THE NEW STORY OF RUTH
There are some books that should come with a statutory warning: ``Caution: Readers should only pick up this book if they have a large chunk of time set aside for uninterrupted reading.’’
Simone Zelitch’s Louisa (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $24.95; 384 pp.) is one of those irresistible books, where the reader is tempted to risk truancy, unemployment or divorce, for the simple pleasure of staying on the couch and turning yet another page. From the opening line on, the book gathers steam and races along to its devastating and poignant climax. Part love story, part detective tale, part history and part fable, the story seamlessly blends fact and fiction, past and present, the religious and the secular.
Set in postwar Hungary and Israel, the novel opens with its feisty, middle-aged Jewish narrator, Nora, and her mysterious German daughter-in-law Louisa, arriving as new settlers in Israel in 1949. Fate and history have made inevitable Nora’s arrival in the Jewish homeland; what is less understandable is Louisa’s fervent desire to accompany her mother-in-law to a refugee camp in a country where she is despised and feared.
The sharp-tongued Nora is filled with trepidation at Louisa’s strange decision to convert to Judaism and live in a country whose scars are still too fresh for people to ignore her German heritage. But she is helpless to stop Louisa from following her because Louisa harbored her and saved her life during the Nazi occupation of Hungary.
The novel, of course, is a modern day retelling of the Biblical story of the Israelite Naomi, who was followed to her homeland by her non-Jewish daughter-in-law, Ruth, the Moabite princess. In fact, Zelitch interrupts her narrative at one point, to recount the ancient story for her readers.
Nora comes to Israel with the hopes of finding her Zionist cousin Bela, whom she has always been in love with but who had left Hungary decades ago to start a kibbutz. A secular, European Jew, Nora has so far resisted Bela’s cajolings to immigrate to Israel but now, he is her only relative in a country to which she is a stranger. However, Bela does not show up to meet her boat and all attempts to locate him lead to a dead end.
The search for Bela and our curiosity about his fate, gives the novel its tension. It also gives Louisa its poignant sweetness, as we see a young Nora struggling with her love for Bela, repressing it, forcing herself to save the letters in which her love may be obvious and sending in their place letters in which she sounds flippant and funny. Instead, she marries Janos, an unemotional, unsuccessful engineer, whose allegiance is to the Communist Party, rather than to his family.
But Louisa herself gives the novel its mystery. She is a well-realized character--young, pale, otherworldly, artistic but with a deadly resolve and hard-headedness that is a match for anybody she encounters. For instance, Louisa chases Nora’s carefree son, Gabor, so mercilessly that in the end she wears him down and he marries her. After Gabor is killed by the Nazis in 1944, it is Louisa who harbors Nora in her cellar to protect her from the Nazi camps and the Allied bombs. And yet, selflessness is followed by betrayal, making Louisa a complicated, rich character.
However, it is Nora who is the true heroine of the book. Acid-tongued, prickly, sentimental, expansive, timid, Nora is a bundle of contradictions, her own personality as complex as the mix of revulsion and love she feels for her daughter-in-law. Above all, Nora is a survivor, a woman who life has battered around like a boat in a storm but who is still standing. Even her final heartbreak is borne with a grace that comes from years of struggle and grief.
The novel slows down so slightly in the end, when we find out what has befallen the idealistic Bela. Despite what the plot reveals, his reasons for not meeting his cousin’s boat seem a little suspect for a man so conscious of personal responsibility. Indeed, the novel is at its strongest before the plot reveals the reasons for Bela’s absence. But perhaps Louisa is the victim of its own success because Zelitch has done such a masterful job of keeping us interested in Bela’s fate that any revelation may have come as a slight disappointment.
In a time when most fiction seems small and pinched Zelitch has written a grand, brave, open-hearted novel. In the homely-looking Nora she has found a narrator who is painfully honest and whose narrative is filled with the sharpness and incisiveness that only the truth can deliver. There is no postmodernist self-consciousness or irony here, no metafictional wordplay or navel-gazing. This is fiction writing the old-fashioned way--a good plot, strong, larger-than-life characters and a large scope. It is easy to imagine this novel coming soon to a big screen near you.
Using the broad canvas of Europe and the Middle East, using history as a backdrop, Zelitch has created a novel that is not afraid of its ambitions. As much as it is a novel about history, it is also a novel about memory and its dangers--about how the past never dies but how it must be put in its place so that the present can unfold.
The language itself is as clear as the light in Israel. In Louisa, words do not dazzle; they illuminate. Although this is a long novel, there are no wasted words here. Line builds upon line, as the plot rushes forward like a train, toward its predestined destination. Zelitch finds her rhythm and voice so early on, that the narrative flows as easily and inevitably as a river.
Like its narrator, Louisa is an honest, brave, intelligent and highly entertaining book. And like its narrator, it is a joy to get to know.
--Boston Globe, Oct. 1, 2000
