by Rhoda Lerman
PRAISE FOR RHODA LERMAN
GOD’S EAR
“Rhoda Lerman’s brilliant fifth novel, God’s Ear, is by turns playful and prayerful, ironic and deadly serious. Although her idioms and inflections are hauntingly and soothingly familiar … Lerman speaks in her own vatic voice … wildly funny, achingly spiritual, profoundly Jewish and feminist at the same time. When Rhoda Lerman’s wise words enter God’s willing ear, the holy connection crackles.”
—Brett Singer, The New York Times Book Review
“You have company coming, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and E. L. Doctorow. Her name is Rhoda Lerman and God’s Ear is her fifth book. She knows her Jews, she knows her Southwest, and she spins one terrific yarn out of the two strands.”
—Charles Fenyvesi, The Washington Times
“Lerman has a sharp, lyrical, and almost uncanny ear for the Jewish absurd.”
—Susan Shapiro, Newsday
“Lerman effortlessly works an immense amount of Jewish learning and Hasidic lore into a novel that’s moving, wise, and very, very funny. Irresistible storytelling.”
—Kirkus
“Like a Chagall painting translated to print … The very opposite of a minimalist, Lerman proves herself mistress not only of side-splitting one-liners but also of pregnant perception about faith and virtue.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Seldom have wisecracks and authenticity been so wedded in a Jewish-American novel. God’s Ear laughs its way to religious epiphany that is rare indeed in the contemporary Jewish American novel.”
—Sanford Pinsker, The Philadelphia Inquirer
CALL ME ISHTAR
“The writing is splendid and the imagination is boundless.”
—Ishmael Reed
“A brilliant and original triumph of the imagination.”
—Marge Piercy
“Lerman equals Philip Roth at his own good game—the Jewish absurd. Her eye for the giveaway detail, her ear for the mad halfphrase, her ability to sustain the cadences of a comic scene, all have that peculiar mix of energy, lucidity and hysteria at which Roth excels … Call Me Ishtar announces a writer of genuine talent. Rhoda Lerman is a find … go out and find her.”
—Harriet Rosenstein, The New York Times Book Review
“A virtuoso performance; biblical rhetoric juxtaposed with Americanese and supernatural events with the dull routines of suburbia … a weird, often hilarious mix of the exotic and the mundane.”
—Lore Dickstein, Ms. Magazine
THE BOOK OF THE NIGHT
“Lerman creates in The Book of The Night a fantastic narrative voyage that is as unpredictable as an acid trip in which one’s imagination is the primary determinant of reality; it is replete with luscious detail and intriguing wordplay.”
—Valerie Miner, The New York Times Book Review
“A metamorphosis as provocative as any of Kafka’s is at the heart of this bizarre, sometimes prolix and portentous novel … a book filled with strange, rich effects unlike those in any other contemporary novel … it has stayed in my mind, and stimulated and bothered me, more than any other fiction I have read this year.”
—Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune Book World
“Lerman’s characters grapple with philosophy like lovers, and the result is a gothic novel of ideas with a plentitude of life to sustain its armature of scholarship. The language is gnomic and very fine, fiery, and mysterious and attractive to those who remember Yeats and Blake.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Rhoda Lerman has demonstrated—with much fun along the way— that it is still possible to write a clever, serious, and technically innovative novel … because of the novelist’s never-flagging sense of irony and fun, her wonderfully provocative story is also a delight to read. With The Book of The Night, she takes her place beside Robert Graves.”
—Colin Walters, The Washington Times
THE GIRL THAT HE MARRIES
“A perfectly nice female person succumbs to the atavistic urge to transform herself into the All-Time Classic Wife. With Rhoda Lerman’s outrageous talent this becomes the feminist Jekyll-and-Hyde of our time—and we recognize the monster in ourselves while we’re laughing.”
—Gloria Steinem
“Read it and weep. With unrelenting manic ferocity, this savage, sexist, hilarious romance à la Kafka demonstrates the truth of H. L. Mencken’s assertion that ‘to be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god.’ Pursuers of ordinary men (is there some other kind?) can hardly afford to miss this cautionary tale.”
—Julie Lerman, The New York Times Book Review
“Devastating. For every woman or man who has married (or is in danger of marrying) in order to shore up an inadequate self.”
—Betty Friedan
“A wickedly funny comedy of erotic manners.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“A devastating satire of the games people play in courtship and supposed love. While it is a superb parody, it also holds enough of the truth to make you want to cry.”
—Lucy Freeman
“Antically funny … Like her characters, Lerman’s language plays games. [She] is funny because she hears us so right … Spinning us on a swift whirligig through the sexual nastiness of our culture, she set us down laughing.”
—Erica Abee, The Village Voice
“A gem of a novel … Striking.”
—Carol Felsenthal, Chicago Daily News
ELEANOR
“A haunting portrait … blessed with sensitivity and depth and honesty.”
—The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A beautiful novel, elegantly written, true as anything could be. Like her heroine, Rhoda Lerman has taken great risks in writing it; after reading it, I am sure that Eleanor Roosevelt would approve.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“An imaginative success … Lerman brings what has always been a stick figure in history to glowing, aching life.”
—Doris Grumbach, The Chronicle Review
“Lerman risks everything as a novelist by casting the entire narrative in Eleanor’s voice and creates a plausible, deep-running, vulnerable, complex, moving character.”
—Saul Maloff, The New York Times Book Review
“Truer to the great lady’s heart than any other account.”
—Jean Stapleton
“A poignant, plausibly imagined novel … the author’s attempt to write in [Mrs. Roosevelt’s] voice succeeds both as a novel and as a sensitive portrait of a woman who at 33 knows who she is but has yet to imagine who she’ll become.”
—Clarence Petersen, Chicago Tribune
“A reality truer and more haunting than the most scrupulous notes of the biographer-distinguished historical fiction.”
—Frances Taliaferro, Harper’s Magazine
“From the first the narrative is powerful, every word of it readable and compelling, the period details skillfully rendered, the tension beautifully managed and sustained … a tour de force.”
—Publishers Weekly
This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2017 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special orders, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 1989 by Rhoda Lerman
Foreword copyright © 2016 by Phyllis Rose
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now kno
wn or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
ISBN 978-1-4683-1140-2
EISBN 978-1-4683-1416-8
For my mother
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
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Reading Group Guide Discussion Questions
FOREWORD
RHODA LERMAN WAS AN ORIGINAL, A WRITER OF DAZZLING IMAGINATION who never undertook the same kind of novel twice, producing comedy, satire, historical fiction, fantasy, fable, and tragicomedy in a career that went all over the place. Normal genres, normal boundaries did not exist for her. In her thinking, she was always open to the unexpected. She liked to claim descent from Hasidic mystics. She went through life with a firm grasp of practical necessity but with one ear always open to otherworldly truth. She called it thinking sideways, letting the other brain speak. “I am a woman with my feet on the ground,” she said to me once. “But I talk to creatures in outer space.” When I reported this conversation back to her, I suggested she edit “creatures in outer space” to something a little less crazy, and she thanked me for having her back, replacing the creatures in outer space with “a psychic who talks to dead dogs.” But the original statement, I now think, is the one to remember, as forcefully stating the way in which Lerman lived in two realms at the same time.
She was a thirty-seven-year-old housewife in Syracuse when her great comic novel, Call Me Ishtar, was published. In it, the Sumerian fertility goddess is imagined as inhabiting the body of a housewife in Syracuse. It opens with the husband fingering his wife to climax while they are driving across the bridge between Canada and New York, returning from a business trip. Such raunchiness was just starting to enter the American novel with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the latter published in the same season as Ishtar. Spirited, generous, sexy without being solemn about sex in the way of most male novelists of the time, Lerman the debut novelist was greeted ecstatically by reviewers, who tended to compare her to Roth, because of the raunchiness and because both excelled at what one critic called “the Jewish absurd,” a mixture of energy, lucidity, and hysteria. She infused suburban American life with mythic depth as Joyce had intertwined Dublin life with the wanderings of Odysseus. She was a female Joyce, a female Roth, exactly what the seventies wanted.
Had she followed Call Me Ishtar with another raucous romp or another myth-impregnated view of modern life, it would have been better for her career. Instead her next book, although equally good, was quite different. The Girl That He Marries is a sharp-focused, realistic and satiric view of the marriage game in New York City. A young woman realizes that in order to capture the man she wants, she has to turn herself into someone she doesn’t want to be. Lerman turns the usual marriage plot, in which characters grow into marriage, inside out. Jane Austen would plotz!
Following her exploration of marriage into a wholly new genre, she imagined herself next into the union of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and produced her saddest and most empathetic book, Eleanor, about a woman married to a man who holds all the cards. And after that she imagined herself—in some ways, it didn’t demand as much empathy as to imagine herself as Eleanor Roosevelt—as a woman who abandons both husband and lover and finds happiness melding her consciousness with that of a gorilla. Animal Acts is a clever, zany novel, whose author seems increasingly concerned with mythic differences between male and female, animal and human.
So she spun from one kind of novel to another, never exhausting her imagination or her need to express the multiplicity of her nature. It would be unusual for any one reader to follow her to the outer limits of her wild imagination and enjoy all the kinds of writing she produced. For me, her next novel, The Book of the Night, is difficult. It is set in the past and the future, the narrator is at times a woman, a man, and a cow, and it is filled with wordplay. But Lerman herself considered this her best novel, and I have no doubt others will too. It perfectly fulfills the notion that certain New Age intellectuals of the eighties had of the modern work of literary art: unrestricted by linear plot or synthetic “characters,” inscribing the free play of the mind. These savants, whom Lerman admired and who admired her, were based in the New-Age Mecca of Crestone, Colorado, and devoted to “the realization of a new planetary culture.” Lerman was spending a while teaching in Boulder and her openness to big ideas led her to this group.
It also motivated a period of study with a distinguished rabbi in Boulder, and that, in turn, inspired her masterpiece, God’s Ear, about a young Hasid forced to take over his father’s congregation in—of all places—the high desert of Colorado. She depicts an American West peopled by men in Eastern European beaver hats, mystics with spiritual ties to the Native Americans whose land they have bought, but hopeless schmegeggies about wilderness living. Passionate, hilarious, and heartbreaking, God’s Ear has been described rightly as having the appeal of a Chagall painting. It was, again, received with wild enthusiasm by critics but did not reach a wide audience.
Lerman continued to write although she did not publish another novel in her lifetime. To earn a living—and, I imagine, to absorb her immense energy—she and her husband Bob became breeders of champion Newfoundlands, wholly immersed in the world and the culture of dogs. She wrote two wonderful non-fiction books about dogs and, unsurprisingly, seemed to understand them in the same complex way she understood people. And yes, she did consult an “animal communicator” to talk to her dogs both alive and on the other side of the rainbow bridge.
I had had my own whacky idea: I was going to read through a shelf of fiction in the library randomly selected to see what was out there in the world of literature, unfiltered by current opinion. I chose the LEQ to LES shelf in the New York Society Library and so discovered Rhoda Lerman’s work. I felt a jolt of joy when I first read her, not just because I liked her work so much, but because I wanted there to be someone like her on my shelf: a first-rate writer who never had the success she deserved. I wanted to show how rare was literary merit and how even rarer, enduring literary fame. More than we like to admit, a life spent writing can leave behind wonderful books that occupy space on a library shelf but are never checked out.
Rhoda was not astonished when I turned up in her life and brought her work, in a modest way, back to public attention. She believed that the universe provides. “Of course,” she said, “the universe also provides cancer.” She was being treated for thyroid cancer when I met her and died of it in August 2015, typically enthusiastic even at the point of death to see what was on the other side.
It makes me very happy that The Overlook Press is re-issuing Rhoda Lerman’s work. Most are surefire delights, bound to please and exhilarate all who read them. Some will make us argue amongst ourselves. The conversation will give the books another shot at enduring, proving them to be the classics I believe they are.
—Phyllis Rose, New York
“Everything on this earth, in this universe, is absolutely intentional.”
“God weaves your destiny from your choices.”
“The purpose of suffering is to correct the distance between you and HaShem.”
“The world
is created by the letters and answered by the sounds.”
— Rabbi Fetner,
of blessed memory
1
THE RABBI’S ONLY SON, YUSSEL, SOLD INSURANCE, MOSTLY LIFE. He made a fortune because everyone in the Hasidishe world knew that his father, the Rabbi, and his grandfather of blessed memory, and his grandfather’s grandfather of blessed memory, all of them stretching back unbroken in a golden chain from Far Rockaway to Horodenka, to Braslow, Chernobyl, Lublin, Tiberias, Jerusalem, to David, to Adam, all of them in the Fetner family, made prophecy.
“So, why are you here, Yussel?”
“To sell you some life insurance.”
“Oy. What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Today, this particular day, why are you here?”
“You’re on my list. I come every six months. Your premium’s due.”
“The truth, Yussel.”
“You’re on my list.”
“How will I go?”
“Bernie, Bernie, I’m just selling life insurance.”
“Believe me, Yussel, if a Fetner comes to my door selling life insurance, I’m buying.”
Behind his back his clients called him the Angel of Death. The Rabbi’s son made a lot of money selling insurance. From Williamsburg, from Borough Park, from the Five Towns, they came to him to buy. As soon as he picked up the phone and said, “Guess who?” they bought. Life, accident, doubled their umbrellas, upped their homeowner’s and liability. Everything.
Yussel married a beautiful sweet girl from Toronto, a rabbi’s daughter. Although she spoke perfect Poylishe Yiddish she also had a slight British accent and looked a little like Patty Duke. He had a Mercedes, a house near the beach with moss-brick on three walls in the leisure room, two ovens, the Patty Duke wife, four Donna Reed daughters, one son who looked like him, which wasn’t so bad but very Jewish.
“You know something I should know, Yussel?”
“Nothing, it’s just time to look over your policy, Berel.”
“Your father tell you something? Your uncles? Did you hear something? Maybe about the Almighty’s intentions?”