A Novel With Soul

Arye Lev Stollman's book
is a coming-of-age tale with a mystical twist.

A

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rye Lev Stollman's debut
novel, The Far Euphrates, is
a coming-of-age-story, but
with its own twist — it's
the tale of a soul coming of age.
Set in Windsor, Ontario, in the
1950s and 1960s, the novel is narrat-
ed by Arye Alexander, the only child
of a scholarly rabbi who leads a con-
gregation. A day-dreamer always
aware of his differentness, he tries to
figure out the world of the adults
around him and the world within
himself. As a young boy, he is told
that he has good beat — the Gypsy
words for fortune and luck — by an
aging fortune teller, who dismisses his
mother's worries that he is a strange
boy.
Stollman's writing is graceful and
understated; its rhythms have been
aptly described as prayerlike. His
characters are memorable: the cantor,
a gifted singer who has been subject-
ed to Mengele's experimentation on
twins at Auschwitz; his cheerful wife
Berenice, who is childless and shares
secrets with Arye Alexander; the can-
tor's twin, Hannalore, who works as a
maid for Henry Ford II and wears a
cross to camouflage her identity; a
wealthy young gentile girl with star-
tling wit who is dying. Loss perme-
ates this story.
On the wall of the rabbi's study is
a map of Babylon during the time of
the Talmud, with the rivers Euphrates
and Tigris drawn in; and he tells his
son that the Euphrates had its source
in the Garden of Eden. The novel's
title, as the author explains, refers to
the "beginning of the world as we
know it, from the expulsion from
Eden." One of the book's themes is
displacement; none of the characters
seems at home.
On his 16th birthday, the boy
retreats to his room, where he spends
the next year doing tzimtzum, self-
contraction, "God's withdrawal into
Himself to make a space in which He

Sandee Brawarsky is the book critic
for The Jewish Week.

I

might place the physical universe."
He seeks transcendence, answers to
the mysteries of life.
His father is sympathetic and sup-
plies him with reading material for
his self-study; his mother is further
convinced that her obsessive worry is
justified. During his time alone, he
accumulates knowledge, learning the
Ugaritic language, physics, neu-
roanatomy and neurophysiology and
he scrutinizes his body. He is aware
but not shameful of his homosexuali-

Photo by Jerry Bauer

SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to The Jewish News

Novelist Aryeh Lev S'tollman grew up in
Windsor, and attended day school and a
yeshiva in Detroit.

ty. A death ends his seclusion.
To describe the novel as mystical
makes it sound like it belongs in the
New Age section of the bookstore;
rather it's a novel seeped in Jewish
learning. The author, like his narra-
tor, is the son of a rabbi from
Windsor, where he grew up. Stollman
attended a day school and yeshiva in
Detroit, and then studied at the Telz
Yeshiva in Cleveland and Yeshiva
University.
In a telephone interview from his
home in Dutchess County — he lives
part time on Manhattan's Upper West
Side — he denies that the novel is
autobiographical beyond the detail of
a rabbinical father and son. Writers'
spoken voices sometimes seem jar-