BOOKS
A JEW WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
THE STOLEN JEW. By Jay Neugeboren.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
$14.95
The Stolen Jew
is actually two novels. The one by Jay
Neugeboren that you can hold in your hands and read (an act I
unreservedly endorse) contains, almost intact, another novel by
Neugeboren's protagonist, Nathan Malkin. In the forty years
since Nathan wrote his novel, also called
The Stolen Jew,
it has
become acclaimed as a classic and Nathan has abandoned writ–
ing in order to provide for his schizophrenic younger brother.
Now sixty-four, Nathan reflects bitterly on his spent youth
and talent. His brother has just died. His brother's son encour–
ages Nathan to write fiction again. But Nathan has a better idea:
Knowing that his novel
The Stolen Jew
(which is about a nine–
teenth-century Russian Jew kidnapped to serve in the Czar's
army) is popular in the Soviet, Union for its severe anti -Czarist
(and, Soviet officials believe, anti -Semitic) stance, Nathan forges
an undiscovered manuscript of his classic and travels to Moscow
with his nephew to sell the forgery to the Soviet government.
The romantic nephew convinces Nathan to spend his scammed
rubles on exit visas for dissidents, and he tricks Nathan into
helping smuggle a "refusenik" dissident, a real-life stolen Jew,
I
from a Soviet psychiatric prison, in a brisk climax to a long,
rich, complex book.
Neugeboren's
The Stolen Jew
is a great rarity: complex to
think about, easy to read.
It
ca n be read as an espionage tale, a
\
love story, a Jewish novel, a historical novel, a metafiction, a
psychological study, or even as a ghost story. Each genre of
)
which
The Stolen Jew
partakes has its inherent weakness-love
stories tend to sap; espionage tales tend to dull cynicism; ghost
stories tend to ridiculous denouements . But Neugeboren's craft
in interweaving his genres is such that he extracts each genre's
strength, while discarding its foibles.
Neugeboren's love story, for example, between Nathan and
his brother's widow Rachel, does occasionally verge on the ba–
thetic. In one passage, they stroll through Prospect Park, which
