Arts is Entertainment
Cover Story: Summer Reading
FICTION
THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN
WOLFY AND THE STRUDELBAKERS
THE COMPLETE TALES OF KETZIA GOLD
By Daniel Silva
(G. P. Putnam's Sons; 336 pp.; $25.95)
By Zvi Jagendorf
(Dewi Lewis Publishing; 187 pp.; $13.95 pb)
By Kate Bernheimer
(Black Ice Books; 140 pp.; $11.95 pb)
Six paragraphs into
Daniel Silva's thriller
You know you're in
for a wild ride when
you pick up a book
authored by a writer
with the colorful
name of Zvi
Jagendorf, who has
titled his novel Wolb
A beautiful and trag-
ic work of great
emotional resonance
and a truly ambi-
tious first novel, The
The English Assassin, I
was hooked. In the
book's prologue, the
author offers up not
one, but two bomb-
shells and keeps read-
ers maneuvering the
minefields from there
on out.
The English Assassin
has it all: Nazi war
criminals, unscrupu-
lous Swiss bankers,
art looted from Jews
during the Holocaust,
a world-renowned violinist whose past is the key to
the art thefts, and a hero whose imperfections lend
humanity to his seeming dispassion.
Israeli Gabriel Allon didn't set out to be an opera-
tive for Mossad. It is a life left behind for the satis-
factions of his chosen profession — restoring
Renaissance masterpieces. But when Allon is called
to a mansion in Zurich for the restoration of a prize
painting, he finds himself not only face-to-face with
Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, but toe-to-lifeless-
body with the Raphael's now-dead owner.
The chinks surrounding a decades-old suicide are
beginning to fall, and Silva's Allon has been set up to
catch them.
There's more to The English Assassin than a racing
plot and deft sketches of European capitals and
coastal Corsican villages. Silva's characters are well
drawn and quirky enough to set them apart from
the familiars from central casting.
In addition to the tortured Allon, Silva dishes up
the reluctant spy's handler — Ari Shamron, "an iron
bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as
he walked."
Allon is plagued by two nemeses — the assassin
of the novel's title and a meticulous and calculating
Swiss, Gerhardt Peterson. Both men, while assuredly
the book's bad guys, nevertheless evince startling
flashes of humanity.
Silva moves the plot along, allowing Allon a clue
here, an informant there, but before our hero can
put two and two together, allies are silenced.
I was reminded of Hansel and Gretel. No sooner do
the hapless siblings look back to check their trail of bread-
crumbs than it disappears. Allon's trail, too, is littered
with corpses of those from whom he needs answers.
With an ending as satisfying as it was surprising,
The English Assassin rates space in your beach bag
this summer. Silva is at work on his sixth novel.
Until then, those new to this author can content
themselves with this, his fifth book, and then double
back for books one through four.
— Debra B. Darvick
6/28
2002
72
and the Strudelbakers.
That's
Strudelbakers as in
delectable pastry, not
Studebaker as in car
of a bygone era.
These clarifications
aside, Jagendorf, an
Austrian-born Israeli,
does write of a bygone era — that of wartime and
post-war England.
Wolfy Helfgott's voice rings true, hilarious and
consistently poignant. With a child's penchant for
categorizing, Wolfy has all the "refugees" of his world
-- Chaim, Frida, Mendl — pegged.
Frida is "more sick person than crefijee'" and
Mendl is a jumpy "refigee" who is "always waiting
for the worst to happen, like being sent to Australia
in a ship for enemy aliens."
Beyond parsing refugees, Wolfy observes everything
in the post-war London that is now his home: neigh-
bors puzzled at the ways of these people, the Jews; the
Bishop of Lichfield, whose prize to Wolfy for answer-
ing why Mary gave birth to Jesus in the manger
inevitably creates fireworks at home; the landlord who
clacks his false teeth to make Wolfy laugh.
Wolfy's is simultaneously a world of confusion and
lies, joy and comfort. His mother, anticipating her
death from TB, has written a set of letters to be
mailed to her aged parents in Tel Aviv once she suc-
cumbs.
Wolfy, dutifully reciting Kaddish for his deceased
mother — "It was like being tested in Latin gram-
mar three times a day every day for a year" — par-
ticipates in the charade albeit "disgusted with him-
self. He was putty. There was nofight in him."
Wolfy fights back in the only way he knows how:
He scrawls his postscript as illegibly as possible.
But if his nuclear home life leaves a bitter taste in
his mouth, life with the strudelbakers is much
sweeter. When he is with his adopted aunt and
uncle, Mendl and Rosa, even the silence of their
apartment is "crammed full of the spicy smell of the
strudel. It fills the cold rooms with the fragrance of
fruit and cinnamon and roasted nuts and baked
dough."
For this couple, strudel is their "perfect child, an
object of praise, a source of pleasure and pride,
warm, silent and ready to be devoured."
The same could be said about Jagendorf's novel.
— Debra B. Darvick
(11111):CIC
•
Complete Tales of
Ketzia Gold com-
bines the odd partic-
ulars of the daily life
of a young woman
with the universal
moral and spiritual
struggles of the folk-
tale.
Often using tech-
niques and actual
stories from Yiddish,
Russian and German tales, Kate Bernheimer
shows the challenging family life of Ketzia Gold,
a young American girl growing up in the suburbs.
While Ketzia's relationship with her sisters and
parents seems to play out like a troubled story
from the Brothers Grimm, her life running away
from home is peppered with the odd moral spirits
of early Yiddish tales.
Though the novel often circles back to her
upbringing, its main concern is Ketzia's relation-
•
ship with her high-school boyfriend, and their
subsequent marriage and divorce. More than sim-
ply a story of failed romance, the novel is an
investigation of the psychological, spiritual and
emotional life of the main character.
Working as a transcription typist for a private
detective firm, Ketzia is constantly concerned
with the functions of everyday conversation, and
is often overwhelmed with the difficulties and
hidden meanings in human interaction.
"Typing is my career, after all, and not talking.
For example, whenever I absolutely must speak on
the phone with my mother, I type the whole
thing out on the table with my fingers."
Ketzia tries to navigate adulthood, but she is
awed by fear and love, and finds herself moving in
and out of daydreams and her own complex per-
sonal mythologies. The effects of this internal
world on her husband and her husband's effect on
it often create tense emotional dramas that seem,
like most tragedies, as avoidable as they are neces-
sary.
It is common to hope that hearing the story of
a life (fictional or not) will help one understand
that life. With The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold,
Bernheimer has offered something far greater —
not the ability to understand the life of one
woman but the opportunity to know her.
Joshua Beckman
—
FICTION
on page 76