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6/11
1999
Expires 7-31-99
98 Detroit Jewish News
`Second Iland
Smoke'
n unlikely minyan of Jewish
hustlers, gangsters, Miami
Beach neighbors and a
golfer late for his tee-off
gather amidst platters of whitefish for
the bris of Duncan Katz, son of Mila
and Yankee Katz, survivors of
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
The Katzes have no surviving rela-
tives to honor at the bris, so the
sandek and godfather is a friend, a
former seltzer deliveryman who
became one of Meyer Lansky's chief
Miami operatives. With a mohel who
moonlights as a bookie, the baby,
named for a Scottish king, is perhaps
"the only Jew in the room whose
record is still clean."
The 1953 mobster bris is the open-
ing scene in Thane Rosenbaum's first
novel, Second Hand Smoke (St. Martin's;
$24.95), an impassioned work, leavened
with dark humor, that explores the
shadow-filled hearts and souls of the
children of Holocaust survivors.
In an interview, the 39-year-old
author, whose late parents were sur-
vivors of Auschwitz and Maidenek,
describes this book as a post-
Holocaust novel. He says that for him,
the world begins with Auschwitz. "To
me, it all started over. The odometer
got spun backwards." For Duncan
Katz, too, the beginning is not the
high-rise Miami Beach apartment of
his bris but the Nazi concentration
camps.
Second Hand Smoke is the second in
a trilogy about the far-reaching conse-
quences of the Holocaust, as expressed
in the experiences of the second gener-
ation. The first, Elijah Visible, a collec-
tion of nine linked stories, was pub-
lished in 1996 and won the Edgar
Lewis Wallant Award. While the first
work was about mourning and loss, as
Rosenbaum explains, this novel deals
with rage and abandonments.
.
I
Thane Rosenbaum: "I have God
problems. What casualty of the
Holocaust doesn't?"
The protagonist in
Thane Rosenbaum's
new novel is choking
on his parents'
Holocaust pain.
"The first was about paralysis; in
the second, Duncan is ready to take
on all challenges. He's unstoppable, a
mythical monster."
Rosenbaum, literary editor of Tikkun
magazine, is now completing the third,
The Golems of Gotham, a novel about a
haunted house on Manhattan's West
84th Street, the street named for Edgar
Allen Poe. That novel, he says, is about
moving forward into the next century.
It offers a deeper sense of healing and
forgiveness."
He explains that he sees the three
"
Sandee Brawarsky is a New York-
based freelance book critic.
works as a "logical progression," which -\
he couldn't have achieved in one novel.
"Maybe it will take three generations
to cancel the contagion," he says.
One common thread among the
three books is their non-linear narra-
tive style, which the author describes
as a "shattered glass sensibility." The
narrative moves forward and back in
time, its disjointedness reflecting the
"brokenness of the world."
Rosenbaum comments that "in a
world after Auschwitz, books can't
have a 'once upon a time' beginning.
That's over in my conception of the
post-Holocaust novel." As he unfolds
the multi-layered story in Second
Hand Smoke in this fractured style, he
maintains the dramatic twists, in ener-
getic prose.
Duncan Katz grows up enveloped in
his parents' pain: Their memories
become his; the fumes of the camps fill
his lungs, as the title suggests. Mila
pushes Duncan to learn to fight, feed-
ing his hunger for revenge. From karate,
football and street fighting, he turns to
law, and works for the Office of Special
Investigations, prosecuting Nazi war
criminals. Later, he travels to Poland,
having lost his job and his family, and
there finds a sustaining connection.
The plot is difficult to describe
without revealing details that are bet-
ter left to the reader to discover. But,
eventually, Duncan learns to breathe
anew, realizing that he has been chok-
ing on smoke for years.
Mila is an entirely new breed of lit-
erary Jewish mother. Raising her son
as a kind of experiment, she shows
him no love, so that he'd be strong
and wouldn't need a mother. 'A moth-
er is like a teddy bear, a rabbit's foot, a
pacifier," she says, dismissing those
roles for herself . She's complicated
and tough, a shark at cards, a friend to
racketeers large and small:
"Her strength was apparent in all
her movements, in everything she said
and did. ... Overweight, she smoked
too much, and her nervous system
functioned like randomly ignited fire-
crackers. But her deficiencies somehow
came across as assets, which pleased her