The Jazz Player

By BENJAMIN POLLAK

What is it about the past that exerts such a strong pull on the imaginations of young Jewish novelists? For the last decade or so, Jewish writers have sent their protagonists on jaunts through Eastern European shtetlekh and the bustling streets of the old Lower East Side; there have been stories of Jews in nineteenth century New York and the wild west, countless novels set during the reign of the Third Reich, and even a swashbuckler set a millennium ago in the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria.

Ami Silber’s new novel is no exception to this trend. Set in Los Angeles in 1948, Early Bright pays homage to the rhythms and sounds of America in the first half of the 20th century—the fast-paced bebop of the forties, the lilting syntax of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and the all-but-forgotten slang of hepcats and hard-boiled hustlers.

Silber, who pens historical romances under the name Zoe Archer, is an ambitious ventriloquist, projecting her voice across decades into the body of her protagonist, Louis Greenberg, a handsome Bronx-born pianist and con artist. The results, however, can be disorienting. The narrative, like its first-person narrator, struggles to reconcile the distant poles of its identity, jumping from the World of Our Fathers to the world of West Coast jazz, sometimes in the space of only a few sentences. Describing the club where he plays, for instance, Louis narrates, “A riot of heat and sound had met me as I stepped inside. The band was already cooking, the room was packed. It was something of a joke to call Dee’s a parlor. If my bubbe’s parlor looked like this joint, nobody would’ve come over for mah-jong.”

Of course, Jews have had a long and complicated relationship with jazz and its thorny racial politics. It was a Jew, Benny Goodman, who fronted the first popular integrated jazz band, but it was another Jew, Al Jolson, who united jazz with blackface on the silver screen in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. In the story of her own Jewish jazz musician, Silber presents many of the difficulties of pre-integration America but few of its complexities. Her protagonist is Jewish, but—at least in his relationship to jazz, and its African American performers and fans—he’s simply white. Louis struggles to be accepted as a serious musician, not just a “jive white square trying to make it like he’s a colored hepcat,” and, in a take on the classic story of forbidden love, tries to sustain a secret affair with Beatrice Langston, a beautiful African American woman who frequents the club where he plays. (Her surname is a nod to Langston Hughes, from whose book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred the title of Silber’s novel is borrowed.)

Racism is just one of the many obstacles that confront Silber’s beleaguered protagonist, though it is, perhaps, the only one that’s not of his own making. Exiled from New York after losing his father’s respect (Louis is intentionally vague about the nature of his crime), he seems bent on proving just how much of a creep he can be without having his readers’ sympathy go the way of his father’s. Three years after the end of World War II and the liberation of Auschwitz, Louis, who dodged the draft years earlier, earns a few extra bucks by cashing in on the sentimental weaknesses of war widows. “I’ve got what they call grift sense,” Louis explains proudly.

Each sucker and chump I meet is laid open to me, so I see their tiny little hopes, their wants, the rooms they live in and the windows they stare out of, dreaming. Those dreams are the keys that unlock each con, everybody wanting something else. Everybody thinks it’s got to get better, there’s something more than just this. That’s what I sell them: their own secret souls.

The desire to have something else or to become someone else is at the heart of Silber’s novel. Moving between personae and voices, her narrator is, in turns, the passionate artist, the good Jewish son who laments the loss of his family, the hard-boiled conman, and the smooth talking Casanova who hops into bed with the widows whose money he steals. If the contours of Louis’ identity are blurred and mercurial, however, his ambitions are not. The plot begins to take shape when Louis, in the hopes of winning his father’s regard and a place for Beatrice and himself in society, resolves to take the American Dream by the throat by cutting a hit record. “I pictured my record hitting the stores, selling out,” Louis fantasizes.

And if I wanted to step out with a colored woman, then the hell with everyone else, I’d do what I like. I’d throw cash onto the floor and watch them all bend over to pick those bills up, but it’d be nothing to me, all that money. Already, they’d be clamoring for my next record, the money coming in, and then my father, Beatrice, everyone, they just couldn’t turn me down.

As a plan, it’s wildly impractical, but as a plot, it proves more effective. Almost despite myself, I was sucked into Louis’s desperate machinations as he tries to con his way into a recording studio and back into the heart of his father. Silber’s prose is often deadened by an over-enthusiasm for period slang and tough-guy affectations that yield excruciating clichés like, “If that piano had been a woman, I would’ve fucked it” or “I was a gonif, but I was an honest gonif.” At her best, though, Silber crafts a plot with moments of suspense and urgency.

Early Bright is evidence of Silber’s versatility and enthusiasm, her taste for spicy language and her eye for scenes of romantic desperation. Ultimately, though, the novel shares the predicament of its protagonist. Jazz novel, crime thriller, romance, and work of Jewish fiction, it takes on many roles without fully succeeding at any.