rev. of Elijah Visible by Thane Rosenbaum
Elijah Visible
Stories by Thane Rosenbaum. St. Martin’s Press, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Marcie Hershman.
This is as vibrant and provocative a collection of short fiction as I’ve read in years. That it is also a debut collection makes it all the more gratifying. Thane Rosenbaum, who, in his early thirties left a prestigious New York law firm in order to write, seems already an old hand at fiction, fashioning heartbreakingly astute stories out of labyrinths usually too dark, too steeply dangerous, too voracious and empty for most writers to navigate with much hope of safe arrival.
At the center of
Elijah Visible’s nine stories is the memory of the Holocaust. Made present here through its tenacity and weight rather than by its particulars, the Holocaust is the enormous inheritance bequeathed to the young, assimilated, American-born Jew, Adam Posner, who appears in all the stories. Adam’s parents are survivors of concentration camps, and their undetailed history seems more real to him than his own. As with so many in contemporary America, his is a sense-of-self in flux, yet as a child of survivors, his identity, conversely, is rooted.
The collection’s ingenious structure mimics the pull between inheritance and impermanence, as story after story slightly rearranges the reader’s assumption of who Adam is. In one tale, he’s an adult, in the next, a child; here, the setting is Miami, there, New York City; sometimes the character is orphaned, sometimes well-sheltered and lovingly parented. Rather than create a sense of discontinuity, the shifts become a matter of fascination: Look how different, the author seems to saying, the individual caught in a web of history can be. By the end, the feel is very much like that of a novel.
“Cattle Car Complex” opens the book with a no-holds-barred Kafkaesque transformation, as Adam Posner, a yuppie lawyer, finds himself stuck after-hours in the dark, airless cubicle of a Manhattan elevator. In the lobby, his Russian limo driver and the building’s Irish security guard listen to Adam’s growing hysteria through the intercom: “A brief interlude of silence was then followed by a chorus of moans and shrieks, as if a ward in a veterans’ hospital had become an orchestra of human misery, tuning up for a concert. ‘I don’t believe there are work camps! We won’t be happy. We will die there! I can feel it!’ . . . ‘What’s ‘e saying?’ the security guard asked.”
The raw power of this story is matched by the subtleties of others. “An Act of Defiance” has Adam as a dreary stickler of a professor who comes face to face with the inexplicable joy his elderly uncle — a long-lost European relative — takes in life. In the masterful and frighteningly funny “The Rabbi Double-Faults,” he is a bar mitzvah boy playing in a tennis match between two reunited brothers, one a wild, ultra-liberal Miami rabbi, the other now an Orthodox Israeli rabbi (both are survivors), as they battle to declare God’s presence in the universe as either “absent” or “all powerful.” In “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light,” Adam, an abstract expressionist painter whose hip nihilism seems empty even of emptiness’s meaning, clumsily seduces a Swedish fashion model by the glow of his mother’s
yohrzeit candle, lit to memorialize the anniversary of her death.
Elijah, Visible introduces a young writer who brings with him a long past and — as seems clear — a long, artistically rich future. Thane Rosenbaum’s first story collection is a cause for our celebration and reflection, both.
Marcie Hershman is the author of the novels Safe in America
and Tales of the Master Race,
which are now out in paperback (HarperPerennial). She teaches writing at Tufts University.
