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I 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