Patty Friedmann Novel
Is A First Rate Story

JOSEPH COHEN

Special to The Jewish News

p

atty Friedmann's The
Exact Image of
(Viking,
Mother

$18.95) is the exact image of
a first-rate first novel. It is
superbly well written, witty,
sad, funny, poignant, flip,
serious, and, most of all, ac-
complished beyond what one
normally expects in an in-
augural narrative effort. It
rings with the authenticity of
real experience closely lived
and closely observed. Why is
it so good?
it
is
For
openers,
astonishingly deceptive in the
sense that the story runs as
if it were on cruise-control,
smoothly pacing itself, never
breaking down like the pro-
tagonist's erratic Karmann
Ghia. It sails on by without
asking the reader to assume
any responsibility. All one
L I) has to do is to sit back and en-
joy the ride. The sheer enter-
tainment factor is high. The
book has style and class and
plenty of both. Yet
underneath this highly
sophisticated narrative ex-
pressway there exists a whole
series of emotional subterra-
nean tunnels, each with its
own painful entrances and ex-
its, on-going problems and
special torments. That's
where the deception comes in:
you may think you can just go
along for the ride but you
-, can't. You have to get
involved.
The emotional subterra-
nean tunnels are ones which
involve us on various levels,
Jewish, male and female,
parental, familial, human.
The book opens with the spec-
tre of unresolved feelings
about the Holocaust and it
ends with another spectre,
the tidying up that follows
one death by AIDS and
another by Alzheimer's
disease. In between, issues
are raised and explored, and
are sometimes resolved and
sometimes not. These include
Jewish and Catholic identity,
adolescent rebellion and its
extensions into adulthood,
mother-daughter conflict,
single motherhood, Jewish-
black interaction, New
Orleans decadence, escape
and return, loss, and
regeneration in a time of shif-
ting values, recklessness and

Joseph Cohen is emeritus
professor of English at Tulane
University and founding
director of its Jewish Studies
Program.

exploitable relationships.
Selfishness and greed splatter
rich and poor alike, compoun-
ding everybody's misery.
The central conflict is the
prolonged identity crisis of
the protagonist, Darby
Cooper. She is the daughter of
a union of two German Jews.
Her father escapes from Ger-
many and the Holocaust just
in time. He is lucky enough to
leave on one of the last boats
from Le Havre before World
War II erupts. Nameless, he is
little more than a useless
abstraction. Letty, Darby's
mother, is a fourth generation
American, rich and spoiled,
an uptown Jewish bluestock-
ing phony aristocrat, who
when we first see her is
traveling in France with Dar-
by's grandmother (a genuine
aristocrat, Chicago born and
reared, disenchanted with the
artificiality of life in New
Orleans), both of them so
preoccupied with their shop-
ping that they are totally
oblivious to the monumental
tragedies unfolding on the eve
of the war. On their voyage
home, they are also passen-
gers on the ship from Le
Havre. Darby's parents marry
after a shipboard romance.
The marriage is foredoom-
ed because the couple has lit-
tle in common: Letty is domi-
nant and insensitive, Darby's
father is ineffectual and
oversensitive. Letty plays the
wealthy uptown bitchy
matron; nameless daddy is
merely the manager of the
fancy grocery patronized by
her well-to-do neighbors. In
time, he commits suicide, vic-
timized by his in-laws' ar-
rogance, his own
powerlessness, and the guilt
it generates over their com-
plicity in leaving his mother
in Germany to be exter-
minated by the Nazis in
Theresienstadt. Talk about a
skeleton in a closet; this is
one that keeps on growing.
As Darby enters
adolescence, she rejects both
parents. Her rebelliousness
never ebbs; it moves
straightforward into
adulthood. She purposely
takes and tenuously holds on-
to a low-paying job as a
librarian.
Really good novels about
Jewish life in the American
South are as rare as koshered
rabbits. Jewish tales just
haven't come out of the land
of cotton. This one is now out
of its warren, and it's a honey
of a kosher bunny, a real cot-
ton tale. ❑

Copyright 1991 Joseph Cohen

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