bruno Sorge lying on his lover's bed after he has "unzipped his trousers in anticipation of the lower-intestinal flatulence a simple luncheon of sliced onion on thickly buttered, seeded rye nowadays caused him...

...Isler creates a sweet, nuanced voice for this narrator, which even in descriptive passages conveys some sadness: "Candles are alight on my table of a Friday night, and of a Saturday I do not work...

...Each of the stories is told in a voice and tone appropriate to its setting, be it the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th century...

...Now a little Mel Brooks enters into the mix...

...For all of its breezy clarity, artifice and wit, though, this bouquet of literary styles should not be underestimated...

...In "The Crossing," a wandering Jew encounters Oscar Wilde and feeds him lines that will find their way into The Importance of Being Earnest...

...The story is a set of interwoven anecdotes— ugly moments of harassment and persecution—framed by the recounting of the birth and death of Mostrino...

...The Bacon Fancier" does not simply refer to the meat...

...who goes on to press Shylock into a colloquy on religion—"an Interview with a Jew being the sine qua non of the Grand Tour that had pretensions to character...

...In less sure hands, the sly and sometimes silly allusions could spell trouble— could make this an E. D. Hirsch-style cultural knowledge quiz, or worse, a literary version of Forrest Gump...

...Without ever making any grand claims, the stories trace the awkward, half-successful emergence of Jews from the ghetto into the larger world—their struggle to find a place in gentile-dominated society and the limits they eventually confronted...

...Indeed, the book demonstrates that the melancholy comedy so typical of Jewish literature is the fruit of hundreds of years of human suffering...

...Christians have been terrorizing him since he was a child, bamboozling him, humiliating him, kidnapping his brother, stealing away his daughter, trying to badger him into converting to their faith...

...The narrator of the title story is traveling from Porlock to Bristol, a dulcimer in hand, when he enters a farmhouse and interrupts the work of a longhaired poet...

...The first begins: "At one time a monster, a prodigy, was born in the Ghetto—well, not born here perhaps—we can't be sure —but discovered here certainly...

...That has melody...

...The protagonist of the final tale, "The Affair," ends up playing in Dreyfus: The Musical—where the refrain of a love duet has a chorus girl and the Lieutenant singing, respectively: "If you were the only Jew in the world"/ "And you were the only gov...

...Isler's second novel, Kraven Images (1996), about a British professor at a second-rate college in the Bronx, was by comparison disappointing...

...In 1994 at age 60, after teaching English Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York for 25 years, he published The Prince of West End Avenue, a remarkable freewheeling tragicomic novel that manages to be a meditation on art and mortality...

...Gallant Jack Barth, for example, is an incompetent soldier turned Civil War celebrity hero because of an inebriated, accidental and catastrophic charge into a Confederate ambush...

...His was the sort of success he would never allow his characters...

...But what this Shylock really wants to talk about is "the curse that has been my lot throughout a long life...

...With The Bacon Fancier he returns to form...

...Elvira Königsberger, to cite another example, is an aging diva who observes: "When I started out, you couldn't get anywhere in opera, not here in America, with a name like Elsie King...

...Aye, bona-robas," says Tom Caryote, an English tourist looking for a whorehouse (or, as he elaborates, "Strumpets, stales, harlots...

...The writer whizzes through history, and while he does so dons and doffs literary styles with breathtaking ease...

...it is an allusion as well to Sir Francis and a bawdy wink (there is a memorable aside about a man having sex with apig...

...cock benders, pistol grippers, pen wipers, cod swallowers, daughters of the game...

...Reviewed by Gabriel Brownstein English Department, Barnard College Allen Isler's collection follows the lives of four Jewish men in four different centuries and countries...

...Were he one of his own creations, he would hole his precious fictions away in his desk until one day, in some sad, ridiculous, ironic episode, all his ambitions and vanities would lead him to a mortifying and undeserved disaster...

...Ben Cardozo, a master violin maker who likes both to eat bacon and to quote Sir Francis, recounts his love affair with his servant girl, Queenie, and his search for a wife...

...His interest is not in discussing "my landmark trial...

...Reviews of the author's two novels, The Prince of West End Avenue and Kraven Images, have compared him (maybe a bit hyperbohcally) with Bellow, I. B. Singer and Nabokov...

...Century after century Isler's characters discover, figuratively, their own personal ghettos...

...Cardozo's story is a study of isolation and assimilation—of a lone Jew, apart from his community, living in a strange land and growing away from his own traditions...

...He is telling us about Mostrino, "Defender of the Jews," a giant, docile half-wit originally found (like Moses) in a basket, born lacking a foreskin (he "dropped into this world without a penile sheath"), and with only three fingers on one hand that resembles the Hebrew letter shin...

...In the opening piece, "The Monster," a Renaissance Venetian moneylender describes his troubled life, and during one straight-faced digression evokes The Merchant of Venice with himself cast as Shylock...

...The Bacon Fancier attacks difficult and complex issues—exile, assimilation, antiSemitism, ghettoization—with charm and flair and a manic comic edge...

...The Crossing" and "The Affair" are told in the third person...