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May 27, 2005/Iyar 18 5765, Volume 57, No. 39
Young Jewish authors release hot new titles
GABRIELLE BIRKNER
Special to Jewish News
It was in the forests of Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century that Leo Gursky, a narrator in Nicole Krauss' impressive new novel, "The History of Love" (W.W. Norton & Company, $23.95 hardcover), learned to make himself invisible. It is in New York City more than 50 years later that Gursky - an octogenarian who even after eluding the Nazis spent most of his life in a state of protracted hiding - begs notice.
Determined not to die on a day when he is seen by nobody, Gursky goes to great lengths to make himself conspicuous: Emptying the contents of his wallet on the floor of the grocery store; spilling milk at the local coffee bar; or offering himself up as a nude model for a drawing class.
When he is not staging such antics, Gursky awaits an unremarkable death in his Lower East Side apartment. "My name is Leo Gursky," reads a card he keeps in his wallet. "I have no family. Please call Pinelawn Cemetery. I have a plot there in the Jewish part. Thank you for your consideration."
But when a copy of his long-lost opus, "The History of Love," penned in Yiddish a lifetime earlier, arrives in the mail, the old man is buoyed with a new resolve to trace his manuscript's labyrinthine journey. Gursky's "The History of Love," attributed to a writer named Zvi Litvinoff, is a collection of stories detailing the imagined origin and evolution of love's language.
Chapters from the obscure volume are copied word-for-word in the journal of 15-year-old Alma Singer, the novel's alternate narrator, named for a character in "The History of Love."
"There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations," according to one of Gursky's tales, which Alma's mother has been commissioned to translate from Spanish to English. "When the world grew bigger, and there wasn't enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented."
For Alma's mother, the assignment is more than a little personal. "The History of Love," incidentally, was the first gift she had received from her late husband, who had bought the Spanish-language volume in a Buenos Aires bookstore.
"The History of Love," Krauss' second novel - her debut tome "Man Walks Into A Room" was published in 2002 - is a booby-trapped mystery, whose intricate plot keeps pages turning. It is also an uncommon work of literary fiction that, despite some too-obvious metaphors and far-fetched scenarios, weaves disparate voices into surprisingly cohesive narrative.
When Alma seeks out her namesake, Gursky's lifelong love Alma Mereminski, the various storylines begin to angle inward until they converge during the book's climatic final scene.
Recent releases from other young scribes:
"Early Bird" by Rodney Rothman
(Simon and Schuster, $23 hardcover)
Rothman, the 20-something former head writer for David Letterman, leaves the big city for a heavily Jewish retirement community in South Florida. With an eye for the absurd, Rothman details the hilariously hectic and complex life of a young "retiree." Canasta, anyone?
"The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies" by David Deutsch and Joshua Neuman
(St. Martins Press, $13.95 paperback)
The new book by the sardonic duo at the helm of Heeb magazine imagines all the most preposterous charges leveled at Jews throughout history are true. Christ-killing? Check. Blood libel? Check. Clandestine quest for world domination? Check. Side-splitting chapters - one purports that Rabbi Chaim Schnitzelnaum, not Osama bin Laden, was behind the 9/11 hijackings - expose the ludicrous logic behind the conspiracy theories that continue to plague the Jewish people.
"The Sex Doctors in the Basement" by Molly Jong-Fast
(Villard, $21.95 hardcover)
The self-proclaimed "diet Jew" and author of "Normal Girl" returns with a collection of light-hearted essays about growing up as the only child of author Erica Jong, the so-called "Queen of Erotica."
"Schlepping through the Alps" by Sam Apple
(Ballantine Books, $23.95 hardcover)
A true story of the unlikely adventure of Apple, a New York writer, and Hans Breuer, an Austrian shepherd and Yiddish folk singer. Apple's comic journey reveals much about Austria, Breuer and himself.
Gabrielle Birkner, a staff writer for the Jewish Week, lives in New York.
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