Customer Reviews

The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A rare contemporary novel that survives and even surpasses its accompanying hype. I LOVED this book! The narrator, Frau Doktor Rother, is fat but beautiful, smart but under-achieving, anti-Semitic but married to a Jew, and aristocratic though brought low during the war. She's lucky--and she knows it--to land in Weehawken New Jersey and reunite with her surgeon husband, whose family is being eradicated by the Nazis. She is sui generis--larger than life with an utterly compelling voice. Full of judgments, full of juice, but unwaveringly religious. The plot is almost beside the point, it's all about these smart, prickly, disappointed European German and Jewish immigrants who, with all their talents and sophistication, are often clueless in their American incarnations. The Empress of Weehawken is a comedy of manners conducted from a wing seat in Heaven. Though full of romantic entanglements, the relationships in it that truly matter are those between mothers and daughters. Very moving, suggestive of important truths (though never explicitly), and a wonderful delicious read.

Irene Dische gets extra credit for her staccato writing style. The brisk--almost breathless--sentences add to the inherent humor. The book is fiction, but it's narrated by the author's Catholic grandmother, affectionately known as Mops, a nurse who marries a Jewish doctor, Carl Rother, in 1930's Germany. Carl converts to Catholicism, but it doesn't stop the SS from barring Aryan citizens from seeking Carl's medical attention. His wife's relatives help Carl emigrate to the U.S., where his poor command of the English language stymies his attempts to pass the pathology board exam that will enable him to practice medicine. Also in danger is Carl's half-Jewish daughter Renate, a headstrong teenager who refuses to conceal her lineage in Nazi Germany. After Carl gets his M.D. but loses his job prospect, his wife and daughter join him in New York. There Renate marries Dische, known primarily by his last name and for "hogging the eccentricity limelight." I know this doesn't sound like it should be funny, but the narration makes it so. Oddly enough, the humor diminishes when Irene herself becomes a more central character.

This is a hard book to review. Initially one gets overwhelmed by the tempo and humor of the "I" story teller in the book, lady Rother. And until page 100 I was still a happy reader, enthralled in the action, but soon thereafter I got more and more disenchanted and could not understand why. Then it hit me: none of the characters, and I mean NONE are actually likable. Not that they have to be, but all remain strangely flat. They are good and/or interesting, but more bad than good most of the time. The black pedagogy of the family's child rearing is sometimes unbearable, and ultimately, Dische does not really give the characters true depths. The Rother couple remain distant not only to eachother but to the reader, I think. The relationship to the daughter and grandchildren is more or less cool, or so it appears. The novel is more journalistic in style, telling one event after another, but there are no feelings anywhere, despite the severity of the historic events. We do get to know grandmother Rother as a young woman, new wife, mother and later grandmother, but I am not sure what the reader is to do with her. I could not devlop love or hate for her. Ambiguity has its limits. From what I read on the first 50 pages, I expected to become more fascinated with the characters, but as the events unfold, I become more and more bored and turned off. But this is most likely my fault, not the author's. See for yourselves.

The Empress of Weehawken is a faux memoir from the point-of-view of Elisabeth Rother, leading us through her amazing life and the lives of her daughter, Renate, and her granddaughter, Irene. Yes, Irene, as in Irene Dische, the author. But as Elisabeth would say, more on that later. At first glance, Elisabeth is an unrepentant snob, an anti-Semite who marries a Jew, a borderline abusive mother, and if I had put aside the book after fifty or so pages, I would have come away disliking Elisabeth despite her amusing turns of phrase. Dische has absolutely nailed Elisabeth's incisive, witty, condescending, observant voice, and though Elisabeth says she is anti-Semitic and disdainful of the lower classes, Dische allows her actions to tell a more nuanced story. By the end of the story, I adored Elisabeth, and though I'm not a big crier while reading, I wept at the end.

The story begins with Elisabeth telling of her difficulties conceiving with her husband Carl, and Elisabeth's disappointment that the eventual child (Renate) is a girl. It is the 1930s in Germany and Carl is a Jew, regardless his conversion to Elisabeth's Catholicism before their wedding. As life becomes more and more restrictive, Elisabeth bullies the Catholic church into helping relocate him to America. She sends Renate to a convent school as a "good Catholic girl." Elisabeth's strength of spirit becomes very clear as she protects her family, and even attempts to help Carl's family using her family connections (her brother Otto is in the SS). Though Elisabeth is the one with the "good breeding" and noble family, it is Carl who is most scathing in his judgments about Jews, and Carl who enforces class delineations (though Elisabeth pays lip service to the idea of keeping the servant class in their place, her relationship with Liesel belies that position). In Part II, Elisabeth and Renate join Carl in America, where they have nowhere to stay, as Carl's unbelievable behavior has put him on the outs with the Catholic church. Elisabeth takes the reins of the family and steers them toward assimilation and even prosperity. After the war, she deals with the bitter correspondence from family, friends, and even unknown Germans, who congratulate her on getting out of Germany and ask for handouts. Her response is inspiring. Dische weaves the lives of Renate and Irene through Elisabeth's narrative, and Elisabeth often invokes a subject, promising to return to it later. Elisabeth is very, very funny on a variety of subjects. On old age: "After forty, if you wake up without feeling any pain, then you're probably dead." On Heinz kosher baked beans: "They came in glass jars, and the inside of the cap, if you put your nose right up to it, smelled like pork. It was some kind of trick. I believe this was used by the Jewish manufacturer to attract his own pork-starved people, and that trick is as much proof as one needs about the ingenuity of the race."

Irene Dische has placed this disclaimer before Chapter One: "Certain events and characters in this novel were inspired by real people and events. But the actual events, characters, and dialogue depicted are all fictional." If anything, the knowledge of the author's own connection to the story, was a minor drawback to me. On occasion, I was pulled out of the story wondering if the events were actually true (not just true to the story); the incidences of child abuse (did the maid/nanny actually lock the real Irene in a closet for punishment, leaving the house when the screaming got on her nerves? and, oh, the pants-wetting thing!) and Irene's wild adventures abroad (did some intervention actually abort the near-rape experiences of Irene, or is she rewriting her history our of wishful thinking? or did those scenes never happen at all?) I know that "real life" is very popular right now. Memoirs pop up right and left, and don't get me started on reality television. And if Irene hadn't been a character in her own book, I would have had no issues at all with the "inspired by real people and events"--in fact, I would have thought it an ingenious idea to write a biography of one's grandmother from the grandmother's point of view. Wondering about the truth of Irene's story was only a minor nuisance, but it did, at times, distract me from the story. Nevertheless, this is an engaging, moving story about an extraordinary woman, and I certainly recommend it.

Frau Doktor Rother has an opinion on everything, whether she is asked for it or not. She gets her immediate family out of Nazi Germany and into the US with nothing but her bloody-mindedness. She continues her imperious oversight of her slightly deranged family in Weehawken, New Jersey and then from the World to Come. I read this book a few months ago and some sentences still stick in my mind.

I wasn't sure about this book at first, given the narrator's tone, but I settled into truly enjoying it. The author's device of using her full-of-contradictions grandmother as the narrator of her own memoirs is a fun device that reveals the inner workings of this almost unbelievably fascinating family. Among other things, this is a tale of mothers and daughters, rebellion, rags to riches, world adventure, and German morals. Even though the Rothers endure some truly horrible things, the narrator remains stoic (sometimes almost ignorantly or selfishly so) and convinced of the correct way to proceed. Full of tragicomedy, it's uplifting and a uniquely American story.

a mass of conflicting emotions, it is a differently told tale of European immigrants. It seems to be based on a real family. Some of the writing fails, tho the reader stays with the main character, alternately admiring and disliking her.
The rest of the cast of characters never completely comes to life. It is , nevertheless a good alternate read on the human experience post WW2.