BOOKS
I look at Hoover's unbelievable thicknes . He looks like a small safe.
Ho ver looks at her and sees a generation of girls gone wrong-hair
bobbing, sequined dresses, white slavery, convertibl e cars. He looks
at her and sees real beauty hung openly like a side of beef in a cooler.
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That is good, even wonderful, but these localized felicities don't
accumulate to move or involve us. Apple wants to do standup comedy,
that 's his secret. He wants those one-liners ("To kiss her would be
acupuncture."), those Yiddish cadences, those tics and nudges. And it
would be a blessing to his readers if he would give them the
spritz
direct
instead of asking his overworked plot and characters to carry his
considerable wit around.
If
Gail Godwin's
Violet Clay
leads a life in which nothing has
happened, the hero of Stefan Kanfer's
The Eighth Sin
leads a life in
which so much has happened that it is impossible to absorb it. A
Gypsy, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp as a boy, mistrustful
of language but inwardly articulate, Benoit Kaufman rules
The Eighth
Sin
with his rich and relentless consciousness. Kanfer takes him from
childhood to adulthood in chapters that follow Benoit's experiences as
a young thief, serious artist, husband and father, and, intermittently,
pursuer of Eleazar ]assy, Gypsy collaborator with the Nazis.
Kanfer scrupulously avoids exploiting Benoit's moral status as
survivor of the camps, a lways moving one step ahead of easy senti–
ments and predictable allegiances. Benoit's first person narration is
skeptical, ironic; he is a si lent refuser of consolations and systems. Yet
his irony doesn't undermine our interest or belief in him; on the
contrary, his defensive wit is sympathetic, moral, intelligent, embedded
deep in his character, plausibly sneering at times, yet not destructive.
His skepticism is, in fact, a matter of tact, a way of minimizing his self–
importance in the face of the large horrors he has witnessed. To
comment on those horrors would be presumptuous and redundant,
and Kanfer represents them in frozen italicized blocks inserted in the
narrative at just the right moment; the documentary sources coolly
indicated just below them:
ITEM: The Germans began to kill the Gypsies. There were two
houses full of Gypsies. They threw small children out of high
windows onto the cobblestones and there was a lot of blood.
J.
Fikowski,
Ciganie na
polskich drogach
(Cracow:
Wyd/ Literackie, 1965)
