A Catastrophic Couple

“The gas chambers and ovens have brought a new kind of Jew into the world.”

— Chaim Potok

Steeped in Jewish history, the repercussions of the Holocaust shadow Alan Kaufman’s fifth novel. Berlin Woman details a disastrous middle-aged love affair, set in an international and increasingly right wing political atmosphere.

The author’s alter ego, Nathan Falk, a “moderately well known mid list author and editor with ten published books to his name,” is in the middle of a European book tour. At a Berlin book conference, where he is a featured speaker, Nathan meets the seductive married Ukranian writer, Lena. Their love affair begins in the house she shares with her German businessman husband, and Lena openly reveals her other frequent sexual liaisons. Thus begins their depressing and puzzling relationship.

I have eagerly devoured Kaufman’s previous mesmerizing memoirs (Jew Boy [2000] and Drunken Angel [2011]) and novel, Matches (2005). As an editor, he produced the seminal The Outlaw Book of American Poetry (1999), as well as three other Outlaw collections. But in this creation of a cliched and totally charmless female character, Lena seems to possess no positive attributes other than her pleasing physicality. The interactions between the lovers appear dismal and debasing, right down to the weird sad sex. For a sensual man who claims, “I wanted gentleness, eagerness, soft lingering kisses. To stroke her cheeks, skin and hair” he then ends up having sex with someone who makes him react “like a woman must feel who is quietly being raped.” Both 2G second generation Holocaust survivors children, the ill fated duo seem to mostly tantalize and torment each other, replicating their traumatic backgrounds.

While Nathan wallows in an impossible relationship totally choreographed by Lena, much of it is carried on electronically. Lena introduces Nathan to social media, “To which she is so addicted, she carried her tablet around with her everywhere in order to be instantly available.” But her availability to the love-struck Nathan occurs only on her own selfish and idiosyncratic terms, as he finally compares this affair “to anal cancer” and confesses, “Lena is my Final Solution.”

Decades after WWII, both ill crossed lovers continue to battle post Holocaust trauma. Damaged from the experience of fractured family life with his French survivor mother in the Bronx, Nathan becomes a willing victim to Lena’s strange sadism. The catastrophic couple are diametrically opposed in politics. While Nathan explores and writes about the Holocaust, the Eastern European Lena says she is a self-hating Jew and claims Putin “will put iron in the flaccid spine of the metrosexual West.” Traveling between Berlin, Tel Aviv, Vienna, San Francisco, New York and Salzburg, Nathan links Jewish oppression to the “raped and slain women, the kidnapped children, the whipped and enslaved blacks, the queers thrown by true believers from Middle Eastern roofs.” Today, “sixty percent of polled American teens have never heard of Auschwitz,” the author notes, and he visits the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Salzburg.

Always a powerful and provocative writer, Kaufman’s insights into today’s sweeping wave of contemporary racism and rising totalitarianism are actual and alarming. As I write this, an attack in a Jewish supermarket in Jersey City has left six dead. With resounding reality, Kaufman calls out both the left and right wing of current anti-Semitism.

Hardcore and funny depictions of the literary world — stars, agents, publishers, conferences, groupies, provide an incisive relief from the central and sordid love affair, which grows increasingly hard to empathize with. Zingers like “For already, a new beer-chugging, Klonopin-popping generation of MFA aspirants now crowd literature’s hallowed vestibules” show Kaufman at his smart sardonic best.

Fortunately, Nathan’s interactions with male companions provide some welcomed depth and decent conversation. Why are the men portrayed so much more interestingly then the women? Surely a refugee sex worker, or a young hypnotist in Tel Aviv are worth exploring as characters, rather than just as brief erotic encounters. In one of...