The Malamud Factor: Recent Jewish Short Fiction. - Review - book review

Judaism, Wntr, 2000 by D. Mesher

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. By NATHAN ENGLANDER. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Foreign Brides. By ELENA LAPPIN. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories. By SAVYON LIEBRECHT. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

The Wedding Jester. By STEVE STERN. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998.

Like Never Before. By EHUD HAVAZELET. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

The short story has been in decline for decades, despite the fact that more short fiction is published now than ever before, because publishing has grown in small college or art quarterlies, while the commercial market for short stories in magazines and newspapers has rapidly dwindled. Similarly, the book-buying public has long shown a huge preference for novels over stories and, for that reason, publishing houses have often been reluctant to bring out story collections. This is of particular concern for writers and readers of Jewish fiction, in which the shorter forms have traditionally held a revered place, traceable back perhaps as far as Talmudic agadot and even the Bible itself, but directly rooted in classic Yiddish literature of the nineteenth century, and such practitioners as Shai Agnon, Bashevis Singer, and Bernard Malamud in the twentieth. This is all the more reason to celebrate the recent spate of outstanding Jewish short story collections by a group of writers whose diversity, as well as their a bility, seems to guarantee the continued importance of the genre. Indeed, the varying demands of continuity and innovation may be measured in many of these collections by what might be termed the "Malamud factor"--the interweaving of traditional and modern elements as characters struggle towards a new life while carrying the emotional baggage of the old.

After the appearance of only his first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander already seems the heir apparent to Malamud's "silver crown" as king of the American Jewish story. In nine wonderful tales, Englander (a New Yorker now living in Jerusalem) shows an impressive command of both art and artifice, telling tales on subjects as varied as the Holocaust in Chelm, a Stalinist purge of Jewish writers, and the lives of haredim and Americans in contemporary Israel. Most of the stories, however, play off a familiar American setting against Englander's always ironic take on what it means to be Jewish: insanity in a suburban congregation, a Royal Hills wig-maker who dons one of her own creations and becomes a changed woman, the gentile in a Manhattan taxi who is suddenly aware that he is "the bearer of a jewish soul," the portly hasid who works as a department store Santa at Christmas, and the complicated affairs of a "Royal Hills agunah," whose husband refuses to give her a get. Each is t old with a Malamudian combination of wry humor and real compassion, seducing the reader into sharing Englander's affectionate view of characters caught in bizarre--but meaningful--dilemmas.

Consider Dov Binyamin, the Jerusalem hasid of the title story, whose wife denies him sex, and whose rebbe grants him a "special dispensation" to visit a prostitute "for the relief of unbearable urges" (181-2). Dov Binyamin drives to Tel Aviv, "the city of sin" (182), and cruises bus stops in Ramat Gan where prostitutes ply their trade. But he feels too embarrassed or guilty to pick one up, until an American woman, who speaks "beautiful Hebrew, sweet and strong as her step" (185), jumps into his car without asking. The multiple stereotypes--and barriers--involved here (observant and secular, hasid and prostitute, Israeli and American) are standard features of Englander's art, but even more characteristic are the multiple levels on which he brings the story to a resolution. For after his night with Devorah, the American prostitute, Dov Binyamin begins to avoid his wife, Chava Bayla. She, mistaking his sense of guilt for indifference, begins to treat him better: talking to him and touching him with affection, s erving his favorite foods. And when Dov Binyamin still fails to respond, Chava Bayla becomes sexually suggestive, and then aggressive. Indeed, she becomes the woman he has always wanted, making him wonder "if he had ever known the true nature of his wife at all" (190). As a modem-day black-hatted Tantalus, however, Dov Binyamin is in no position to enjoy the changes in his wife. That night with Devorah has given him more than just relief from his urges: "When he began to urinate, the burning worsened. [ldots] For Dov Binyamin was on fire inside." Yet, as the story ends, he, like Moses's burning bush, "would not be consumed" (190-1).

That ending is mild, focusing on the verbal possibilities of "consumption" and "consummation," instead of the literal probability of venereal disease, which is first suggested two pages earlier. This, too, is characteristic of Englander's style: in postmodern rebellion against the traditional O. Henry-prescribed "surprise ending" of most short stories, Englander's fictions end not with a bang but a sly whisper. Often, the endings seem completely fiat, as if the author is challenging the reader not to prefer the familiar irony and ambiguity that mark closure in conventional short fiction. "The Twenty-seventh Man," for example, in which a reclusive reader is added to Stalin's list of twenty-six Jewish writers to be arrested and executed, ends simply with Bretzky, one of the writers, "shot five or six times, but being such a big man and such a strong man, he lived long enough to recognize the crack of the guns and know he was dead" (23). The non-ending of "The Tumblers" is another case in point. In that story, the Mahmir hasidim, a small group of minimalists from Chelm, escape transportation to Auschwitz by boarding a circus train and trying to pass themselves off as acrobats. They are saved, when performing before high Nazi officials including, perhaps, Hitler himself, by their total ineptitude, from costuming to performance. Mistaking the real thing for clever parody, the Nazi audience applauds the "Jewish ballet" of the Mahmirim, who expect to be shot at any moment. But, for them, "there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out of the ghettos; no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks in boxcar floors; no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach outfrom chimneys into ash-clouded skies" (55). What happens to the Mahmirim? Englander supplies no ending, because his characters, though fondly drawn, are only fictions. Let us meditate instead, he seems to suggest, on the horrors of reality.