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Bar/Bat Mitzvah's • Engagements Health • Food • Insight • New Arrivals and much more! 4/12 2002 76 DBTROTT JEWISH NEWS JN On The Bookshelf Transforming Beauty In "The Illuminated Soul," author/doctor Aryeh Lev Stollman, a Windsor native, reinterprets the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew. she instead sees a gracious sign. In the Miscellany, those words are illustrated by a pillar of cloud — and were the inspiration for her scholarly father's great, still unfinished work, Clouds of Glory. am an expert on brains," the narrator of Aryeh Lev She decides to stay in Windsor and later can't remember Stollman's artfully written new novel, The who guided her to the home of the Ivri family, who have a Illuminated Soul (Riverhead; $24.95), says in the room to rent. opening of the book's first chapter. Joseph Ivri is a When she appears at their door, Adele Ivri, a devout successful neuroanatomist who has written a very success- widow, and her sons Joseph and Asa believe they have ful popular book toward the end of his career, also titled never seen anyone as beautiful as the red-haired Eva. The Illuminated Soul, and now he's looking back. "She placed one foot in front of the other, carefully, as if Stollman's novel is richly layered with texts, including a she were crossing a narrow bridge 15th-century rare illuminated manuscript, the from a mysterious and enchanted weekly Torah readings, Japanese stories and the world we knew nothing about, into author's own midrashim. our small and quiet one." It's a story about an exquisite woman who sud- She moves into an upstairs room, denly appears in Windsor, Canada, just across from and soon recounts stories of her Detroit, in the late 1940s. Soon after, she departs, family and her travels, shows them but her presence lingers on long after. the Miscellany and shares her kind- The author provides the reader with much to ness and wisdom; she tells them reflect upon about exile and wandering, the brain that "anything you have ever seen or and the soul, memory and beauty, and the afteref- heard or held changes you. It fects of the Holocaust. becomes a part of you. It's a scien- Stollrnan, a neuroradiologist, is also something of an tific fact. Your brain changes. Why, expert on brains, although he probably wouldn't when we look at each other right describe himself that way. In an interview in his now we are being changed forever." Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, he explains Eva goes on to say that although that the structure of this novel "weaves in and out of many things can be lost or taken time, recapitulating the way the brain works." away over a lifetime, the soul can't Although we may order our memories in a kind "The Illuminated Soul" be taken away. "The secret is not to of time line, that's not the way our minds work. He tells the story of an exquisite care too much for all those other emphasizes that memory isn't linear; rather it's full refugee who, along with things you cannot keep." of cross-associations. It's only at the end of this a magnificent Hebrew novel, after many shifts in time, that the story is manuscript, profoundly fully unfolded. transforms the lives of a Clouds Of Glory beleaguered Windsor widow The summer of Eva's arrival, Joseph and her two young sons. — a 14-year old perfectionist who Eva's Story couldn't fall asleep until he had Eva Laquedem Higashi, an exile from Prague, car- checked the silverware drawers several times to make sure ries in her handbag at all times a rare 500-year old manu- that the meat and dairy sets were lined up evenly — is script in miniature called The Augsburg Miscellany. It con- practicing the Torah readings so he can fill in for the ba'al Book of tains 600 hand-written pages, including the koreh in synagogue. Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations and philosophical treatises Adele, who learned the trope from her father and usually — all illustrated in lavish detail. corrects the synagogue's reader from her place in the It had belonged to her father, and she smuggled it out of women's gallery, helps him. Eva looks at the text he is Czechoslovakia and has had it with her as she journeyed to studying and tells him, The solid consonants are like our the Soviet Union and then Japan — she married a Japanese material bodies and the invisible vowels are like our souls doctor in Prague — before coming to the United States. that make our bodies come to life." She ends up in Windsor after taking what she thought Some readers will take in the significance of the fact that was an afternoon detour from Detroit to have a look at he's practicing "Beha'alotecha" when she arrives: That Canada, but she doesn't have the required paperwork with chapter refers to the clouds of glory that enveloped the her to cross the border back to the United States. encampment of Jews in the desert. That day in Windsor, she observes a great circle of Eva seems to understand the hearts of Joseph and Asa, a clouds above that bring to mind the biblical verse, "And in child of uncommon beauty who is losing his vision. the place where the cloud abode, there the Children of She is visited in Windsor by the emissaries of a Israel encamped." Jerusalem rabbi who knows of her father's fate in Europe, For a woman who might think of herself as stranded, SAN DEE BRAWARSKY Special to the Jewish News I