BOOKS
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Neugeboren makes seem like an idyllic village green, right down
to the touch of a Brooklyn cop on horseback tipping his hat and
reminding them to call him for help "should anyone molest
you." But Neugeboren can't afford to overindulge in sentiment,
and he doesn ' t. (The next chapter plunges immediately into the
opposite excess: taken from Nathan's
The Stolen jew,
it de–
scribes the savagery of Cossack soldiers, told from the stolen
Jew 's point of view.) Even more than his deft scene shifting,
Neugeboren's clear language vindicates
The Stolen jew's
most
sen ti mental passages.
Examine the resolution of Nathan's and Rachel's love affair
in the final paragraph of the book.
Below the table his knees were actually trembling, he real–
ized . H e felt like a very young and nervous boy. He shud–
dered . The four words had been in his head for weeks, he
knew. For years. "Will you marry me?" he asked.
"Yes, Nathan," she said. "Yes."
The allusion to
Ulysses
in Rachel's blooming affirmation is no
great marvel. But Neugeboren's ease in making the allusion,
while at the same time making it work for him, is. Molly Bloom
fairly shrieks her "Yes"; Rachel barely whispers hers. But the
reader hears both of them at once. And that is the achievement of
this book: the pleasurable reconciliation of opposites.
Neugeboren's cleverest dialogue, for example, crops up
during his most serious scenes. Whenever Nathan is alone after
his brother's death , the dead brother suddenly materializes to
chat. These long eerie dialogues on subjects like the nature of
sanity and the purpose of death are filled with outrageous puns,
ridiculous bilingual witticisms and insults-all delivered in a
rapid-fire, (dead) brotherly manner.
The Stolen jew
finally does so many things at once that the
reader finds himself picking and choosing among his sources of
pleasure. Someone who chooses not to enjoy Nathan's repartee
with his ghostly brother and characters can still derive pleasure
from these uncanny scenes. A Freudian reader would call these
conversations an expiation of Nathan's guilt. A spiritualist
would say tha t his brother's ghost is actually haunting Nathan. A
novelist would recognize Nathan's construction of imaginary
