Alan Isler's Images
TUTTLETON, JAMES W.
Books Alan Isler's Images By James W. Tuttleton In 1994, Alan Isler published The Prince of West End Avenue, a hilarious first novel about a zany production of Hamlet in the "Emma Lazarus," an...
...And now, at 83, he finds himself retired to the "Enema Lazarus," as the dyspeptic residents call it, planning a performance of Hamlet...
...Berkowitz (n?e Naomi), a would-be poetess whose most articulate utterance is "Oh, wow...
...We are given glimpses of his nonstop sexual fantasies about one or another undergraduate coed, like the voluptuous Nimu...
...They link together the European political past and Korner's present "institutionalized" state...
...Someone steals Otto's prized possession-a framed letter of praise from fellow poet Rilke...
...What was rotten in the state of Denmark-the mixture of politics, love, and murder that paralyzes Hamlet in the Shakespearean play-merges with what was rotten in the state of pre-Hitlerian Germany, when even Jews believed in Kaiser, Vaterland, und Kameradschaft...
...I missed in Kraven Images the bittersweet blend of pathos and farce he achieved in The Prince of West End Avenue...
...Otto is a believer in Principle, Purpose, and Intention-in a divinity that shapes our ends...
...Still, Isler means us to understand Kraven as a survivor who has come through the wreckage of his life and intends to start again...
...Kraven's own seduction, as well as that of Stella's husband, by the repulsive old Professor Diotima von Hoden, who has devised a cunning, foolproof aphrodisiac out of three rare mushrooms, is wildly funny, the stuff of Chaucerian fabliaux...
...Set in 1974, Kraven Images puts the title character face to face with a nutty assemblage of flower children, SDS types, the utterly bored, and wild-eyed madmen-"the sons and daughters of anti-intellectualism in its revolutionary ascendancy...
...the self that Korner is and the self he was (or wants to remember having been...
...Settling in America after the war, he worked for many years at the public library seeking an answer to the survivor's unanswerable question, "Why me...
...English by birth but a longtime New Yorker and sometime professor of English at Queens College, Isler has now returned to England...
...In the confusion brought on by this death, the wily old Nahum Lipschitz has seized power and appointed himself director of the play...
...And quite mysteriously, Lipschitz falls or is pushed and breaks his hip, taking him out of the production...
...Called the Red Dwarf because of his size and politics, Poliakov wants "The People" to vote on every aspect of the play production...
...James W. Tuttleton teaches American literature at New York University...
...Hamlet is somehow the key to Otto Korner's life...
...Isler's preoccupation with the boy's youth, the fate of Jews in World War II, and the Kraven ghosts he must exorcise in England dominates the ending of the novel and suffuses it with an excess of sentiment...
...In affectionately recounting the story of these eccentric seniors, Alan Isler discloses a breathtaking knowledge of American "Yinglish," West Side delicatessen culture, cockamamie Jewish prejudices, and the universal vanity of human wishes...
...Comyns and an empty-headed masseuse with a Ph.Th.D...
...Since some readers may not yet have seen The Prince of West End Avenue (now available in a Penguin paperback, $9.95), a few words about it may make Kraven Images a bit clearer...
...and life as it is lived and its representation in art...
...But, with the rise of fascism, his family in Berlin was murdered, and Korner was thrown into a concentration camp...
...Like Hamlet blind to the evil of the king, the young aesthete Otto-in love with the faithless Magda Damrosch and beguiled by the inane nihilism of the Dadaists-cannot believe in the reality of the rising political evil that will leave her dead, his family exterminated, and his world in ruins...
...He begins to get poison-pen letters, in the form of egregious verse, from the unknown thief...
...Isler's second novel, Kraven Images (Bridge Works, 264 pages, $21.95), has a comparable antic disposition, a tendency to the broadest farce, and yet a felt seriousness arising from what is lost to all of us in the devouring maw of time...
...In this he is much like the protagonist of his new novel, Kraven Images-a British-born English professor at Moshulu College in the Bronx who returns to England as a middle-aged man...
...Given the absurdity of all this, Kraven has "transformed his career into theater, a private entertainment in which he starred, and thus he coped with his uncertain times...
...Lazar Poliakov, a millionaire old-time Bolshevik, is the gravedigger's assistant and sworn enemy of Lipschitz, an old-time Zionist...
...In the hilarious rehearsals for Hamlet in the Emma Lazarus, the deadly conflicts of European history and the tragic implication of Shakespearean art are transposed into utter farce...
...The temperamental Tosca Dawidowicz, a seventy-something Ophelia in pink plastic curlers, refuses to act opposite doddering Freddy Blum because "his halitosis could make her forget her lines...
...Isler's portraits of Zinka Bleistift, "the department's most militant pacifist," and Kraven's chairman, the ursine Aristotle Papadakis, familiarly called "Papa Doc," are richly satirical in the best college-novel tradition...
...Physical Therapy Director...
...In the course of the rehearsals in The Prince of West End Avenue, mysterious things happen...
...Books Alan Isler's Images By James W. Tuttleton In 1994, Alan Isler published The Prince of West End Avenue, a hilarious first novel about a zany production of Hamlet in the "Emma Lazarus," an Upper West Side Jewish retirement home...
...The "prince" of the title is Otto Korner, an elderly and distinguished minor poet from Berlin who had known Rilke and been involved with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara during the World War I years...
...And his dismissal of Accident and Coincidence as the rankest philosophical heresy opens the door to some of Isler's most interesting moral reflections...
...It also won the National Jewish Book Award for that year, an auspicious accomplishment for a debut novelist...
...The Prince of West End Avenue sets up-quite unobtrusively but very skillfully-three sometimes serious, sometimes farcical, but always related parallels through Korner's flashbacks and recollections...
...The fictional return to England is charged with nostalgia-an emotion difficult to make other people understand...
...The book ends with Kraven broke, abandoned by Stella and without a career, a home, or a life...
...Hugo Weisskopf (wryly called the Kommandant) and his several assistants, including the oversexed Dr...
...Something is rotten in the retirement home too: The amateur production is in disarray because its director, Adolphe Sinsheimer, has unexpectedly gone to his reward in a Long Island cemetery, where all the other residents of the Emma Lazarus will eventually meet the gravedigger...
...A new employee from Cleveland, Mandy Dattner, is an exact double for the beloved Magda Damrosch Otto lost in the Holocaust...
...We watch as he seduces his beautiful upstairs neighbor, Stella Poore-Moody, whose husband absconds to London with a burlesque stripper named Dolly Divine and her sisters Sugar Plum and Candy Peaches...
...Presiding over the Emma Lazarus is the authoritarian Dr...
...Otto, slated to be the ghost, is finally voted in as director and title character so as to restore sanity to the hilariously disordered production of Hamlet...
...Kraven takes up the search for Stella's decamped husband, which leads him back to the village in rural England where, as a boy, he and his Viennese relatives had lived out World War II-until a stray German bomb killed virtually all of them...
...The faculty at Moshulu are hardly better...
...The evanescence of youth, the transience of joy, the brevity of what's left-all these make Isler's characters long for "quality time," in that vulgar modern locution, for rich experience filled to the brim...
...All is not fun and games in Kraven Images, however, for the professor's personal and professional lives collapse when a coed accuses him of sexual harassment, her radical boyfriend completely trashes Kraven's apartment, and Chairman Papa Doc discovers that Kraven's academic credentials are bogus and terminates his academic career...
...He ousts elderly satyr Freddy Blum and claims the role of Hamlet for himself...
...So engaging were Isler's ambulatory octogenarians and so nutty were their theatrical schemings that the book, published by a small firm in Bridgehampton, N.Y., was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award...
...He is sitting in a hotel room-rather like Saul Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day-weeping at the fragility of the human condition and the pity of his (once again) shattered life...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 38
