Past Tense

Photo by Joyce Ravid

The two protagonists of Nicole Krauss’ new novel could not, in some ways, be further apart. Leo Gursky, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor from a Polish village and retired locksmith living in New York, fills his days with the minutiae of survival and fears his imminent solitary death: “I try to make a point of being seen,” he says. “Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even though I’m not thirsty.” He carries in his wallet a card which reads, “MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.” His counterpart, a precocious adolescent named Alma Singer, is preparing not for death but for life, writing in a notebook titled “How To Survive in the Wild” and negotiating the excruciations of her first kiss. What will slowly draw them together is a fiction, The History of Love, penned by Gursky in his youth as a tribute to the girl he loved and then, as far as he knows, irretrievably lost. The uncovering of the manuscript’s winding history, from Slonim in Poland to Valparaiso, Chile, and back, via Britain and Israel, to Brooklyn, constitutes much of the novel’s plot.

The considerable pleasure of this book resides, at least in part, in its complicated and unexpected interweaving of literary influences. Gursky’s monologues are a tour de force of a familiar kind: He is a version of America’s male Jewish narrators of the second half of the 20th century, a little bit Singer, a little bit Bellow, a little bit Roth. He is funny, rueful, eccentric, obsessive. Scarred by the loss of his family and friends to the Germans, he is marked, too, by the loss of his great love, a woman named Alma Mereminski, who fled to America and bore Gursky’s child, only to raise him as another man’s son — a son who, in turn, has become a great man of American letters, a little bit Bellow and a little bit Roth. Gursky riffs, hilariously and often. For example, he opines upon his good looks, or lack thereof: “As a child, my mother and my aunts used to tell me that I would grow up to become handsome . . . The year of my Bar Mitzvah I was visited by a plague of acne that stayed four years. But still I continued to hope. As soon as the acne cleared my hairline began to recede, as if it wanted to disassociate itself from the embarrassment of my face.” He also acts with a novelistic eccentricity, modeling nude for an art class (in order, of course, simply to be seen), or taking a limo in the dead of night to repair a stranger’s front-door lock. He crashes his lost son’s funeral, stinking of drink, and the scene — comic and ghastly at once — pleasurably echoes its literary antecedents.

Alma Singer, however, emanates from a different literary set altogether, that of the questing half-child who confronts life’s big questions with a whimsical eye. While Leo Gursky struggles with matters of death and constipation, the sweating, Beckettian horror of isolation and old age, Alma’s search for her namesake, Alma Mereminski, has something of a bookish romp about it. Her male literary cousins can be found in Le Grand Meaulnes or The Counterfeiters, but her closest female relative might be Harriet the Spy. Alma’s father died of pancreatic cancer when she was 7, and she lives, now, with her younger brother, known as Bird, who considers himself a lamed vovnik, one of 36 holy people alive at any time, according to Jewish teaching. He is busy selling lemonade to buy a plane ticket to Israel, and preparing for the Flood. Their mother, a translator — translator, indeed, of The History of Love — is, as parents in such books always are, only the vaguest of presences. Indeed, when Alma notes, near the novel’s end, that “After Uncle Julian left, my mother became more withdrawn, or maybe a better word would be obscure, as in faint, unclear, distant,” it is difficult to imagine that this parent could be any more distant, any less visible, and still be on the same planet as her children (or the reader, for that matter).

The cementing of Alma’s and Gursky’s narratives is effected by a third, the Borgesian account of The History of Love, and of its caretaker and usurper, Zvi Litvinoff. He, like Gursky, hailed from Slonim, but ended up in Chile rather than in New York, and through an elaborate series of events and deceptions — and here again there is a flood — he unwittingly and posthumously ensures Gursky’s reunion both with his early manuscript and with its most recent devotee, Alma. (Krauss quotes at some length from Gursky’s History of Love; and perhaps in doing so does it, and us, a disservice. It is, in this account, that manuscript’s effects that matter; and we strain to see their cause in the rather precious passages relayed here.)