groups have begun to interact in
America on a level deeper than
restaurateur and devoted patron.
David Wong Louie traces the rela-
tionship between a young Chinese-
American man and a
Jewish woman, both of
them born and now
coming of age in the
States. While he sheds
some light on the con-
nections and disconnects
between the two cul-
tures, Louie's greatest
insight is into the
changes in Chinese-
American culture over
the first two generations
in America.
Sterling Lung is an
ambitious young chef
trained in French cuisine
at the prestigious
Culinary Institute of
America. He is torn
between his desire to be
the good son, helping his
parents at the laundry
they own and run, and
his desire to be a full-
blooded American. He
bristles when people ask
him to cook Chinese
food, is embarrassed by
his parents and dates
only white women.
His girlfriend, Bliss
Sass, is a Jewish dental
student, the daughter of
a successful businessman,
raised in an architectural
dream house in affluent
New Canaan, Conn. Just
as Sterling's parents are
arranging to fly in a
bride they have chosen
for him from Hong
Kong, Bliss becomes
pregnant. Bliss and
Sterling marry; the two
families are actually fairly
tolerant; and everyone
dotes on the son that is
born.
Sterling, however, is
ambivalent from the very
start about Bliss. Be fore-
warned: This is not a
love story. The relation-
ship between Sterling
and Bliss is bleak and
culminates in tragedy.
The portrait of Bliss
remains somewhat blur-
ry, and Sterling comes off
as callow. Louie's prose

UN,

6/23

2000

76

can be awkward, the metaphors
incongruous.
Nevertheless, because Louie's mate-
rial is relatively novel, the story
remains interesting. For some reason,
popular Asian-
American writers have
primarily been women:
Maxine Hong
Kingston, Amy Tan,
Gish Jen. Louie's explo-
ration of both the
immigrant and the
first-generation experi-
ence from a male per-
spective is valuable.

— Reviewed by
Susan Katz Miller

Pure Poetry by Binnie
Kirshenbaum; (Simon &
Schuster; 201 pp.; $22)
Meet Lila Moscowitz.
She aspires to high
tragedy but is mostly
stuck in a morass of
anxiety and mediocrity.
She is a poet crippled by
writer's block, debilitat-
ed by frequent bouts of
agoraphobia and
gripped by an irrational
fear of soon turning 35.
Neither great sex
with her new beau,
Henry, nor weekly
appointments with her
cross-dressing therapist,
Leon, help her get over
Max, her German-born
ex-husband.
Sound like the mak-
ings of a wacky
romance novel? Yes,
and no.
To be sure, this is a
light read. But there is
also substance here.
Lila is a serious poet,
albeit one who has
been featured in People
magazine for her high-
brow smut. Each of the
novel's 36 chapters
reflects a poetic term or
condition, giving the
book just the right lit-
erary accent. And
everything Lila does is
symbolic.
The number 36
conjures up the symbol
of double chai — the
number 18 - which
in Hebrew also spells
out the word "life."

Ultimately this book is about life
in all of its glorious chaos, even if it
does occasionally degenerate into
one-liners. The jokes come on fast
and furious, especially in Lila's com-
ments about neurotic Jews and single-
minded Germans coming together.
But more often than not,
Kirshenbaum's finely tuned observa-
tions get lost in those jokes. For
example, she slips in a description of
Max the Teutonic cartographer that is
positively brilliant.
"Max was good at his job. A born
cartographer if you can imagine such
a thing ... ever mindful of boundaries
and lines of demarcation That's not
to say he wouldn't cross one, but
knew of the displacement difficulties
deriving from the reductions of one
map to another. Differences in size of
the symbols alone can cause problems
practically insurmountable. Still, Max
was able to turn the global earth into
a flat surface, which is something
only the gods ought to be able to do."
But a poet can perform equally
impressive transformations, especially
one who aspires to a state of pure
poetry or, as Binnie Kirshenbaum,
defines it: "a theoretical ideal to
which poetry may aspire."
Lila Moscowitz knows this, but, in
the end, Pure Poetry is like a summer
rainstorm — flashes of insight and
wit illuminate its pages and then it's
over as quickly as it arrived.

— Reviewed by Judith Bolton-Farman

Love Life by Zeruya Shalev; translated by
Dalya Bilu (Grove Press; 288 .pp.; $24)
The topic of illicit love often is
best left to great novels written by the
likes of Tolstoy. That's why Love Lift,
Israeli author Zeruya Shalev's first
work of fiction to be translated into
English, is such a pleasant surprise.
Shalev's character, named Yaara,
is also the Hebrew word for "fear."
Yaara does indeed live in fear of
choking on her own life of apparent
normalcy. In an attempt to save •
herself, she performs the symbolic
Heimlich maneuver of embarking
upon a love affair with a friend of
her father, who is not the man he
appears to be.
Yaara is drawn to Aryeh's foreign-
ness, his unexpected sexual desires
and the things that he knows about
her parents' former lives.
The Israeli-born Yaara has no
grandparents, and her parents' past is
unclear, intentionally lost in the
building of the State of Israel.
Married to an adoring but unexciting

husband (computer programmers
don't make great romantic foils),
Yaara cannot resist falling into Aryeh'
bed, regardless of his obvious philan-
dering.
A student of biblical literature, she
invokes a midrashic, or interpretive,
tale about adultery, written at the
time of the destruction of the Second
Temple.
Shalev handles the first person nar
rative deftly, making the reader care
about the details of Yaara's life. Yaara'
meandering thoughts mitigate her
adultery, making her quite likable,
and leaving the reader tcricheer her o
to succeed.
Though some of the scenes strain
the novel's realism, Yaara's self-assess-
ments are delightful and the
hermeneutics of her midrashic analysi
are often profound. This is a fine first
novel, demonstrating that the right
and easy thing to do is not always
necessary

— Reviewed by Dinah Zelts

The Devil's Shepherd by Steven
Hartov (Morrow; 323 pp.; $25)

Steven Hartov's latest thriller is a
fast-paced, well-crafted and extremel
literate page-turner that has it all:
espionage, treachery, murder and
atonement. And that's just the begin-
ning.
The story opens with Israeli intelli
gence agents Eytan Eckstein and
Benni Baum navigating a convoy of
boats filled with Ethiopian Jewish
refugees to safety in Israel, while
under heavy fire from Ethiopian
rebels.
Operation Jeremiah, as the missio
is called, is a success, permitting
Baum and Eckstein to think about
hanging up their high-tech cloaks an
daggers so they may begin to enjoy
the almost forgotten comforts of
hearth and home.
But even as Baum and Eckstein
reflect upon retirement and all it has
to offer (in Eckstein's case, a chance
to salvage a marriage about to crum-
ble because of his long absences),
readers know the dynamic Israeli duo
haven't fought their last fight.
In fact, almost immediately after
completing Operation Jeremiah,
AMAN, Israel's military intelligence
branch, orders Baum and Eckstein
(under threat of court martial) to
"volunteer" to lead their most per-
ilous mission yet.
It seems one Jan Krumlov of
Czech counterintelligence has defect-
ed to the Israelis in Addis Ababa,

