The Dead Leaves
By Barbara Jacobs
Translated by David Unger
Curbstone Press, 126 pages, $10.95 paper
In Mexican short-story writer Barbara Jacobs’ “The Dead Leaves,” a biographical novel about her father that received the 1987 Xavier Villarrutia Prize (a major Mexican literary award), the narrator speaks to us in a childlike voice, yearning for the simplicity of the “good times” when all of Emile Jacobs’ children lived at home and there were nights of chess and bridge and things went well with Emile’s business, the Hotel Poe on the Calle de Edgar Allan Poe in Mexico City.
A leftist who fought the good fight, kept the ideals of his youth into his old age and lived long enough to see those ideals trampled by history, Emile is described by his daughter as a man of “steadfast” character: “Though you might not know what he thought, you somehow knew where he stood.”
But Emile also was quite reticent, unwilling to speak of the events of his life that formed his beliefs, and this made him rather a mysterious hero to his children. Emile’s missing past is what Barbara Jacobs describes for us.
Born in Manhattan in 1909, Emile was the youngest son of Lebanese immigrants Mama Salima and Grandpa Rashid Nahum. Nahum returned to Lebanon for a visit and died there when Emile was a baby. Mama Salima took her three children and her favorite book, “Walden,” and headed west, settling in Flint, Mich. There she opened a Persian carpet shop, read books and papers in English, Arabic and French and wrote occasional articles for the papers back home in Lebanon.
Emile, the dark lad who lived in a Persian carpet shop, “transformed himself” into an all-American boy, delivering papers and playing baseball. But Mama Salima’s youngest was also a reader who devoured books until their ideas devoured him. At 15 he discovered the socialist writings of George Bernard Shaw and was never the same.
After college, Emile went to New York, determined to be a journalist. At a party he met a would-be publisher who encouraged him to become the Moscow correspondent for The Monthly Review.
By the time Emile reached Moscow, city of his young Marxist dreams, The Monthly Review no longer existed, but he went on to free-lance for the Moscow Daily News and the International Review, date the niece of Sergei Eisenstein, hang out with Paul Robeson and other expatriate artists and writers, and become a dedicated socialist.
Upon his return to America, Emile helped form the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and almost immediately went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The first American volunteer to set foot on Spanish soil, he didn’t leave Spain until most of his comrades were dead and the Republican cause was lost.
Back in the United States, Emile joined the Army, which took a dim view of his leftist past-so much so that he was never shipped overseas and an intelligence officer was assigned to spy on him. That’s when Emile’s faith in America fizzled and he headed south to learn another language, open the Hotel Poe, and rear his children.
Emile spent the second half of his life pondering the meaning of the first half. Outside his window was a stone bridge-a pointless structure that did not even rise above a stream; rather, it gathered fallen leaves and derelicts. This is where he goes to die, allowing the dead leaves to slowly cover him.
