C
/—
and which she exploited to no end."
Her life story is one of several splin-
tered narrative lines: In a hospital at
the end of her life, she shares her mys-
teries — including "her gravest secret
of all, her deepest shame —with nurs-
es who love her.
Beyond the novel's final pages,
Mila's story lingers in memory.
Second Hand Smoke is a novel
with a theme song, background
music that appears in the text from
time to time that's a kind of hidden
family anthem.
Gershwin's "Someone
to Watch Over Me"
is hummed, played
on piano and ulti-
mately appears, in
slight variation, on
Mila's tombstone. .
"In the way that
breathing is the anti-
dote to smoke, this
song is the antidote to
abandonment. We all
have a deep desire to
know there are people
watching over us, car-
ing for us, even the
most friendless
among us, "
Rosenbaum explains.
He points out that
Mila may have wanted to share that
sense with Duncan but couldn't —
until her death, when she hoped he
would understand her life and the
choices she made.
In meeting the author, one can't
help but wonder about parallels
between Thane and Duncan; even their
British-inspired names have a similar
ring. When asked about the autobio-
graphical nature of his fiction, he
explains that he works from a point of
counter-reality where I start in some
instances with things that are true of
my life and then reimagine, reinvent."
He dots the narrative with real land-
marks from the Miami Beach child-
hood of Duncan's (and his) youth, and
familiar details in Duncan's Upper West
Side neighborhood, where the author
now lives with his 3 1/2-year-old
daughter Basia Tess.
He says that in many ways his
parents, who died within a few
months of each other in 1980, are
unknowable" to him. "A lot of what
I try to do is to understand their
world better by reimagining it and
fictionalizing it," he says.
In writing about Mila, he "created a
character I understand more than my
mother. But she's nothing like my
mother.
CC
Rosenbaum is something of a mys-
tic when it comes to the subject of his
writing. When he left the legal profes-
sion to write seven years ago, he hadn't
written fiction at all other than "stock-
piling notes and sentences and titles
for stories and novels."
At the time, he didn't know what
he would write about; he was not at
all involved with other children of sur-
vivors and didn't plan to write about
that experience. He says that he can't
account for the way the books came
out, or for their mes-
sages.
About his Jewish
identity, he says, "I
have God problems.
What casualty of the
Holocaust doesn't?
"I'm extremely
proud of being
Jewish, as part of a
community, as a
Jewish writer. When
God enters the con-
versation, I squirm,
even though it's
important to me that
my daughter is
exposed to Jewish
ritual."
A law professor in
human rights and a
teacher of creative writing,
Rosenbaum sees himself as part of a
new wave in the Jewish literary tradi-
don. "The first wave was the literature
of escape," he says. "l'm part of the lit-
erature of return."
He speaks of a "Jewish soulfulness"
that many Jewish writers share, even
when they write in different styles,
pointing in different directions. We
all come from the same literary neigh-
borhood," he says.
Rosenbaum seems unusual in his
pride and generosity toward the work
of other writers at a time when slightly
veiled competition and jealousy are
more often the norm.
Can he imagine writing on subjects
unrelated to the Holocaust? "I'm seri-
ous when I say this is a trilogy, I don't
think I'll write again about specific
legacies, at least not immediately," he
answers. After finishing the third novel,
he plans to write about broken families
— a subject he sees as "not unrelated to
the emotional complexity of my first
three books. The sensibility of broken-
ness is the same. Cultural genocide. A
pathology of the Western world."
Would he think about writing a
memoir? "My imagination is more
interesting than my real life," he
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