Tag Archives: 1930s

Love and Guilt: Modern Girls

12 Thursday May 2016

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Review: Modern Girls, by Jennifer S. Brown
Penguin, 2016. 363 p. $15

There’s an old joke about how a wedding differs in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish sects, which turns on who’s pregnant–the bride, the bride’s mother, or the rabbi. In the Orthodox case, it’s the bride and her mother.

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

In Brown’s terrific debut novel, however, which depicts Orthodox life on New York’s Lower East Side in 1935, it’s no joke. Both Rose Krasinsky and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Dottie, are pregnant, and neither planned it nor wish it. Rose has four surviving children, having lost one to polio and others in miscarriages, Dottie being her eldest. Rose has spent her life caring for them and her husband, Ben–worn herself out, in fact, to the point that she hoped she’d changed her last diaper. More importantly, she wants, above all, to have the time to devote herself to causes she believes in, such as helping European Jews escape Hitler’s menace. Her brother’s one of them.

Meanwhile, Dottie dreams of escaping the Lower East Side and the shtetl mentality to which Rose was born. She has a good job at an uptown insurance firm and has just been promoted to head bookkeeper. She has a fiancé, Abe, a solid, stolid type. Trouble is, Dottie’s baby isn’t his–and he’s in no hurry to get married, even resists her attempts at seduction, on religious grounds. Sooner or later, though, he has to find out, and so does her mother.

From this intriguing premise, Brown derives a morality tale, a mother-daughter story, a romance that’s satisfyingly hard-edged, a cultural exploration for a young woman divided between two worlds, and a feminist argument that makes its point without a soapbox. It’s unusual to find a first novel with such breadth, especially one that doesn’t compromise reality to ease the pain.

I know something of the world Brown describes, because my paternal grandparents, like Rose, worked in a so-called needle trade (though their profession was making hats, not lace trimmings). The Krasinskys are Socialists, as my grandfather was; I remember seeing Karl Marx in Yiddish on his bookshelf, though I was too young to know what that meant. So the inflections, idioms, and ways of thought feel familiar, and Brown sets her scene well in Dottie’s narration:

The smells of home–the ever-present reek of liver, of schmaltz, of carp boiling on the stove–caused an uproar in my stomach, immediately deflating my mood, reminding me of my misfortunes. Always the smells permeated, overwhelming even the sweet scent of baking challah and roasting tzimmes. Ma never escaped them, but I went to great extremes before leaving the apartment to douse myself in the cheap toilet water I bought at Ohrbach’s so as not to bring the stink of the East Side into my Midtown office.

(Translations: Schmaltz, when not referring to intensely Romantic music or melodrama, is rendered chicken fat, the secret to tzimmes, carrots stewed with fruit. There are less arterially threatening ways of cooking this dish, but Rose wouldn’t have known them, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have changed her recipe. The phrase, Why are you making such a tzimmes?, meaning, “such a big deal,” derives from the length of time it takes to turn the carrots practically molten.)

The novel vividly captures the fear of arousing scandal (and how neighbors tune their ears to it), the casual anti-Semitism of Dottie’s coworkers, the ways in which men assume their superiority over women, how only their ideas or desires count. Despite these riches, however, I hear false notes. If Abe keeps Dottie at arm’s length for religious reasons, why is he willing to go to the theater on Friday night after the Shabbat candles have been lit? More importantly, though the author draws Rose as a full portrait, I think she’s too modern and flexible about certain matters. If you read Modern Girls–and I recommend that you do–you’ll know what I mean, even if you disagree with me. And in a rare foray into schmaltz, Brown’s depictions of a wealthy, assimilated Jewish couple seem over the top, straw villains unworthy of this novel.

But still, Modern Girls is a fine accomplishment.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Self-Flagellation As an Art Form: The Photographer’s Wife

15 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: The Photographer’s Wife, by Suzanne Joinson
Bloomsbury, 2016. 334 pp. $26

Eleven-year-old Prudence Ashton has been dragged by her self-absorbed father, Charles, to Jerusalem in 1920, with no thought to her happiness, formal education, safety, amusement, or social isolation. (Prue’s mother is somewhere back in England, perhaps institutionalized; Prue fondly remembers her storytelling, though also her brutalities.) But to Ashton, Prue’s a nuisance, an encumbrance. The only thing that matters is his lunatic scheme to remake the ancient city along British lines, blowing up whatever’s in the way, to create parks, green spaces–desert? What desert?–and orderly neighborhoods. His colonial nightmare might be funny, if people weren’t dying because they oppose the regime that dreamed it up.

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Meanwhile, Prue roams the city almost at will, lonely but fascinated. Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, colors, smells, and myriad faces draw her in, and she understands the city better than any of the English trying to bulldoze it. Prue’s only companions are Ihsan, a kindly man who tutors her in Arabic (for which she has a knack), and Eleonora, a beautiful, severely depressed Englishwoman. Like Ihsan, Eleonora’s husband is an Arab nationalist, which pulls Prue into witnessing and unwittingly participating in underground political activity, for which people are being butchered like cattle.

A pilot shows up to work for Ashton, but his real motive is to pry Eleonora away from her “mixed-race” marriage, which to him is “wrong.” Like the other Englishmen in this novel, he’s completely out of touch, expecting Eleonora to agree and takes it hard when she doesn’t. On the other hand, her husband stays away from her for weeks at a time, photographing British brutalities. He wants a child, but she’s too scared to have one; her mother died giving birth to her.

If you’re thinking these people are a dreary, listless bunch, you’re right, and then some. What kept me going were Joinson’s terrific prose and her enviable gift for creating character. For instance, here’s the pilot, recalling his school days:

Willie had experienced a series of vivid fantasies in which a man, for some reason Italian, would magically arrive at helpful moments and offer to be his intermediario. This middle-man, a fixer or wizard, would plant himself between Willie and the rest of the world and sort everything out. He charmed the loathsome housemaster, tricked bullies, coaxed his father back from his ships, and then, when his father’s presence was altogether too much, cast him away again for four years and a day.

But, like Willie, I find nothing to hold onto in the world of this novel, much of which takes place in England in 1937, when Prue has her own child to ignore.

I sometimes believe that we are designed to betray the people we love, just as sometimes we hand everything over, like a bright unclipped purse, or a secret part of our body, to a stranger

I disagree with Prue. I don’t think her life illustrates betrayal. Rather, I see criminal neglect, sadism, manipulation, and craven silence, perpetrated by monsters with whom I can’t identify. As the chief victim, Prue’s a born masochist, which gets very tiresome–Say something, damn it–but of course, she doesn’t. Masochists don’t. But after a while, when all she gets is more and more punishment, to which her silences grow longer and longer, I want to scream. Philandering, abusive husband, jealous of her artistic success as a sculptor? Sure; why not? Government agents pursuing her for reasons they refuse to divulge, in ways that seem flagrantly illegal? Oh, all right.

The Photographer’s Wife claims to be about politics, but I’m not sure what the message is. Part of my confusion comes from the narrative style, which chops the story into irritatingly unfinished bits set in different decades, so that it’s hard to get a coherent picture. Maybe Joinson adopted the mixed-up order to keep a secret, but if so, it’s a gimmick that doesn’t work. The secret seems decidedly weak and anticlimactic, yet the narrative uses it to take an unearned about-face. Even odder is that this turnabout has to do with German persecution of Jews in the late 1930s, when the novel fails to mention its Arab counterpart in 1920. But maybe the real problem politically is with Prue, who’s a total airhead about anything except art. Just as in 1920, she understood nothing of the dangerous currents wracking Palestine, in 1937, she neither knows nor cares what’s happening to the world–except she’s no longer a child, and so has no excuse.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Famous Life in the South Pacific: Euphoria

28 Monday Sep 2015

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Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Review: Euphoria, by Lily King
Grove/Atlantic, 2014. 257 pp. $25

Suppose that three anthropologists, a husband-and-wife team and another man, cross paths in New Guinea in 1931. The husband, a magnetic, vicious boor, is jealous of his wife’s fame and has myriad ways of expressing it. His animosity grows sharper as he senses the other man attracting her with two qualities he sorely lacks, simple kindness and the ability to play with ideas. But they’re scientists, so their love triangle seethes with conflicting views about human nature, reflecting what they observe about the indigenous peoples they’re studying and how they themselves behave, so that scientific theory becomes practice. And throughout this chillingly tense, enthralling novel, it’s fair to ask what civilization means and whether Westerners have a monopoly on it the way we tell ourselves we do.

King has closely based Nell Stone, the woman of the triangle, on Margaret Mead, and the men, on two of her husbands. But don’t think for a second that their actual history predicts King’s narrative or the themes involved. Yes, she portrays Mead’s exploration of tribal sexual mores and the lives of children, findings controversial then and now, which have, incidentally, influenced American theories of child-rearing. (It was no coincidence that she chose Benjamin Spock to be her daughter’s pediatrician.) But scientific history aside, it’s the relationship between Nell and her husband, Schuyler Fenwick (known as Fen), and how Andrew Bankson comes between them, that give Euphoria its remarkable breadth.

Take, for instance, the differences between Nell and Fen:

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. . . . It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory–he had wooed her with these qualities day and night for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille–but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure. His interest lay in experiencing, in doing.

For her part, what drives Nell to suffer the hardships of field work is to gather stories about other people and return home to tell them. She hopes to find a loving audience, much as she had wished her parents would pay attention to her when she was little. More important, though, she believes “that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.”

The struggle between them, with Bankson as mediator, sounding board, and, eventually, equal participant and catalyst, plays out in so many facets of life that Euphoria held me spellbound, in awe of King’s breadth of vision. To name only a few themes, the narrative reveals the anthropologists’ conflict while hashing out the nature of science, culture, feminism, violence, sex, power, exploitation, greed, selfishness, and what it means to understand someone else.

And to give you just a hint about the depth of this story, euphoria refers to how gratifying that understanding feels. But, like all euphoria, it’s brief, whether as friend, lover, or scientist. As Nell tells her journal, she loves the start of any new field posting, when she must rely on visual, nonverbal cues to communicate, to which she must pay close attention, or she’ll miss the meaning. Once she gets past that point, though, it’s less exciting and possibly misleading, for in her focus on verbal conversation, what’s really happening may slide by, unnoticed. Words, she remarks, are so often unreliable.

The field work provides a vivid, ever-changing background, in which there’s no such thing as a casual interaction. That’s another of this novel’s pleasures, the window on how anthropologists go about gathering information (or did in the 1930s). As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always liked good cross-cultural stories. Euphoria is that, and a lot more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Different Southern Belle: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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Review: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton DiSclafani
Riverhead, 2013. 390 pp. $30

Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has it made. Her family, which consists of her parents, her twin brother, Sam, and herself, live in a manorial home on a thousand acres in Florida. She has her own pony and is an expert rider, a cool daredevil on horseback. It’s the early 1930s, but the Depression hasn’t touched her; a citrus farm supplements her father’s income as the local physician, the only doctor for miles around.

However, as the story opens, Thea has been banished, with no explanation or negotiation, to a girls’ riding camp in western North Carolina. Something has happened for which she takes the blame, though part of her objects, even as she struggles with her shame. Nevertheless, she believes her punishment to be temporary, for the summer only, yet you sense that she’s kidding herself. There’s a reason two hundred girls have gathered here, and it’s not just to improve their equestrienne skills or learn to become ladies in the Southern style, perfect in posture, manners, and elocution.

That reason, however, is a secret, which DiSclafani skillfully keeps, drawing out the tension. The careful reader may guess, as with much else that happens, but if so, that doesn’t matter. Thea’s story, a coming-of-age with a sharp edge, is well worth following, and she learns some very hard lessons at a young age. The rawness may put some readers off, but the author has much to say worth hearing about sex, gender, families, and the stifling nature of white Southern gentility, though many attitudes she explores are of course not peculiar to the South.

Perhaps to heighten Thea’s sense of dislocation, as if her shameful exile to a different state weren’t enough, DiSclafani has made her a hothouse flower. She has never attended school beyond her father’s lessons and never socialized with anyone her own age except Sam and their cousin, Georgie. Consequently, Thea has no clue how to act when suddenly thrust among hundreds of strangers, and every glance, every gesture, carries the potential for acceptance or ostracism.

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1932 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1936 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

I found this hard to swallow, both as a premise and in the writing. Some emotional transitions feel overwrought, especially when Thea flip-flops from, say, hope to misery within a single sentence, all of it told, none of it earned. That bothered me but was less pervasive than the trouble with her family life, which seems hermetically sealed beyond belief. Has she really never seen anyplace except the homestead? The Great Depression ravaged the South more than any other region of the United States, yet Thea has no sense of it. People still continue to get sick, so her father continues to collect his fees–or so the narrative says, as if they always had the money to pay. There are no shacks, no Hoovervilles, no pellagra, no summonses at midnight for dirt-poor patients who put off getting medical attention until they’re dying. There are no black people, either, or stories of violence, interracial or otherwise. The culture of the riding camp feels lived in and may reflect the time, but the story doesn’t quite feel Depression-era.

What’s true in Yonahlossee, however, is Thea’s hunger for love and acceptance, and how she goes about finding them, sometimes in forbidden ways. She also begins to question her family’s motives and behavior, realizing their dishonesty and selfishness, and, to some extent, how unfair they were to punish her. As the most sympathetic adult character in the book–significantly, from New England, not the South–tells her in confidence:

Parents never trust their children. I don’t know what happened exactly, and you don’t need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it’s in a family’s best interest to make a child believe that.

This passage spoke loudly to me. What Thea does with this notion makes her story important enough to overlook narrative flaws or implausibilities.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Homage to Tom Jones: The Foundling Boy

29 Monday Jun 2015

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With this post, I’m starting a summer schedule, in which I’ll review one book a week.

Review: The Foundling Boy, by Michel Déon
Translated from the French by Julian Evans
Gallic, 2013 [Gallimard, 1975] 415 pp. $16

Halfway through this poignant, often hilarious tale, the protagonist, Jean Arnaud, comes across a truth I wish I’d taken to heart at age seventeen, as he does:

There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. . . . When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ . . . [I]t was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer.

Jean imbibes this lesson after reading Stendhal, who’d have enjoyed the young man’s amorous adventures and the gentle irony with which Déon tells of his growing up. But this picaresque novel also harks back to Henry Fielding’s rollicking eighteenth-century masterpiece, Tom Jones. Both begin with a foundling child of mysterious origins who fits no societal niche and will have to make his fortune through his gifts of character, which turn out to be considerable.

However, The Foundling Boy takes place in France between the world wars, not eighteenth-century England, and the particular atmosphere in which people try to recover from old wounds offers a perfect forum in which to observe how people enjoy life (or don’t). In this, the novel has a distinctly French sensibility, by which I mean that the characters who succeed are those who know better than to take themselves too seriously. I think this notion is what the French, at their best, have given Western civilization.

Once the basket bearing a newborn infant is left on a doorstep belonging to a childless couple, caretakers of a Norman estate, there’s little plot to speak of. But don’t worry. Episode quickly follows episode, and Jean gets into scrape after scrape, portrayed with wit, charm, and keen observation. Most of the story takes place in Normandy and Provence, so if you like France, or can imagine or have experienced the pleasures of either place–cider and ancient greenery in one; warm colors and aromatic herbs in the other–you’ll like this book.

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Sometimes, the omniscient narrator takes time out to tell you who’s important to remember, and who isn’t, as if Déon were your mentor. The role fits, for practically everybody wants to mold Jean to his or her own purposes–for his own good, of course. His adoptive father wants him to be a gardener, like himself, and to stay close to home; a con man tries to teach him to be a con man, and roam the world; and Ernst, a German youth he meets on a bicycle trip to Italy, insists that fascism offers the only useful, honest path in life.

All this is ripe for satire, and Déon doesn’t miss a trick. Especially as a young boy, Jean has no experience with which to filter out the useful advice from noise or what, to the reader, appears the counselor’s self-interest. Jean’s not weak–far from it–just green, but that constantly gets him into trouble. And as he navigates through his difficulties, what’s personal to Jean is also political and social commentary about 1930s Europe, though he doesn’t always know that. For instance, he can’t figure out why Ernst, who seems to laugh a lot and be good-natured, should take himself and his country so seriously, especially to spout hateful, vaguely frightening ideas from a book called Mein Kampf. Jean’s puzzlement reflects a common attitude of the time, one explanation for why so many Europeans underestimated Hitler.

Originally published in 1975, The Foundling Boy is a classic in France, though only recently translated into English, as with its sequel, The Foundling’s War. Déon belongs to the Academie Française, but he’s now also part of my personal pantheon: a great writer I’d never heard of.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Side of Purgatory: West of Sunset

11 Monday May 2015

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Review: West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan
Penguin, 2015. 289 pp. $28.
I’ve never been able to read about addictions. I have thin tolerance for masochism, an issue that cuts to the bone with me, without having to find it in the bottle, the racetrack, or various crystalline powders. I have zero tolerance for addicts who beat up their spouses, friends, or anyone else, let alone themselves, so presenting them as sympathetic fictional characters is a tough sell. Recently, I put aside The Temporary Gentleman (nominated for the Sir Walter Scott Prize), by the splendid writer Sebastian Barry, because I couldn’t imagine how anyone would waste time on the protagonist, a violent, irresponsible drunk.

Arthur Bryant's sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States).

Arthur Bryant’s sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States).

However, West of Sunset calls my bluff. It’s about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, spent in Hollywood, where he tries to pay back his debts, stay ahead of his crippling expenses, and restore his self-respect. Even if you don’t know the story, you can guess that Hollywood is the last place to find redemption, especially for a writer who considers himself an artist. Double that if said writer destroys himself with pills washed down with alcohol.

A familiar story this is. Yet I can’t resist Fitzgerald, whom I put above any American writer of his generation. For depth, for psychological acuity, for prose–which, at its effortless best, feels like breathing–I think he has no equal from that prolific era in American letters. But it’s not that West of Sunset is a fan letter; anything but. True, O’Nan has captured Scott’s perceptions, ways of thought, and voice, and at times you can sense Amory Blaine or Nick Carraway or Dick Diver lurking just beyond the pages. But the literary frisson is only an overlay to the pain beneath, of a man who had talent to burn and, sadly, did just that with it. Where Scott once thought himself on top of the world, destined for immortality, “so much of his life now was making arrangements, and he’d never been any good at it.” Hollywood, though he doesn’t know it, is his last, valiant try:

 

. . . the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. . . .On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

Fitzgerald’s contradictions are all in this novel. He’s a frat-boy libertine and Puritan; selfish and open-handed; roils with anger, yet tries to make peace (while sober, anyway); yearns for acceptance while believing it’s his right; and wants desperately to do the right thing, even as he surrenders to his worst nature. But West of Sunset is hardly a one-man show. O’Nan gives full life to Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, Scottie, their teenage daughter, and to Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist with whom Fitzgerald falls in love. Through them, as well as Scott, the narrative holds astonishing tension, despite the cycle of gin and repentance, and the inevitable end.

Another pleasure is the Hollywood scene. Bogart gets a good bit of ink, and Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and Joan Crawford, among others, make noteworthy appearances. The gossipy studio repartee is delicious, as when Dorothy Parker remarks, of Crawford, “She’s slept with everyone at Metro except Lassie.” Charles MacArthur, in town with his actress wife, Helen Hayes, “was over at Universal adapting his last play, a task Scott imagined was like slowly poisoning your own child.”

West of Sunset is a tragic, powerful tale about a man who said yes to all the wrong things because he had trouble saying no.

Disclaimer: I obtained this book for review from the public library.