The Courtly and The Crude

The voice of Leib Goldkorn, whose command of English is as precarious as his take on history, is unlike any other in contemporary American fiction. An aging, nattering refugee from Nazi atrocity, he first spoke in 1976, in the title work of a five-piece collection called “The Steinway Quintet.” That novella, about a bungled holdup at the Lower East Side restaurant where Goldkorn performs piano in a chamber ensemble, resurfaced, accompanied by further misadventures, in 1985 in “The Goldkorn Tales.” Leslie Epstein, the literary ventriloquist who taught Goldkorn to speak in fractured phrases about wildly improbable events, now brings him back for a tumultuous pratfall of a curtain call. The Mr. Magoo of Holocaust survivors, Goldkorn still lives, and in the three linked novellas that constitute “Ice Fire Water,” Epstein offers a masterly blend of the plangent and the preposterous.

“Am I in your opinion a country pumpkin?” Goldkorn asks when a waiter at New York’s posh Court of Palms brings him a bill for $120 that he, still a stranger to American currency and pretentious menus, expected to be $3.25. A musician whose art was powerless to save his family from genocidal slaughter, Goldkorn is no greenhorn; he used to play a silver flute, which he has had to put into what--confusing hock with seawater--he calls “prawns.” Neither pumpkin nor bumpkin, Goldkorn has seen something of the world but, during a zany “circumlocution of the globe,” this madcap malapropagator also sees much not on the map. Don Quixote sallies forth into the world to encounter demons of his own devising; myopic Goldkorn transforms the visible into the risible.

When we first see Goldkorn in “Ice,” it is the morning of his 94th birthday, and he is making his way to the communal toilet in the ragged rent-controlled building on West 80th Street where he lives with his diabetic wife, Clara. Suffering from constipation, prostatitis and lust, Goldkorn aims to relieve all three during a span in the can. Mixing memory and desire, his mind wanders back to the night of anti-Semitic violence known as Kristallnacht and to an erotic female fantasy he calls “Crystal Knight.”

“Ice Fire Water” abounds with inspired confusions and illusions--not least Goldkorn’s conviction that an opera he has composed about the biblical Esther will, like the Jewish queen herself, deliver his people from their enemies. “It was art that had saved me, as in truth it must save us all,” declares Goldkorn, proud of his standing at the top of his class in an Austrian music academy. In second place was nemesis Hans Maltz, who betrayed Goldkorn’s family to the Nazis and who, along with Darryl Zanuck, seems to reappear in Paris, Rio, the South Pacific, New York and almost everywhere Goldkorn turned.

In each of the three sections of “Ice Fire Water,” Goldkorn embraces a glamorous movie star and collides with history. In “Ice,” he meets Hollywood’s Ice Queen, Sonja Henie, and inadvertently saves Adolf Hitler from assassination at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Mistaken for composer Erich Korngold, Goldkorn is invited to Hollywood to direct Henie in “Everything Happens at Night,” which, like everything else, he tries to rework as the story of Esther.

In “Fire,” Goldkorn runs into fiery Carmen Miranda and a lusty Arturo Toscanini on a ship bound for Rio. Anxious to prevent Brazil from siding with the Axis, he conducts “Aida” as a variation on Esther and a warning to the world to avert annihilation of the Jews.

In the aquatic events of “Water,” Goldkorn blunders into a South Sea movie set and tries to save Esther Williams from cannibals and the United States from an attack on Pearl Harbor. He himself is saved from drowning by the ballast of a manuscript he keeps beneath his underwear, his musical magnum opus--”Esther: A Jewish Girl at the Persian Court.”

In his most recent novel, 1997’s “Pandaemonium,” Epstein used Peter Lorre to narrate an antic account of making a movie out of “Antigone.” Though his best-known book is “King of the Jews,” the tale of a doomed ghetto, Epstein was born with celluloid in the blood; brothers Philip and Julius Epstein, who wrote “Casablanca” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” were his father and uncle, respectively. Irreverent as it is inventive, “Ice Fire Water” is a manic screwball comedy and, if it ever made it onto a screen, even the mosquitoes would guffaw.

One of many gags in “Ice Fire Water” is the claim that Goldkorn is unable to open the door to his apartment because it is blocked by unsold piles of Epstein’s earlier book, “The Goldkorn Tales.” It was, indeed, admired by Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times book critic, who, like several other real-life figures, makes an appearance in the new book. When a grateful Goldkorn invites her to lunch, he confuses her with a Japanese cleaning woman. Goldkorn’s botched account of Kakutani is symptomatic of how, undone by history, he remakes reality.

Much of the humor in “Ice Fire Water” derives from the collision of the courtly with the crude--an urbane senior citizen solicits telephone sex, and the horrors of Kristallnacht are confounded with the tawdry titillations of stripper Crystal Knight. Deprived of his precious Rudall & Rose flute, Goldkorn seeks compensation for life’s disappointments. But English again betrays the immigrant when he claims that art can save us. He misconstrues the verb. “Ice Fire Water” offers elemental evidence that, impotent against the barbarism of the 20th century, art can merely salve us.