For some reason, three of the most interesting books I’ve read this season have been about the 20th-century Jewish experience. Each of these treats the central tragedy of the Holocaust in an utterly different way. Julie Orringer’s “The Invisible Bridge” is a lush historical novel that follows a young Hungarian architect through Europe before, during, and after World War II; the book doesn’t skirt any horrors, but it is all about continuity of narrative. “Day for Night,” by Frederick Reiken (which I reviewed last week) takes a wholly different approach, circling a central mystery about a character who may or may not have survived a mass killing through the perspectives of over a dozen other characters.
In “The Frozen Rabbi,” accomplished novelist Steve Stern attacks the quandary of how the Jewish past affects the Jewish present, and while his book is on the surface the least connected to the Holocaust of these three, in its heart it is as conscious of that event as any Eli Wiesel book. The rest of the book deserves attention, but allow me to spend a few moments explaining why Stern’s approach is different and why I believe these books are appearing now.
Stern traces the history of a family we first come to know as the Karps of Memphis. It’s the late 1990s, and young scion Bernie has just discovered something in the basement Kelvinator. Bernie’s find and what happens next take up about half of the novel. Its other half is about how an Old World family survives the traumas inflicted on European Jewry over the last century.
Yet pogroms and kibbutzniks get more time than the Holocaust, which is relegated to the experience of Shprintze, Israeli immigrant and Ruben “Ruby” Karp’s short-lived first wife whose first-born son dies with her. Obviously, there is a lot of symbolism resting on Shprintze’s frail shoulders, and even more on her forearm’s “blue-inked tattoo.” By laying her to rest, is Stern saying that America’s Jews have forgotten something? Or repressed something? Or something else entirely?
It isn’t easy to tell from Stern’s treatment, but if the reader pays attention, she’ll see that this author is less interested in explaining how something so horrible happened than in tying it in to the larger story of where some American Jews come from and where they are today. That’s what I found in these three contemporary novels by Orringer, Reiken, and Stern: They are discovering new ways to write about an unspeakable thing with which they have little direct experience. As the years roll on and fewer and fewer of us have any links to survivors or liberators of the death camps, we have a choice about whether to remember or forget.
“The Frozen Rabbi” urges us to remember not just the tragic parts of Jewish history in the West (pogroms, stereotyping) but also the productive ones, like entrepreneurial spirit and resilience. A large part of that resilience, it would seem from Stern’s vigorously funny novel, is humor. From the moment young Bernie Karp finds 19th-century Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr’s icy sarcophagus in his family’s deep freeze (Bernie is — what else? — searching for a piece of liver with which to abuse himself, inspired by a certain novelist), the book’s action mixes magical realism with historical storytelling with huge, broad, Marx-Bros.-style laffs. At one point, the unfrozen, newly hip Rabbi tells Bernie that the answers he seeks “It’s all in the book…which it’s twenty-four ninety-five retail.”
HA! What self-respecting American Jew would pay retail? But I digress…this is a book which it simply defies description. Stern is by turns solemn, gleeful, wry, sorrowful, and manic, yet it all works. I rarely wanted to put “The Frozen Rabbi” down. Even when one Karp ancestor turns to a life of mob crime and seems utterly unsympathetic, the author has a trick up his sleeve to redeem the moment. However, through all of the hijinks, the author also has a much more meaningful purpose: He shows that Judaism isn’t a mere matter of appearances. The Rabbi himself discards his shtreimel and phylacteries for Hefner-esque lounge garb, but remains a man of words. Characters may be Russian peasants clad in homespun or modern teenagers wearing tee-shirts, but they’re still Jewish.
Somehow, Stern seems to be saying, it doesn’t matter how much we forget. What matters most is what we remember.
