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June 28, 2002/Tamuz 18 5762, Vol. 54, No. 41
Time to heat up your reading
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Summer reading is often beach or airplane reading - breezy novels or action-packed adventure stories. But for the more ambitious reader, the slower pace of the summer months often means time to tackle that stack of books you've been wanting to read and just not had the time for. Depending on personal taste, that pile might include literary classics, historical or political analyses, arts or cultural commentaries or contemporary fiction and poetry. The sky's the limit when it comes to summertime reading - what's important is choosing whatever suits your interest or inclination. Following are three suggestions to consider.
Michel Quint's "In Our Strange Gardens" (Riverhead Books, $12.95 paperback) is a little gem of book, tiny enough to tuck into a carry-on and short enough to finish on a flight from Phoenix to San Diego. Translated from the French by Barbara Bray, the book was reviewed widely when it came out earlier this year. Picking it up one hot afternoon, I understood why. Sparely written in first person, it manages, with few words and little historical detail, to recreate for the reader France in 1940 under the Vichy Regime. The story turns on an act of resistance by Quint's father, Andre, and his cousin, the author's Uncle Gaston, and their subsequent escape from death at the hands of German soldiers. The recounting of the ironic twist of fate which assures their salvation, gives Quint new insights into their lives and newfound respect for his father, a teacher and sometime clown, and his uncle, a ne'er do well.
Who else but Chaim Potok could deliver a trio of novellas light enough for summer reading but hefty enough to satisfy the appetite of the more serious reader? "Old Men at Midnight" (Alfred A. Knopf, $23, hard cover), Potok's ninth book, is actually a series of three linked novellas, all of which examine the horrors of war. The link is a woman, Ilana Davita Dinn, who becomes the conduit for the stories. In "The Ark Builder," Dinn is an English tutor to a young boy who is the lone Holocaust survivor from his town in Poland. In "The War Doctor," she is a graduate student who encourages a visiting lecturer to write about his experiences under Stalin. In "The Trope Teacher" she is a writer who encourages a distinguished professor of military history to write his memoirs.
Potok, author of such well-known novels as "The Chosen," an ordained rabbi as well as writer and editor, crafts a book that is both eminently readable and engaging. With a few deft words and carefully parsed sentences, Dinn comes alive. In "The Ark Builder," Potok captures the pain of her student, Noah Polit, the 16-year-old boy from Europe who needs a Yiddish tutor and recounts how Dinn is able to reach him. "You have pictures, I have nothing," Noah says to Dinn the first time he comes to her house for the tutoring sessions. "No remember, Papa's and Mama's faces. No remember. Yoel, I remember. Reb Binyomin, I remember. With animals and birds and flowers. Not Papa and Mama. Not all uncles and aunts and cousins." Dinn discovers that Noah has a gift for drawing, after Noah accedes to a request by her little sister to draw a picture of his house for her. Little by little, the boy begins to open up and his story unfolds. He tells Dinn how he and his brother Yoel helped Reb Binyomin decorate the town shul with carvings and painted images. They were, he says, like Bezazel in the Bible, ark builders. And then he tells her of the first day that they used the new ark, of how they "prayed in a new dimension of color, space and time;" of how the sound of the shofar was ultimately drowned out.
"On the second day of Rosh Hashana, in the middle of the morning service, the German army arrived."
Potok's chilling images counter the summer's heat with equal intensity.
Another genre, a family epic set in New York's Brighton Beach in the 1950s, may just hit the spot on a lazy afternoon. Carole L. Glickfel's first novel, "Swimming Toward the Ocean" (Anchor Books, $14 paperback) is the story of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Chenia and Ruben Arnow, and their family, told through the eyes of their daughter, Devorah. Glickfeld has an eye for quotidian detail, capturing the minutiae of everyday life with uncanny skill. "I imagine my mother straightening the decks of cards, then lining up the Parcheesi game with the Chinese checkers board before she takes my sister's jump rope off the closet shelf. She doesn't lock the apartment door when she leaves. In her backless slippers, she walks up two flights, clopping with each step."
But allowing Devorah to begin telling the story of her philandering father, with his penchant for creating phony lawsuits, and her mother, who discovers passions of her own, from the womb was just too much artifice for this reader. Still, Glickfeld is able to imbue the trials and tribulations of one immigrant family with universal emotion, proving once again that the measure of a good book is often its power to take us someplace else and than transcend time and place with its all-too-human story.
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