Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (review)

114 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 Mandel skillfully blends these incongruent themes into lyrical verses which give voice to the sensuality of Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. Pastoral allusions are interwoven with descriptions of the inner life as if the surroundings were extensions of their selves. Fusion and boundlessness oscillate throughout this work, perhaps best typified by the allegorical meeting of Jacob and the nocturnal visitor with whom he struggles until the unnamed other fades into the ether with the dawn. However, because the figure of Jacob is drawn rather larger than life, Mandel is not as successful in picturing his essence in the dynamic terms which she achieves for the women. The poem-novella is divided into three parts and subdivided into ninety short "chapters," each consisting of a few verse lines rarely exceeding one page. Direct and indirect Biblical references suffuse the text without detracting the flow of poetic narrative or obscuring its meaning. Only the names of the handmaidens' pagan gods appear as artifactual contributions to the work, as if to jar the reader. For the poetry aficionado, The Marriages ofJacob is an enjoyable way of appreciating a well-crafted poem and of obtaining a woman's imaginative interpretation of Biblical lore. Werner I. Halpern, M.D. Rochester, New York Stories of an Imaginary Childhood, by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. 197 pp. $12.95 (p). Melvin Jules Bukiet's Stories of an Imaginary Childhood is a bold attempt to imagine what it would have been like to be a Jewish child on the eve of the Shoah. The present collection is a "Back to the Future" work with a tragic difference. Unlike the Back to the Future movies, Bukiet's work does not and cannot undo or alterJewish fate. Rather, these stories serve to emphasize the innocence of the Jews and the inescapability of their doom. Bukiet's father, a Polish survivor who immigrated to America in 1948, spoke constantly of Proszowice his boyhood shtetl. In fact, as a child Bukiet believed that Europe comprised four major cities: London, Paris, Rome, and Proszowice. Consequently, Stories of an Imaginary Childhoodcombines survivor knowledge and second-generation imagination. In twelve interrelated short stories a nameless twelve-year-old boy introduces various characters from a vanished world, including Isaac the Book Reviews 115 Millionaire, a pauper whom the narrator's parents were "proud to be owed money by"; Rebecca the 300-pound Jewish whore-with whom the narrator is in love-who recites the story of Channuka in a bar before giving birth to an illegitimate child in the Proszowice mikvehj Shivka Bellet, a shrew who nagged her husband to death and discovered that she could not live without himj and Zalman the philosophical grave digger. In effect, the book leaps backward, across the abyss of the Shoah. But the power of his tales, like the stories of Aaron Appelfeld, lies in the fact that the audience, unlike his fictional characters, knows what history has in store for the Jewish people. Bukiet, 1993 winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant award, portrays the shtetl as separated from the outside, i.e., secular and Christian, world by an invisible yet enduring mehitza. The narrator wears a kippa and has payot, his father sells food and studies the Talmud. The tales' narrator tells of the fears, hopes, dreams, superstitions, and prayers of a people whose fate had already been sealed. The narrator, a precocious aQd religiously ambivalent youth nearing his Bar Mitzvah, feels both the weight of the past and the tug of the present. He seeks to find his own Jewish ground. Bukiet writes that his stories are an attempt to "inscribe myself in the life that might have been mine." Like many in the second generation, Bukiet takes a post-Holocaust journey to Europe, travelling both to Proszowice and to Auschwitz. Reflecting on his trip and his role as a second-generation witness, the author writes: Seeing and thinking about the Holocaust may be as difficult as living it, not in the hurt of the body, not in the specific searing memories, but in having to face a universe that will allow such evil. Life is...