Adventures in Storyland

By ERIKA DREIFUS

Kafka In Brontëland and Other Stories
By Tamar Yellin
153 pages. Toby Press. $14.95.

In her second book, Kafka in Brontëland, Tamar Yellin offers up a collection of 13 short stories. You’re unlikely to have read anything like them before, although Yellin is a prodigiously published short story writer in her native England, with credits in The Jewish Quarterly and London Magazine, among others. Sometimes considered a writer of “fantasy”or “speculative fiction,” Yellin seems to cross genre definitions and boundaries, writing stories of seemingly everyday (if at least a little bit eccentric) characters in prose frequently infused with mystery and lyricism.

Born to a daughter of a Polish immigrant and a third-generation Jerusalemite, Yellin began writing fiction at a young age. She studied Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford; her first book, a novel titled The Genizah at the House of Shepher, is rooted in her own family history in Jerusalem. But as she revealed in an interview published last year on Fantastic Metropolis,Yellin feels “most comfortable with the short story. I like to write economically. Not minimalistically, mind—but I like every word, every sentence, to have weight. When I write stories I can be as brief as I like. And yet a short story can embrace an entire life, an entire universe.” It can, indeed, and in Yellin’s hands, it does.

In the collection’s opening story, “Return to Zion,” a narrator named Telemachus describes the history of his parents, Penelope and Odysseus (“and many acknowledge this is a strange name for a Jew”). This Odysseus, a factory worker, dreams of a return to Zion, and shares these wishes with his son, but “the farthest he had traveled in my mother’s company was to the beach, where he sat in his shoes and socks and read the newspaper.” Despite the persistent efforts of travel agent Cyril Cohen, who deluges Penelope with travel brochures, Odysseus “would not take a cruise, or a coach trip, or fly by jumbo jet to a foreign capital.” In the end, while Odysseus lies dying, Penelope drinks wine with the travel agent and his brothers. “Her suitors.”

Other stories cover less chronological time, and aren’t necessarily focused on Jewish themes or characters. In “An Italian Child,” an English father sits in his office the day before his son’s seventh birthday, thinking of a place far away, “high in the hills west of Florence, off the road to Viareggio, next to the chapel of San Stefano, in a villa hung with jasmine and a pergola of roses where they eat in summer: that is where my son lives.” He thinks of his son. As he leaves the office and later, home alone, he thinks of his son’s Italian mother. We learn that nearly two years have passed since their marriage ended, and then comes a remarkable passage, lyrical and sharply perceptive at once, as the narrator tells us he has heard that his former wife is “well and happy”:

Sometimes, perhaps, she thinks of me, with the nostalgia of complete detachment. I am glad she is well; I’m not surprised she is happy. Who can blame her, everyone said when they heard she had gone back, isn’t it very lovely there, and after all, it is the place she belongs. I wanted to answer that we belong together, that a husband and wife should be their own country, that one should not abandon the other. But I did not say so, for these notions of loyalty are not popular. The kingdom or love is not a fascist state, even under the rule of marriage. All citizens retain the right of free passage, and may, if they so wish, revoke their citizenship.

Sometimes the memories are less immediate. In “Dr Stein,” the narrator recalls childhood Sunday visits to a retired psychiatrist. “He resembled a petty Freud without genius, a man chiselled in the granite of his disappointments. He was strangely generous. He gave us his Rubinstein records because he hated them, and disposed of his tickets to Pinter like so many football cards. Occasionally he forgot himself and let slip an observation of such humanity that the room in which we sat seemed blessed.” Not much “happens” within this tale; it’s more a series of recollections of the doctor and his wife, and in the end the narrator concludes that “Even my own memories are hazy, partial, more emblematic than actual; they are not flattering to Dr Stein. But they are more resonant perhaps than those of most people, who did not encounter him when they were children, who escaped his company unscathed, and who do not bear forever the marks of a malign influence.”

“Hazy, partial, more emblematic than actual” may be how some perceive many of these stories. These are not ordinary beginning-middle-end tales, with clear conflicts and resolutions. They’re more complex. And they are erudite stories, invoking not only Greek mythology and Biblical history, but also (as the title suggests) Kafka and the Brontës. Some Americans may stumble over the stories' British references and qualities, too. Add gaps and breaks in the prose and frequently unnamed first-person narrators and some may conclude that these are not easy stories, not the kind to be read, perhaps, just before bedtime. But at their base these are very human stories, stories about people at work, people growing up, people growing old. And they're very much worth the effort they may demand.