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Cover Story

READING BUG from page 27

FIMION

ki MUCH ADO
ABOUT JESSIE
ICAPLA1V

effortlessly written as Cohen's first novel.
However, since Jane Austen in Boca was a
masterpiece of light fiction, Much Ado
certainly deserves a place on your sum-
mer reading list.

— Diana Lieberman

THE OUTSIDE
WORLD

By Paula Marantz Cohen
(St. Martin's Press;
280 pp.; $23.95)

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817980

hirley MacLaine may remember
past lives as an Indian princess, a
peg-legged pirate and a citizen of
e doomed island of Atlantis, but Jessie
Kaplan of Cherry Hill, N.J., spent sever-
al months in the late 1500s romancing
William Shakespeare — and she can
prove it.
That's the thesis of Much Ado About
Jessie Kaplan the latest novel by Paula
Marantz Cohen.
The author of the best-selling Jane
Austen in Boca, Cohen has produced
another rompfor the literate Jewish
woman — a big, chunk of America's
novel-readers. '-
Jessie Kaplan, a fOrmerly modest and
mild-mannered widow Withsa loving
family, suddenly throws everyone into a
panic by declaring that, in a former life,
she was the mysterious "Dark Lady" of
Shakespeare's sonnets. The beautiful
daughter of Venetian Jews, she booted
out the bard when she learned he had a
wife back in Stratford.
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is a
crude characterization of her father and
uncle, Kaplan tells the therapist hired by
her long-suffering daughter Carla to
straighten her 'out. Hamlet was also
based on her family, she says.
"My cousin Golda's husband was
Guildenstern and Poppa's partner was
Rosencrantz," Kaplan explains. "In the
play they betrayed the hero, didn't they,
and he had them killed. Just another
way of getting back. Guildenstern was a
very nice man; traded in fine fabrics."
Kaplan's 21st-century family also
includes her son-in-law, a burnt-out gas-
troenterologist; two obstreperous grand-
children; and another daughter, Margot,
a drop-dead gorgeous unmarried lawyer.
When she met Shakespeare in 1594,
Kaplan claims, "I looked just like
Margot — and he wasn't used to that
sort of thing."
As Kaplan's married daughter tries to
"cure" her mother of her fixation with all
things Elizabethan, she also deals with
her depressed husband, plans her daugh-
ter's bat mitzvah and tries to make her
son behave so he won't be expelled from
elementary school.
Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan is not as

T

he Outside World is very much a
novel of manners, focusing on
the rhythms of daily life in the
Orthodox world. Author Tova Mirvis
(The Ladies Auxiliary) explains that ele-
ments of Flaubert's Madame Bova?), are
tucked into the novel, where 19th-cen-
airy France is replaced by 21st- century
Brooklyn and suburban New Jersey.
In skillfully depicting the inner life of
two communities — two very different
pockets of traditional life — and their
relationships with the larger, out s i
woricr,'Mirvis walks in the path of the ,
late Chaim Potok, whose first novel, The
Chosen, navigated between the Chasidic
and Modern Orthodox worlds.
Potok portrayed an evolving friend-
ship between two boys with very differ-
ent fathers at the heart of his story, and
Mirvis brings together a bride and
groom from two contrasting Orthodox
families — one modern and one fervent-
ly Orthodox.
Mirvis knowingly presents the world
of shidduch dates, with many matches
made nowhere near heaven. Week after
week, Tzippy heads to hotel lobbies to
sip soft drinks in meetings that feel more
like job interviews than potentially lov-
ing encounters. Meanwhile her mother
waits in their Brooklyn home, aching to
plan her wedding, "indulging in dreams
that were big and white and made of
satin."
At 22, Tzippy is thought to be on the
verge of spinsterhood. When she asks
her friends about their experiences, they
compare who was taken to fancier
places, and Tzippy wonders if she is the
only one "who felt suspended over the
moment." She longs for something she
can't quite define.
In Israel, she finds her beshert on her
own, and he turns out to be the son of
her mother's college roommate. Baruch
is formerly Bryan, who grew up in a
Modern Orthodox community in New
Jersey.
After studying in Israel for a year after
high school and returning with "religious

fervor and love for the letter of the law,"
Baruch finds his parents' world lacking.
His shift to the right is not uncommon.
Planning the wedding accentuates the
differences between the families, but
they fade when the day arrives. The
wedding is large and full of joy and tulle,
an endless lineup of cakes, guests doing
the "yeshiva boy shuffle" on the dance
floor. Afterwards, Tzippy and Baruch
head to Memphis, where they escape
both families and expectations.
This is a novel driven more by charac-
ter than plot, and Mirvis seems to enjoy
her creations: Tzippy's mother Shayna
who became religious in college strives to
belong and be seen as an insider. Her
father Hershel is launching one get-rich
scheme after another; like his wife, he
thrives on his dreams, but his are not of
weddings. Baruch's mother Naomi turns
to a more spiritual Judaism and wants to
bridge the gap between her son and her
husband Joel, a corporate lawyer who
questions the tradition.
Mirvis writes with gentle humor. She
piles on details about food and ritual,
too, and gets it right. She also captures
the challenges of leading a religious life.

— Sandee Brawarsky

THE SINGING
FIRE

By Lilian Nattel
(Scribner; 321 pp.; $25)

B

.

:

eginning i n the 1880s, many
Jews left Eastern Europe. By
1920, 2 Million of them ended
up in the United States, a large number
on the Lower East Side, of New York.
Some emigrants from theSe,shtetlach
only got as far as London, where they
congregated in the East End. These tWo -
Jewish ghettos provided a home from
which upwardly mobile Jews made
strenuous efforts to escape.
.
Numerous books, poems and plays
were written about life on New York's
Lower East Side. No such literary output
developed in England. The British
Jewish establishment did not welcome
the victims of Russian pogroms,
although about 100,000 of them settled
in Great Britain, where Jews had been
expelled in 1290 and not readmitted
until the 17th century.
Nattel, a Canadian novelist who lives
in Toronto, successfully tries in The
Singing Fire to fill the void in our knowl-
edge about the plight of Russian Jews
who came to London in the closing
years of the 19th century. She does so by
describing the fictional adventures of
two young women in the East End ghet-