INVENTING MEMORY:
A Novel of Mothers and Daughters
By Erica Jong
HarperCollins, 305 pages, $25
This novel, Erica Jong’s ninth, is surely her most explicitly Jewish piece of fiction. It has all of her natural smartness and more, and deals with what one character calls “joots”–the character’s shorthand for the search for Jewish roots.
It begins superbly. In czarist Russia, a Jewish family is hiding in the loft of a barn during a pogrom: Cossacks are down below running their bayonets and swords into bales of hay looking for their intended victims. Up above, young Sarah Sophie is suckling her first-born son, Dovie, who suddenly needs to be burped.
“I was not sure,” Sarah Sophie recalls, “I could do this without betraying us all.” She does dare it, but with the utmost care, “until he gurgled up from his depths a noisy air bubble. . . .” The Cossacks hear this and she quickly (perhaps too quickly?, she later asks herself) claps the infant back to her breast.
Unable to pinpoint the source of the sound, the Cossacks leave, but not before slaughtering some farm animals in lieu of their quota of Jews. After they are gone, Sarah Sophie realizes “my boy did not draw breath.”
Planning to send later for her mother and siblings, Sarah Sophie then travels, alone and in steerage, to America. She “dances” her way across the Atlantic after meeting Sim Coppley, a wealthy WASP from one of the luxury cabins. They separate on landing, and Sarah Sophie begins life in a sweatshop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the first-stop smelter for all the waves of immigrants who feed into New York’s melting pot.
Jong recreates the life-energy of the bustling ghetto with humor, great shrewdness and even greater tenderness. Her descriptions made me remember all those Sundays when I was a boy and my family would relate stories of life on Avenue A or Orchard Street, when my father’s name was Wolkowitz, when his mother was a seamstress and my other grandmother sold dresses from a pushcart, and when my father as a 9-year-old newsboy had to fight off the others for a “good” corner, and on and on. This was perhaps the hardest time in their life-struggles, but as my elders relived those experiences, it made them seem younger, more vital. I loved their stories, and I love the way Jong’s deeply imagined writing recaptures the bittersweet spirit of the immigrant experience.
The story moves away from the Lower East Side ghetto as Sarah Sophie, who had been a photo retoucher in the old country, becomes, first, a catalog illustrator and then, under the sly tutelage of an art hustler named Levitsky, a fashionable–and prospering–portrait painter of wealthy New Yorkers. This leads to her meeting Sim Coppley again, and, with Levitsky, they shape themselves into a delicately balanced menage a trois.
Later on, as Sarah Sophie dictates her oral history for her descendants, she observes: “When I think of my child and her children . . . and how they live, I realize that no leap of empathy can make them understand how close to the bone we were. . . . (They) live in London, Lugano, Venice, Hollywood, Montana, Manhattan. . . . Interest rates they worry about. . . . They accumulate heavy things that cannot be moved in a pogrom.”
The pages and chapter headings are studded with Yiddish phrases and sayings. About a polo-playing parvenu: “If you see a Jew on a horse, one of them is lame.” Or: “It’s not as good with money as it is bad without it.” Or, more seriously: “For death, you always have time.”
Along the way, too, Jong looses her sharp tongue on such targets as a Greenwich Village writers’ party attended by, among others, “Anais Nin with her face powdered white (lusting after beautiful Gore Vidal)” and “puffy Tennessee Williams (lusting after beautiful Gore Vidal).”
Sarah Sophie’s daughter (by Sim; Levitsky is impotent) is Salome, who in the 1920s becomes a flapper and an expatriate writer; her novel, “A Bad Girl in Paris,” has to be smuggled into the States. The Paris scene brings out the Henry Miller in Jong. In fact, it brings out Henry Miller, with whom Salome has one of her many affairs.
Salome begets Sally, who, under the name of Sally Sky, is a famous rock singer/songwriter of the 1960s. Alas, both of these untamed spirits are more like composite types than substantive characters. Neither has been given the depth the author bestowed on Sarah Sophie. Perhaps as a consequence, neither finds much in the way of self-acceptance or happiness. In addition, their sections of the novel are marked by the same surfeit of wet underpants that was such a high water mark, so to speak, in women’s writing about sex when introduced–almost a quarter of a century ago!–in “Fear of Flying.” Today, and this may just be a sign of the times, it seems more like water over the dam.
Then comes Sally’s daughter, Sara, a historian working for the Council on Jewish History, who at the same time is piecing together her own family’s experiences in America.
“At first,” Jong writes, “Sara found herself wrenching the material this way and that, trying to make a story with a moral. . . . But no matter what she did, she could not find a conventional moral in the story. . . . And sometimes she caught herself dreaming Sarah’s dreams or Salome’s or even Sally’s. For in truth she was all these women. . . . Their memories teemed in her brain. She was telling a story–their story–the story of how one generation gave way to the next, the story of how the strengths of one generation rescued the next generation even in its darkest moments.”
This is surely the author talking to herself. For then she goes on to conclude: “When we dream, we invent our own memories, and this is also true when we write.” In this book, Erica Jong has written inventively and well. And her most lasting creation is likely to be Sarah Sophie, who is the beating heart of “Inventing Memory.”
