144
MAUREEN HOWARD
currency. Kortz's final confession is a lingering, beautifully written stop
in the action; sadly late in the game, I found that I might have cared.
As a postscript, this from Nabokov's foreword to
The Defense,
which
illustrates his way of working into a theme so that it is never an over–
lay, but is always central and necessary to the feeling of his work:
My story was difficult to compose, but I greatly enjoyed taking
advantage of this or that unage and scene to introduce a fatal
pattern into Luzhin's life and to endow the description of a garden,
a journey, a sequence of humdrum events, with the semblance of a
game of skill, and, especially in the final chapters, with that of a
regular chess attack demolishing the innermost elements of the poor
fellow's sanity.
Thou Worm Jacob
by Mark Mirsky calls upon the whole Jewish
canon from Sholem Aleichem to Malamud, and yet it cannot be put
down as merely parochial. As a novel Mirsky's book is really a collection
of tales about the dilapidated BIue Hill section of Boston. The apparatus
that strings them together is light and acceptable: ten adult males are
required in the synagogue for the evening Schul, and so we have their
stories. They arrive at the synagogue before sundown only by way of a
contrived miracle - zooming above the rush-hour traffic in a junkman's
cart. The whlinsey of a Chagall flight may be intended, but the scene
glares with the mechanical levitations of Disney.
"I've got the whole state of Jewish affairs right between my fingers,"
Mirsky's narrator says at the outset to let us know he's on top of the
situation. At his worst Mirsky can stuff a tale with as many presumably
hilarious Yiddish references as a Broadway musical, but most of the
time he plays very nicely with the self-pitying tag end of Jewish culture:
fables, parables, anecdotes are written with full command of the genre.
It's a tribute to Mirsky's real strength that he can entertain us with the
comic Jewish mode he's caught up in, and not be dismissed for that
accomplishment. That he can do justice to a style is not very interesting,
and
Thou Worm Jacob
could easily be self-defeating were it not for
two excellent stories.
"The Shammos from Aroostook County" is the history of an old
man, Pfeffer, who sells out his life to live in his dreams. Mirsky con–
structs an interplay between Pfeffer's fantasies (for which he has a
genius) and life (for which he has no talent at all) with such grace that
all the ethnic trappings recede and we are at last in an environment of
real fiction. The range within the story is masterful- a lyric passage
in which the old Shammos has an erotic vision of Lilith in the woods of
Maine; an instructive narrative voice
with
a touch of the biblical; the
old man's fabrications turned to brilliant monologues ; or brutal ex-
