It’s All Connected

By DAVID MOGOLOV

Leslie Epstein’s The Eighth Wonder of the World took eight years to write. Beyond the echo between his working period and the title, there’s something appropriate about that fact: attempting to build a wonder is time-consuming. And, not uncommonly, it requires slave labor.

The wonder spoken of in the title is a mile-high tower, a wartime tribute to Mussolini in honor of his triumph in Ethiopia. And the slave labor is that of Rome’s remaining Jews, saved from extinction by their labor, at least as long as that labor is required. They work upon a precipice, literally and figuratively. The longer they can be kept scaling the face of this enormous building, the longer they can keep themselves away from the train yards, packed into trains that will take them to a concentration camp.

Their predicament is only a tiny piece of Epstein’s latest novel, and eight years is only a tiny amount of time for a project, compared to the time he’d put into his other recent literary endeavor, a theatrical adaptation of his 1979 novel, King of the Jews. I recently sat down for dinner in a Brookline restaurant with Epstein, two nights before the curtain rose on a play that was, no exaggeration, 25 years in the making. What I learned is that in Epstein’s writing, remarkable coincidences abound, and not all of them were intentional.

Though they were published almost 30 years apart, Epstein says that the two novels came from the same source. “In 1961, I was studying in England, and I began to get very interested in myself as a Jew, and in the Holocaust, and I picked up the first of these books on the Holocaust… I still have it, and it’s falling apart with rubber bands around it. It’s called The Final Solution, by Gerald Reitlinger, an English writer, who had done all the spadework for everyone else that’s come behind. He has a one-half-of-a-page description of the leader of the Lodz ghetto, his image depicted on the postage stamps and money, riding around behind a white horse, lording it over his people and then licking the boots of the Germans. And I dog-eared the page. Then fifteen years later, looking about for a subject, I remembered something in that book and went looking, and there was that dog-eared page.” King of the Jews was born. So I’d sort of made up my mind at age 23 to write that novel.” So remember that “25 years in the making” bit? Scratch that. 45 years.

King of the Jews was immediately controversial. The leader of the Lodz ghetto became a man named Trumpelman, and the tragicomic tale of his leadership of the ghetto’s Jewish council, the Judenrat, raised an outcry from critics who felt that the dark humor in the novel, particularly a scene in which the members of the council—in a vain effort to save themselves the horror of having to choose the names of those who will be deported for extermination—attempt mass suicide in an almost slapstick manner, was an insult to those who perished in the Holocaust. One critic famously wrote that “not only did Hitler kill six million Jews, now Leslie Epstein is here to dance on their graves.” Epstein weathered the storm, and published another eight books. And he wasn’t chastened by the criticism: that scene is central to the play.

The most recent novel is, in some ways, a return to the beginning. He’s excited to talk about the origins of the story. “In that same book,” The Final Solution, “there’s another half-page, or page-and-a-half, describing the relationship of occupied southern France and Mussolini. What interested me was the cat-and-mouse game.” The Italian army had occupied Southern France. Nazi German Foreign Minister Joachim von “Ribbentropp would demand the Jews, but… the Italian troops refused to allow a single Jew to be taken. They put the Jews in the best hotels in the Riviera… It was just a spontaneous outpouring of humanity without order. The French police would come and round up the Jews, and the Italians would put tanks around the hotel, and would say,” and here Epstein suddenly is speaking with an Italian accent, “‘Oh, scuzzi, but you cannot take him, he’s-a my cousin.’ They even did weddings. ‘This woman, she’s-a my wife.’ For the day.” And so he set out to write a novel about the Italian army, and a real Italian plan to evacuate Jews on cruise ships from southern France.

This story would eventually merge in his mind with another, the story of an American—Ezra Pound—broadcasting messages of support for the fascists of Europe. Epstein had long been fascinated with the expatriate poet and his anti-Semitic Italian radio broadcasts. But “I couldn’t think of any way they’d ever be a part of the same book… but then I thought, I won’t make it southern France, I’ll make it Rome. Ezra Pound was in Rome… I couldn’t write the poems—so I’ll make him an architect, and he’ll build this mile-high tower. It all felt like a beautiful kaleidoscope, the pieces just fell into place. The Jews who are saved will be saved by their work on the monument!” The cruise ships were represented by a single ship, and the novel would be stuffed with historical figures. Pound merged with Frank Lloyd Wright to become an architect named Amos Prince. Epstein buried himself in research.

Meanwhile, he was retooling the script for the play. In the early eighties, he’d arranged a staged reading of the first version of the script. It required 25 actors. If you want to get a producer to refuse a script, just tell her she’ll need to hire 25 actors. Since then, he’d been in a collaboration with the Boston Playwright’s Theater, and director Jon Lipsky, who had first seen the script 18 years before he would eventually direct it. In a recent Boston Globe article about the adaptation process, Epstein wrote, “the process has been humbling; it has also been a delight. So much so that I have begun to wonder whether my professional life has taken a 40-year detour.” The play, he says, has been hard work, and he’s had his every assumption challenged.

I asked him what, after so many years writing novels and stories, made him think this. “[Working with others] beats being alone in your room. For all the frustrations I’ve had, I’ve learned from the actors and I’ve learned from the director. They had a lot of insights. I think all writing is done from childhood, and they brought their childhoods and their instincts to mine, and we made changes as a result. That’s a large reward, I think.” Playwrights rarely have such collaboration with actors and directors, and Epstein, while grateful that he’s had the opportunity, is also aware that his input might not always have been welcome. His contract gave him full authority over the text, though, and he’d put so much time into the play that he couldn’t imagine not being so involved.

And after such a wait, I wondered, is the play what he imagined? His answer showed that he, perhaps, has more of the novelist in him than the playwright. “Let’s just say it’s close enough. It’s not how I would have directed it. It’s much more theatricalized. In some areas, it’s probably better. But I think in some it’s worse. The director doesn’t always allow the text to speak for itself, so he does too much illustrating of the text.”

He’s quick to point out, though, that Lipsky has brought a lot to the play. “The relationship between me and the director—you know there’s a lot of mutual respect—it’s like the relationship between India and Pakistan now. Each one knows that the other has nuclear arms. Each one knows the other won’t use it, and there’s actually been a growth in relations… and it’s like that with Jon and me. He knows I could write anything I want in the text and he’d have to follow it, but I know that in some way I’d lose him if I did that. So we do this dance.”

He needn’t have been worried. The dance was a success. The play, in two acts, is adapted from two chapters of King of the Jews, the chapters that formed the moral core of the novel. 25 years of revision are apparently sufficient to condense a 25-character play into a tidy script for 12. And the “illustrating” that Epstein feared is all quite appropriate and thoughtfully done. A novelist, of course, would want a text to speak for itself; a director has a different toolbox, and a different aim. Lipsky had a skilled cast, a wonderful set, and some well-conceived lighting and atmospheric fog that silently did a lot of work. Jon Savage and Brent J. Sullivan were responsible for the set and lighting, respectively, and Epstein should send them a thank-you card for bringing such verity to the setting he imagined, the Astoria Café of Lodz, Poland.

I laughed later, when I remembered that he’d written in the Globe that “it takes only six months to write a play.” Maybe he forgot what he’s been doing for a quarter century. Or maybe he’s referring to his next work: a theatrical adaptation of his 2004 novel, San Remo Drive. More likely, I suspect that he wasn’t making that claim about his own writing, but about some ideal: it could take six months to write a play. With Epstein, whatever’s next is unlikely to have been first dreamt of in the same year, or even the same decade. And there’s something appropriate about that, too.