Arts & Entertainment

Object Lesson

In Great House, Nicole Krauss explores the
connections between memory and weighty things.

Sandee Brawarsky
Special to the Jewish News

A

Hungarian-born antiques dealer
with a fine eye for furniture helps
people find pieces of their past —
perhaps a chest from a living room broken
up by the Nazis or a porcelain mantel clock.
In his own stone house in Jerusalem,
George Weisz has reassembled, piece
by piece, his father's study, destroyed in
Budapest in 1944. He has long understood
that he couldn't bring the dead back to life
but that finding the chair they once sat in or
the bed where they slept could bring great
and necessary comfort to those who remem-
bered.
For Weisz, his own missing piece, the place
where he longs to sit, is his father's massive
wooden desk lined with 19 drawers of differ-
ent sizes, including one he locked as a child.
That desk first appears in Nicole Krauss'
stunning new novel, Great House (Norton;
$24.95), in an apartment on Central Park
West: A young poet is planning to return to
his native Chile and finds a friend of a friend,
a novelist, who will watch his furniture in
case he plans to come back to New York. But,
instead, he disappears at the hands of the
Chilean secret police. The novelist goes on
to write seven books at the desk before it is
reclaimed by an Israeli woman.
Great House was named one of 100
Notable Books of 2010 by the New York
Times and was nominated for a prestigious
National Book Award in October (it lost out
to Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule); several
months ago, the New Yorker named Krauss,
36, one of the 20 best writers under age 40.

The novel unfolds through the voices
of four narrators whose stories are linked:
the New York novelist, a father in Israel, an
English professor whose wife wrote at the
desk and a young American woman who
befriends the twin son and daughter of
Weisz, falling in love with the son.
With grace and originality, Krauss writes
of loss and many kinds of loneliness, the
connections between memory and objects,
between memory and identity, and about
uncertainty. The desk is a hulking mystery,
and the characters in each story, even after
many years together, are still in many ways
unknown to one another. Slowly, the reader
comes to fit together these pieces.
Krauss, who began her writing career as a
poet, chooses each word with much care. She
seems more interested in characters than
plot and captures the emotional landscape
of each, often pausing for an extra moment
with a character in his or her private world.
She describes Romanian housekeeper
Bogna who has "a limp, water on the knee,
I think, a cup of the Danube that sloshed
around as she thumped from room to room
with her mop and feather duster, sighing as
if freshly reminded of a disappointment"
In an interview at a Park Slope cafe near
her Brooklyn home, Krauss explains that
she started this novel — her third, after the
highly praised The History of Love and Man
Walks into a Room — soon after her first
child was born. Part of it appeared in the New
Yorker, "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky"
As a new mother, she was thinking a lot
about things that are passed on to children
and the burden of inheritance. She also was
interested in pursuing characters who made

Nicole Krauss

says her

Nicole Krauss:

plots are

different choices than she.
influenced by
Krauss, in a recent con-
what's on her
versation at the New York
mind — the
Public Library with Israeli
burden of
writer David Grossman,
inheritance.
spoke of how much she
loves the novel as a genre,
how wide the possibilities are of what one
might accomplish.
She writes at a huge desk in the study
of the home she shares with her husband,
novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and their two
young sons. She inherited the desk made of
inlaid wood, created for the upper-floor stu-
dio space, when they moved into the house.
While she doesn't particularly like it, she
doesn't want to destroy it as would be neces-
sary in order to move it.
Last summer, she and Foer spent a
few months in Israel, as participants in a
pilot cultural arts program at Mishkenot
Sha'ananim in Jerusalem, and then in Tel
Aviv. She also traveled to Israel with some
frequency while growing up in New York
to visit her grandparents who moved there
from London. For her, Israel is familial —
and she felt that every story she heard, every
episode she witnessed, was potentially her
material there for the taking.
The novel's title hints back at Jewish his-
tory, referring to an academy set up in Yavneh
in the first century by Yohanan ben Zakkai to
preserve and strengthen Jewish learning after
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Weisz, son of a scholar, narrates the books
final chapter and explains that the school
was known as the "Great House," after a
phrase in the Book of Kings.
"Only later," says Weisz, "after Ben Zakkai

Named by the

New Yorker as

one of the 20

best writers

under age 40.

died, did his answer slowly reveal itself,
the way an enormous mural only begins
to make sense as you walk backward away.
Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple
into a book, a book as vast and holy and
intricate as the city itself. Bend a people
around the shape of what they lost, and let
everything mirror its absent form:'
Then, Weisz suggests, "Perhaps that is
what they mean when they speak of the
Messiah: a perfect assemblage of the infinite
parts of the Jewish memory. In the next
world we will all dwell together in the mem-
ory of our memories:'
Like many writers who are Jewish, Krauss
dislikes being pigeonholed as a Jewish writer.
She takes certain pride in it and also "feels
a certain gratitude to the bottomless well
of Jewish life, to which, I'm sure, I'll always
return in my work.
"But I wanted to note — and maybe
this is the origin of that conflicted sense I
described — that what interests me most
is not, of course, religious faith, which I've
never had, but the tradition of argument, dis-
sent, dissatisfaction and questioning that is
so central to Judaism and forms the basis of
all rabbinic literature."
She adds, "Perhaps the word is really
doubt, which is the constant refrain in the
Jewish relationship to God, and, as it filters
down from the sacred, to all things."

ews

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

las In Theaters Now

11:1 Looking for a movie for New Year's
Eve? Currently playing in town are
Little Fockers, Gulliver's Travels and

W

0) The King's Speech.

Ben Stiller

34

Fockers is the third
installment of the
movies starring Ben
Stiller, 45, as Greg
Focker, a Jewish guy
married to the non-
Jewish daughter of
Jack, an overbear-
ing ex-CIA agent

December 30 2010

(Robert DeNiro). Barbra Streisand, 68,
and Dustin Hoffman, 71, reprise their
roles as Greg's parents. As the sequel
begins, we learn that Greg and his wife
now have twins, and he has taken a job
as a drug salesman.
Gulliver is a modern, 3-D take on
the famous 18th- century satire.
Jack Black, 41, plays
Lemuel Gulliver, a
lowly clerk at a New
York newspaper.
Smitten with an edi-
tor named Darcy
Silverman (Amanda
Peet, 38), he passes
off articles lifted from
Jack Black

the Internet as his own. Silverman
sends Gulliver off to write about the
Bermuda Triangle. He goes there, only
to be supernaturally transported to
the land of Lilliput. Gulliver towers
over the tiny people of Lilliput. He tells
them tall tales about how important
he is in his own land. Jason Segel, 30,
plays Horatio, a Lilliputian in love with
the King of Lilliput's daughter (Emily
Blunt).
The King's Speech is based on the
true story of how the current Queen
Elizabeth's father, King George VI
(Colin Firth) of Great Britain, overcame
his terrible stutter with the help of
an unconventional teacher (Geoffrey

Rush). The original screenplay is by
David Seidler, 71. Born in the U.K., he
and his English Jewish parents fled to
America in 1940 to escape the Blitz.

Sport Short

The 2010 Outland Trophy, for the
best interior lineman in college foot-
ball, was just pre-
sented to Wisconsin
Badger Gabe
Carimi. His team will
play Texas Christian
University in the
Rose Bowl on New
Year's Day. Carimi is
a practicing Jew. ❑
Gabe Carimi