Stories Within Stories, on Heaven and Earth

By SANFORD PINSKER

The Angel of Forgetfulness
By Steve Stern
416 pages. Viking. $24.95.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me admit that I’m a card-carrying member of the Stern gang—not the Zionist paramilitary group that fought the British during the days before Israel became a state but, rather, a member of the band of literary critics who have been following Steve Stern wherever his wacky, altogether wonderful imagination would take him. In his latest and most ambitious novel thus far, Stern uses multiple narrators and complicated story lines to take us from heaven—where one of his characters, an angel, hails—to earth; from Memphis to the Lower East Side, circa 1910; from a hippie commune in Arkansas to the Prague synagogue where the most famous of all golems was formed. Small wonder that one character, bedazzled by the twists and turns, exclaims, “This is giving me a headache.”

No doubt many readers making their way through The Angel of Forgetfulness’s 400-plus pages will suffer headaches of their own. There are at least three novels here, each sharing floor space with the other. But whadda ride! Stern has never been higher-energy, freeer, or funnier. His first fictions revolved around the long-ago Pinch district of Memphis, a section populated by colorful Yiddish-speaking merchants. As a folklorist, Stern collected their reminiscences and translated them into English. Later, he added twists of magical realism and in the process, crafted a fictional ethos entirely his own.

Take, for example, “Tale of a Kite,” one of Stern’s most anthologized stories. It ends as a wonder-working rabbi with a magic kite carries off a group of children. By contrast, this novel introduces a fallen angel and his half-mortal son, who take up residence on the Lower East Side at a time when its crowded streets teemed with Yiddish culture. Now, Jewish lore is rife with angels but it's hard to think of one with a more intriguing job description than the one Mokey Fargenish has: “My task [he tells us] was to give newborns an initiatory nose tweak, which erased any lingering wisdom they might have brought with them out of the womb: God forbid their prenatal knowledge of paradise should prejudice them against life on earth.” Hence, Mokey’s role as the “angel of forgetfulness,” not only the source for the novel’s title but also for the unfinished manuscript being penned throughout its pages.

The result is a vertiginous array of stories-with-in-stories as Nathan Hart, an impoverished proofreader for a Yiddish newspaper tries to seduce Chaineh (“Keni”) Freyda, a painter and “wayward Jewish daughter.” Normally, the likes of Nathan wouldn’t stand a chance but when this soap opera builds up a head of steam, the Nathan-Keni relationship turns very steamy indeed. Even more impressive, Stern’s renders his Lower East Side demi-monde with meticulous attention to the details of places and people. Indeed, I cannot think of another novel, including Abraham Cahan’s 1918 insider account, The Rise of David Levinsky, that does a richer, a denser job of giving us a feel for the blab of the Lower East Side’s streets. Here is a representative example of of Nsathan’s ruminations:

Though he recognized the names of the streets he floundered though—Rivington, Christie, Grand—they did not impress him with their familiarity. They were, he decided, the streets of America as described in heaven by the dead, who had never seen them. They were formal streets of stylized refuse and squalor, once removed from the real: tenements that, for all their decrepitude, might have doubled as music boxes, the pushcarts like pulpits and scaffolds, wattled wives that could as well have been rust-bucket barges or lemurs or barnacle geese.

In addition, there are cameo mentions of Forward editor, Abraham Cahan, president William Howard Taft, along with various members of the Jewish Black Hand (some real, some invented), and enough  Yiddish poets, playwrights, and politicians to rival the index of Irving Howe’s encyclopedic study, World of Our Fathers.

Keni’s dying wish is that her nephew, Saul Bozoff, finish Nathan’s unwieldy manuscript about the angel of forgetfulness. Long hidden in the hollow of a tree, and eventually covered over with cement, Saul makes his way to Seward Park and what will now be the work of his life—this after a decade-long stint of sex-and-drugs in Arkansas, followed by a position in a small college’s Jewish Studies program.

At one point Saul describes himself as “buoyed on a froth of words, all nonsense and free association, but somehow involving thoughts and sensations that didn’t necessarily belong to me.” The same “froth of words” applies equally to Stern. His paragraphs are not only models of stylistic density but also of how to place right words in the right places. As for the novel itself, it can be encapsulated by the simple Yiddish phrase, A mol iz geven (“Once upon a time”) or as Nathan points out: “‘It’s about a fallen angel’… and straightway he began to unfold the cockamamy conceit: how the angel’s son by a mortal woman, vos hayst Hannah, was reared in paradise, where the angel dumped him after a pogrom on earth.” Not surprisingly, the liberated Keni is hooked, and the game, as they say, is on—for her, and for us.