/-

'

attracted attention with the publica-
tion of her now classic feminist com-
ing-of-age novel, Memoirs of an Ex-
Prom Queen.
The second story is about her even-
tual return to her parents to help them
dismantle a life falling apart from old
age and illness. Her father, Sam, at 94,
and her mother, Dorothy, at 87, could
no longer maintain their large home
and relocated to an apartment on the
grounds of a nursing home.
Shulman, who was at that point
their only surviving child, was left to
do everything from consolidating assets
to cleaning out closets. Throughout the
experience she was mindful of the
power she had suddenly been granted.
"Though their reduced circumstances
distressed me," she writes, "I was excit-
ed to find that as their power dimin-
ished, mine increased."
As her time with her parents drew
to a close, Shulman concentrated on
understanding the role of memory in
truly chronicling a life. She learns
from Dorothy, who is suffering from
Alzheimer's, that "you don't have to
remember. It's enough that it's true."
The truth first emerges cautiously -
and then boldly in this book.
However, acceptance of the truth
entails triumphing over taboos about
family ties and death along the way.
Alix Kates Shulman did that just in
time to consider herself as a good
enough daughter.

— Reviewed by Judith Bolton-Fasman

Always From Somewhere Else by
Marjorie Agosin (The Feminist Press;
261pp.; $18.95)
Marjorie Agosin's luminous memoir
takes bilingualism to new heights.
However, the two languages for the
Chilean-born Agosin aren't Spanish
and English, but memory and history.
She discerns her own life story
through that of her father's, Dr.
Moises Agosin. In doing so she discov-
ers immutable truths derived from
family lore, personal impressions and
hard facts.
Like his biblical namesake, Moises
Agosin was a stranger in a strange land
and his outsider status a fixed part of
his identity. His Russian-born parents
arrived in Chile in the late 1920s by
way of Turkey and France. A tailor by
trade, Abraham Agosin and his wife
Raquel settled in Quilloto, and were
the first Jews whom the people there
had ever seen.
Moises, the youngest of four sons,

The Story Begins: Essays on
Literature by Amos Oz (Harcourt
Brace; 118 pp.; $20)
What, precisely, are we doing when
we read a novel or a short story?
According to Amos Oz, the acclaimed,
Israeli novelist, as soon as we begin

Amos Oz

The Story Begins

was refused admission to the local
Jesuit academy because he was a Jew
and received his education at the local
public school. From there he began a
lonely sojourn in Santiago as a med-
ical student. Of that time, Agosin
writes, "My father's years as a medical
student were terrifying, sinister and at
the same time beautiful, emphasizing
the complexity of his Judaism. He
delighted in the pleasures of being
self-taught, of reading everything that
fell into his hands and having suffi-
cient time to meditate over the purify-
ing harmony of the abstract sciences
and the pleasures of memory.
Moises Agosin eventually became
the first Jew to head a department at
the University of Chile's medical
school. However, that unprecedented
appointment became his undoing. In
Chile's changing political climate, acts
of anti-Semitism became more overt
and fierce. As perpetual exiles, the
Agosin family was expert at forecast-
ing political dissension and emigrated
to the United States just before the
brutal Pinochet dictatorship came to
power.
In relative safety in Georgia, where
Moises continued his research in
infectious diseases, the Agosins never
quite acclimated to their new sur-
roundings. They simply adjusted to
"living in translation."
In the United States, their identity
shifts almost overnight from Jewish to
Latino. Yet the change is a superficial
one, one that reinforced the notion of
feeling "more and more part of that
incredible human tangle of emigrant
33
Jews... .

— Reviewed by
Judith Bolton -Fasman

sion for the mother's suffering, pain at
the disintegration of the family, vain
attempts to talk, fantasies, lack of love
and the suppressed torments of adoles-
cence.
Moving seamlessly from the fiction
of Central Europe to Israel to Latin
America to the United States, Oz
proves himself a master of world liter-
ature. He shows that he doesn't take
literature, or himself, too seriously.
The opening "contract" of a narrative,
Oz notes, can resemble a game or a
crossword puzzle or an invitation to
the dance, all posed by the author to
the reader.
Reading is supposed to be full of
pleasures and joyous games," despite
some critics' efforts to suck all the
enjoyment out of it. Amos Oz
reminds us that in addition to the
inherent seriousness of most great
works of art, they have elements of
fun in them too.

— Reviewed by Jonathan Groner

reading we are invariably entering into
an implied contract with the author.
Oz argues in this brief, provocative
book of criticism that the first few
pages, sometimes the first few para-
graphs, of any work of literature have
the primary purpose of drawing the
reader in and giving him or her a
taste, a tease, an inkling of what lies
behind the door.
"There are beginnings that work
rather like a honey trap: at first you
are seduced with a juicy piece of gos-
sip, or an all-revealing confession ... ."
Beyond these, says Oz, there are
"philosophical contracts"; there are
harsh, forbidding contracts (works like
Faulkner's that make onerous demands
from the very start); there are even
books that are intentionally built on
lies and fraudulent promises to the
reader.
To make his point, Oz invokes
examples from a wide range of world
literature: Chekhov, Kafka, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, S.Y. Agnon and oth-
ers — some famous, others less so. His
method is that of the careful literary
critic: He pulls and teases meaning out
of seemingly bland sentences, showing
that in the hands of an artist, no word,
no sentence exists without a purpose.
In a Raymond Carver short story,
Oz finds hints, starting from the very
first paragraph, of "loneliness, compas-

By the Grace of Goc• A Tale of Love,
Family, War and Survival from the
Congo by Suruba Ibumando Georgette
Wechsler with Howell Wechsler (New
Horizons Press; 335 pp.; $24.95)
It's a familiar experience to movie-
goers. The actors convey a range of
emotions, giving a performance that is
inspiring, alive long after the lights
have come on. But often such star
power is not enough to elevate and
ultimately rescue the film from suc-
cumbing to its major or even minor
flaws. It's an ineffable sort of disap-
pointment.
Suruba (or Georgette as she is more

6/25

1999

Detroit Jewish News

SI