Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, and Esther Williams have something more in common than simply their film careers--all have been romanced by Leib Goldkorn, the nonagenarian hero of Leslie Epstein's Ice Fire Water. Readers familiar with this elderly Holocaust survivor from Epstein's 1976 The Steinway Quintet and 1985 Goldkorn Tales will already know that he is hardly the most reliable of narrators. Even a newcomer to the Goldkorn universe will quickly find his or her suspicions aroused by the amazing role serendipity plays in the protagonist's life--if not his star-crossed romance with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. (An October 29, 1999 Times front-page personal ad reads: "Dear sweet Miss Michiko K.--Call your Leib Goldkorn.")
Take for example, the circumstances surrounding Goldkorn's providential departure from Europe on the eve of World War II, detailed in "Ice": having failed in an assassination attempt against Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, he finds himself in Paris during Kristallnacht. Then a telegram from movie mogul Daryl Zanuck arrives, summoning him to Hollywood to compose a score for a new Sonja Henie film. The next novella, "Fire," has our hero on his way to Brazil where he hopes to convince the great Arturo Toscanini to sneak his operetta A Jewish Girl in the Persian Court into a presidential performance of Aida--all part of a plan to woo the Brazilian president away from Germany. On his way, of course, he meets Carmen Miranda and the rest is history--according to Leib Goldkorn. The final selection, "Water," finds this wandering Jew back in Hollywood where Esther Williams is slated to star in a film version of his operetta. But just when it seems Goldkorn's mission of warning the world about the Nazi peril is about to be realized, he himself blows it out of the water--literally.
Epstein presents these adventures as memoirs, remembrances of things past recollected by an elderly man as he tries to masturbate on his 94th birthday (his doctor has prescribed a yearly ejaculation). Goldkorn's amorous adventures weave in and around greater issues: the destruction of European Jewry, and the burdens placed on those who survived. Ice Fire Water is a very funny book, but its high humor coexists with a profound recognition that the other side of this very thin coin is stamped with tragedy. --Margaret Prior
From Publishers Weekly
Leib GoldkornAVienna-born Jew, professional flautist and earnest rou? returning from Epstein's The Steinway QuartetAturns 94 as he narrates this wise, heroically funny novel on a frigid fall morning in 1996. Faced with another day caring for his ill, bedridden wife, Clara, while avoiding the intrusions of his bizarre Upper West Side tenement neighbors, he sinks into memory, invoking "the bawdery from the past." In the first section, "Ice," Leib relates his encounters with Norwegian champion figure-skater Sonja Henie as he attempts to free her from Hitler's kiss at the 1936 Winter Olympics and wrecks the plan of his "manly" sister Yakhne to assassinate the dictator. He gets invited to Hollywood to write the musical score for Henie's new movie, but this invitation proves to be a sad case of mistaken identity. In "Fire," Leib attempts to lunch with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani (he maintains the belief that she is a buxom Finn). Here he recalls his misadventures with Carmen Miranda, her Nazi-sympathizing musicians and Arturo Toscanini aboard a Rio-bound ship. In that marine environment, Leib tries to mount his imperfect, epic opera, The Jewish Girl at the Persian Court, based on the Old Testament story of Esther, which Leib believes is a direct correlative of Hitler's reign. He is intent on bringing down the Nazis with his art, especially his former classmate and nemesis, Hans Maltz, the spy responsible for Lieb's family's death in Dachau. "Water" follows Lieb to New York's Lower East Side, where he plans to rescue his beloved Hustler Review model, Crystal Knight, from the dungeon in which he believes she is being held prisoner. Each panel in this triptych is ingeniously designed to parallel Leib's combat with his deteriorating physicality. Beneath the masterful linguistic and critical performance, Epstein slyly plants speculations about survivors' accountability, the responsibility of memory and the relativity of taboo. Making clever use of reconfigured syntax and idiom to create his memorable antihero, Epstein maintains an irony-free observational tone (for which his novel The King of the Jews is justly celebrated). Earthy, resourceful and wistful at once, in this novel Epstein once again skewers folly to the post. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
