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American Jewish Fiction 67pDouble or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse By Raymond Federman SWALLOW PRESS, 1971. 202 PAGES. How can we tell the stories of the Holocaust? This question lies behind the brilliant, inventive writing of Raymond Federman. When he was a teenager, living in Paris, Federman’s family was deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. He survived because his mother stuffed him, her favorite, into a closet—he crawled out a day later and found his way to a farm in the south of France where he could live out the war. An uncle brought him to America, and he attended school, eventually becoming a professor of French literature and an early supporter of Samuel Beckett. In his debut novel, Federman’s project is not to tell this story but to avoid telling it. Instead of relying on the conventions of autobiography, he erects a clever fictional structure that allows him to concentrate on how such a story might be told, rather than on the tale itself. The novel is peopled by three primary characters: the first, “a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man,” records the activities of the second, “a somewhat paranoiac fellow . . . who had decided to lock himself in a room . . . for a year . . . to write the story” of a third, “the hero”—whose name is often given as Boris, but sometimes as Jacques or Dominique—and whose experiences resemble those of Federman himself. Much of the book consists of the rambling plans of the second man, who has only about $1,200 with which to support himself for his year of writing. Locked in isolation, he hopes to survive on noodles and canned tomato sauce, having carried in with himself toilet paper, coffee, soap, and everything else he will need; his calculations of exactly how many boxes of noodles and rolls of toilet paper he should purchase take up dozens of pages. With the Holocaust hovering so clearly in the background, the symbolic resonance of this character’s hypothetical confinement and his computation of the bare necessities of survival hardly need to be emphasized. Federman’s unconventional approach to plot is mirrored by his unique typography: a virtuoso with a typewriter, he lays out each of his pages like a work of visual art, with sentences that trail, twirl, and loop down the page; run backward and upside down; or appear in untranslated French. This book needs to be seen to be believed. Though these tactics might seem sterile postmodernist gimmicks in the hands of a writer with a flimsier subject, Double or Nothing is remarkable for its comedy, for its pathos, and for the degree to which its playful format engages, rather than alienates, the reader. Further reading: Like Federman, many writers use postmodernist tactics to tell and not tell stories of the Holocaust, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Walter Abish, Georges Perec, and the Israeli David Grossman, whose See Under: Love (1989) is the masterpiece of the genre. Federman is nothing if not prolific; in addition to books of scholarly criticism, he has also published many novels, 96 including Take It or Leave It (1976) and The Two-Fold Vibration (1982); though he is in his 80s, he maintains an entertaining blog every bit as irreverent and unusual as his fiction. Ronald Sukenick’s Mosaic Man (1999) is a more recent attempt to bring together the techniques of postmodernism with the American Jewish experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68pJacob’s Son By Ben Field CROWN, 1971. 345 PAGES. In the 1930s, a young Jew in Brooklyn—or anyplace else in America—could choose any number of ideologies. He could join up with communists, perhaps travel to Spain to fight Franco in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; he could affiliate with the Zionists, yearning to make aliyah to that other Promised Land; he could invest shrewdly, work hard, and build up a fortune in a trade like real estate; he could chase girls. The adolescent hero of Ben Field’s final novel, Michael Berkowitz, could follow any of these paths—his friends and companions do—but his interests lie elsewhere. He wants to be a farmer in the United States. By all accounts a remarkable young man, Michael is not an easy character to like. His father, a devotee of the great Hebrew poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, passed away during Michael’s teens. Any number of men would be happy to fill the empty paternal role, from Freund the proletarian; to Dr. Campbell, a professor of classics; to Dr...

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