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New novels provide summer 'escapes'
SYBIL KAPLAN
Special to Jewish News
Two new novels with Jewish themes from well-known writers provide very different sorts of mental excursions for the summer months.
"Inventing Memory" by Erica Jong (HarperChoice, $6.99, paperback), in Jong's inimitable, flambuoyant writing style, is an overpowering novel of Jewish mothers and daughters.
Here we have the generational saga of Sarah Solomon, who comes to the United States from Russia at the age of 17 and becomes an artist for a clothes catalog. She has met Sim Coppley on the ship. He is a non-Jew who is writing a book on "the Hebrews," and he plays an important role in her life.
Solomon later finds more lucrative employment painting portraits of well-to-do women.
The book goes on to cover three more generations of Solomon's female descendants, down to her great-granddaughter. The story of Sarah Solomon begins in the early 1900s, and the last chapter of the book takes place in 2006.
The sex is overflowing, but there also is humor and love and family, with all its pain and bonds, and the special gifts that each generation of women passes down to their daughters. There is a glossary of Yiddish terms in the back to guide the reader.
The book is lively, and it moves quickly, with characters that are full-blown and realistic. This book is not for the timid. The reader feels motivated to delve even deeper into the closets of this fascinating family. Perhaps that is because although the characters are fictitious, readers recognize traits or incidents from their own families.
"The Fifth Son" (Schocken, $13, paperback) is the newest novel from Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and author of more than 30 works of fiction and non-fiction.
In "The Fifth Son," the narrator - son of a Holocaust survivor named Reuven Tamiroff - desperately searches for ways to better understand his brooding father.
"For he has mastered the art of leaving, my father. You speak to him, he seems to listen to you, but suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, you sense his disappearance."
The narrator then meets a friend of his father, who relates to him some of his father's life.
"With him as my guide, I yearn to enter the ghetto and meet its quietly delirious inhabitants. ... I want to live, to relive my father's experience; without that knowledge, without that fragment of memory acquired after the fact, I can never get close to him, I feel that."
The family lives in Brooklyn. The mother is sick in a nursing home. For entertainment, they look out the window. Friday evening they go to the synagogue next door. Eventually, the son discovers part of the problem is that his father believes he played a role in the murder of an SS officer. The son sets out to rediscover his father's past in Germany.
This is a haunting work filled with suffering and profound feelings. To those who regularly enjoy Wiesel's work, this book goes on the "must read" list. For those unfamiliar with it, this could be a gripping entrance into his special collection of Holocaust-related literature.
Sybil Kaplan is a writer, lecturer, teacher and synagogue librarian in Overland Park, Kan.
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