Book Review : A Promise That Dissipates Into Parody

Dancing Bear by Chaim Bermant (St. Martin’s: $13.95)

The opening passages of “Dancing Bear” are both melancholy and portentous; you think, for a couple of thousand words or so, that you might have opened up another “Painted Bird”: “My earliest memory is of a bear. It seemed gigantic and towered over everybody standing around . . . .I must have been at least 3 by then, when the Russians were already in the country, and village fairs were a thing of the past. Yet I still remember my terror . . . . My next memory is of a fire, of people running, men shouting, women screaming, children crying, of flames leaping to the sky and lighting up the night, and the acrid smell of smoke.”

Young Heinschein Rhiner is, early on, made a refugee, torn from his childhood home near a place called Resnitz, “near the Polish border.” His legacy is an obscure, nightmarish set of memories from the un-country of Latvia--invaded in turn by Germany and Russia. Heinschein, quickly renamed Harry Newman, is separated from Anna, his beloved nurse, and trekked off to Egypt, among other places, where he remains under the care of his remote and cold grandfather, as well as a vibrantly vivacious young woman to whom he may or may not be related.

A Change of Tone

Flash forward 15 or 20 years. Harry Newman has journeyed from Egypt to England, where he has come down from Oxford and now works--very unambitiously--as a middle executive in a London bank. Although the narrative tone has changed radically, we might still be in a Kosinski novel, “Steps” perhaps. Young Harry, if he had the stamina, might be bitter. As it is he’s aimless, alienated, alcoholic and charming enough that all manner of women fall under his spell: Sylvia, too vulgar for him; Giselle, a married woman who finds him a flat and jumps into his bed; and Felicia Eissenmacher--daughter of the head of the bank he works for, extraordinarily beautiful, madly in love with him and an old-fashioned nymphomaniac who can’t get enough of his physical attractions.

So--what’s his problem, the reader might ask. The problem is that Harry has been haunted for years by the possibility that he may be Jewish. People keep coming up to him to query: “Are you Jewish?” Or “You couldn’t be Jewish!” And just as Harry is about to marry the lovely young Felicia, a German magazine comes out with a muck-racking story to the effect that Harry’s grandfather, Dr. Rhiner, who ran a sanitarium in Resznitz, was probably a Nazi war criminal who performed atrocities against Jews in the neighborhood, or, alternately, saved Jews in the neighborhood, or--a third possibility--saved them and then burned them in the night, and only one child escaped.

And Yet Another Twist

About this time Harry’s grandfather (who’s been as silent as the tomb about all this until now), dies, and leaves a letter full of unsolved mysteries about his long-lost daughter Inge, and the vivacious Carla, and--here the novel takes another turn. The doctor has left Harry a small fortune, but if the doctor is/was a Nazi, Harry doesn’t feel he has a right to take the money. On the other hand, he’s not too crazy about the possibility of being Jewish either, without having any say about it. The reader is asked at this point to believe that Harry’s life goes “on hold,” in a certain sense, for many years.

He falls in love with Sue Cohen, a Jewish maker of television documentaries--although she only makes the one documentary, about his possibly-Nazi grandfather. Sue goes on to write a book about the doctor, and perhaps a sequel to that. She’s obsessed with the past, and so is he. At one point Sue has a nervous breakdown, tries to kill herself and leaves Harry, so convinced is she that Harry is a Gentile, and that his grandfather did all those awful things.

The story, then, hinges, not on what it means to be Jewish (although Sue gains weight and becomes a “Yiddisha mama,” and relatives float by who speak in burlesque Yiddish accents), but really, on whether or not Harry is Jewish.

Have you ever found yourself at a family reunion sitting next to two old aunts, for instance, who say, “Well, if you were cousin to Lavinia, that must mean you were kin to the Cockerells”? “Would that be Eustace Cockerell, down in Fort Worth?” “Oh, my, no! I’m talking about Ada, the one who married little Georgie.” “No! Not little Georgie Laws, who’s brother died of typhoid when he went to work as a sanitation engineer, and he not a day over 19 at the time?” “The very one!”

Resnitz may not be Fort Worth, but the point is you have to know Heinschein and the Marcovitches and Dr. Rhiner and Dr. Apteker; you have to really care about them and not simply their racial and/or religious affiliation, or the last third of this potentially promising book becomes a parody. Mr. and Mrs. Newman may or may not be Jewish or gentile; however they choose to identify themselves, by the end of the book they’ve become dull beyond words.