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`The One Facing Us'
As a child, Esther, the narrator in Ronit
Matalon's novel The One Facing Us
(Metropolitan; $25) is paid a few cents
by her grandmother to look at family
photographs and describe them. "You
are my eyes," Nona Fortuna would tell
her, We are one soul."
Matalon's imagi-
native and powerful
novel is artfully tan-
gled with these pho-
tos from the album
of a once aristocrat-
ic Jewish family
originally from Italy,
Lebanon and Syria,
who spent genera-
tions in Cairo, and
is now dispersed to
Israel, Africa and the United States. The
photos, some black-and-white, others in
color, appear in the text, although sever-
al are missing and are presented as
blanks, as though they've disappeared
from the album. "A photograph offers
evidence of what is remembered, but
also intimates what might have been,"
Matalon writes.
Approaching her 1 7th birthday,
Esther is sent by her mother to Douala,
Cameroon, to live with her uncle
Sicourelle, a wealthy businessman who
lives with his wife and stepson, waited
upon by servants. Monsieur Sicourelle's
success doesn't cover his loneliness, and
he is charmed by his difficult, brooding
niece.
The very proper Madame Sicourelle
is "sewed up tight all around. ... She is a
universe of faux pax waiting to hap-
pen." Esther is uninterested in
Madame's son Erouan, although she
realizes she has been brought over with
hopes they would marry.
In boredom with her languid days
-- she is neither accustomed to nor
comfortable with their privileged
lifestyle — Esther remembers the fading
photographs and spins her family's sto-
ries, full of surprises. Looking at the
photos, she also recalls her younger self.
Esther tells of her blind great-grand-
father who translates Shakespeare into
Arabic and Grandpapa Jacquo who
gambles away the family fortune and
dies just before the family is to move to
Israel, when their world in Cairo is
destroyed. Her grandmother Nona
Fortuna never adjusts to Israeli life
despite the arguments of her idealistic
uncle Moise. Her father Robert, a wan-
derer, "had been denied the life he was
born to, the life of a Levantine gentle-
),
man.
When a cousin from America tracks
-
STEVEN SPIELBERG
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76 Detroit Jewish News
down her mother Ines and wants to
interview her about family history, Ines,
who has known many disappointments,
tells her, "Roots, roots, roots. A person
doesn't need roots. A person needs a
),
home.
In a rich voice, Matalon presents a
complex reflection on memory and
exile. Born in Israel in 1959, she is a
journalist who teaches literature in Tel
Aviv. The One Facing Us, translated by
Marsha Weinstein, is her first novel to
appear in English. Fl
— Reviewed by Sandee Brawarsky
••
`The Revisionist
'
As the 20th century draws to a close,
Theodor Adorno's famous dictum —
there can be no poetry after Auschwitz
— has been challenged in a myriad of
ways. Survivors such as Aharon
Appelfeld, Primo Levi and Cordelia
Edvardson have integrated their experi-
ences into their
-fiction and mem-
oir, offering
invaluable eyewit-
ness accounts as
they pioneered
their own genre.
In contrast to
this, there is an
insidious aberra-
tion of the post-
Holocaust imagination — one that is
perpetrated by anti-Semites masquerad-
ing as historians and First Amendment
purists. They are Holocaust deniers,
claiming that facts and figures have
been grossly distorted or simply invent-
ed.
In her second novel, The Revisionist
(Crown Publishers; $23), Helen
Schulman, who also is the author of a
collection of short stories, cleverly uses
the lies of Holocaust revisionism, as well
as her protagonist's illusions about his
own life, to prod Dr. David Hershleder
into Jewish self-awareness.
At the outset of the book,
Hershleder is on his way to suburban
New York. It is a hallucinatory sequence
in which he is seemingly unaware of
returning to the home from which he
has been thrown out. On that short
trip, the reader learns that Hershleder, a
successful neurologist, is the son of
Holocaust survivors. The spell of the
sequence abruptly ends when his gentile
wife slams the door in his face.
The pending divorce as well as his
mother's unexpected death lead
Hershleder to identify the Holocaust's
effects on his own life. Hershleder's
mother had been pursuing a degree in
Holocaust studies because "she wanted,