Books: ‘Holy Shekhinah’

Three novels playing on historical themes provide entertaining reads but succeed to varying degrees.

By MATT NESVISKY
The Dark Lady’s Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare’s Muse (photo credit: PR)
The Dark Lady’s Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare’s Muse
(photo credit: PR)
THREE AMERICAN novelists have recently conjured up highly imaginative counter-factual worlds with much in common. One deals with a real but mystery-shrouded Englishwoman allegedly of Italian-Jewish background. The second plays with the notion of a vibrant fictional Jewish kingdom with historical roots.
The third riffs on an alternate Jewish state. All three novels have a decided feminist bent, and each in varying degrees is entertaining. But one novel succeeds far more than the others.
Let’s start with the winner. Even though it is constructed out of numerous creative hypotheses, suppositions and what-ifs, Mary Sharratt’s “The Dark Lady’s Mask” has a sustained plausibility.
The novel centers on Aemilia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645), a rare female poet in Renaissance England who actually succeeded in publishing a book of verse, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” (1611). More notably, Lanier has been identified by some scholars as the vexingly obscure “dark lady” who features in several of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sharratt takes this notion and runs like mad with it.
Well, not quite mad – or if so, yet there is method in’t. More is documented about the life of Lanier than that of Shakespeare. (Lanier has also been the subject of several modern studies.) Thus, with Lanier, Sharratt sticks close to the facts. With Shakespeare – heck, with all those missing years and imponderables concerning his genius, a novelist can imagine just about anything and make it seem credible – to the point where a reader is tempted to echo: “Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
So Sharratt has Aemelia and Will meet cute in London, find themselves in a marriage of true minds and, leaving their respective spouses behind, run off to Italy together. There they tour the ghetto of Venice and attend a sermon by the scholar, cantor and opponent of kabbalah, Rabbi Leone da Modena, then settle into Aemelia’s nearby ancestral home in Bassano, then in a country house outside of Verona. The product of their time together produces not only a child but several plays set in Italy. Lanier, you see, is not only Shakespeare’s muse but his collaborator. (“Of course,” one character muses, “everyone is asking how some provincial with a grammar-school education can write Italian comedies all by himself.”
And indeed, Shakespeare is widely believed to have collaborated occasionally with other playwrights.)
SHARRATT ADDRESSES all of this quite seriously, and the reader is induced to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. Everything Sharratt presents is, if not thoroughly convincing, then certainly plausible – including her characterizations of playwright Ben Jonson, poet Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Southampton, Lord Chamberlain George Carey (a patron of one of the theater companies with which the playwright was associated), Aemelia’s wastrel husband Alphonse Lanier, and the enigmatic and not always admirable Will Shakespeare.
Even with some chronological shuffling, Sharratt also does a fine job of tracing Shakespeare’s meteoric rise and Aemelia’s far less successful career, a life journey that has more ups and downs than a midtown Manhattan elevator.
The author slips only occasionally, as when she has the two main characters speak a bit too often dialogue that appears in the Shakespeare canon, or when another character startlingly employs a Hollywood locution (“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”). She also uses crenulations when she means crenellations. And she is prone to raid the canon for every possible reflection of Aemilia Bassano Lanier. (Hey, Iago’s wife is called Emilia! Really?) Sharratt, who is not Jewish, does not probe Lanier’s presumed Jewish background very deeply, although she does make it a matter of importance to her character. Some scholars argue that the Bassanos left Italy not because they were secretly Jewish but because they were secretly Protestants. Indeed, Aemilia lived in England as a Protestant, and her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” is a decidedly Protestant epic, albeit one with a feminist cast.
No matter. Aemilia Bassano Lanier is a fascinating figure, and whether she ever met William Shakespeare cute or not at all, “The Dark Lady’s Mask” is a thought-provoking romp. Emily Barton’s “the Book of Esther” starts off as a hoot but soon enough goes to hell in a handbasket. I like the premise: the medieval Jewish kingdom of Khazaria, which features in Yehuda Halevi’s philosophical classic, “The Kuzari,” has not, as history tells us, disappeared, but thrives in the Central Asian steppes right up to World War II, when the “Germanii” are about to invade on their way to Russia. Khazaria prepares to meet the threat with its looney-tune mix of military technology.
The Khazars have aircraft carriers, but their aircraft are wooden biplanes. They also pilot “aerocycles,” pedal-powered flying machines such as used by Woody Allen’s character in “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.” The Khazars maintain their tradition as great horsemen, but their horses now include gasoline-powered machines steered with handlebars, something like Harleys with snapping teeth and switching tails. Khazar troopers fight with rifles and pistols, but also with swords and crossbows. They have radar, telephones and telegraph, but unaccountably also rely greatly on homing pigeons.
None of it makes much sense, but for a while both author and reader are having great fun. (It helps that no Nazis appear and the death camps are only vaguely alluded to.) Barton’s story centers on Esther, the 16-year-old daughter of a Khazar nobleman, who is determined to be her nation’s “Yokhanna d’Arc.” Her Sancho Panza is a nine-year-old family slave named Itakh. Although the novel is not marketed as such, we soon realize we are deeply in Young Adult fiction territory. That’s forgivable. But then Barton starts to plot, or tries to. Ironically, the author recently posted an online article about the importance of plotting, but she obviously hasn’t given the matter much practice.
Her set-up is very creative, but from the getgo, her story limps, falters, sags.
Anyway, in order to lead an army, Esther decides to seek out the nation’s kabbalists, with hope that they can turn her into a man. After a long and not especially interesting journey by horsemobile, Esther finds the mystics. They can’t transgenderize her, but they do supply a couple of dozen huge clay automata (in the same paragraph referred to alternately as both golems and golemim). These turn out to be really good soldiers. Oh, and there are golem horses too; very economical. But whether claymation warriors can turn back a blitzkrieg remains to be seen.
For the bulk of the novel Esther gallops back and forth on her mechanical mount, trying to raise troops, dithering between two love interests, and debating with her companions as to whether golems (or golemim) have souls or consciences or should be allowed in a minyan.
Pick-up-and-drop-it plot-clutter includes a brief encounter with a werewolf, pigeon messages to Praha (Prague) to reach a longlost relative, tension with Esther’s sister, and the Kagan, the ruler of Khazaria, who hides behind a curtain much as does the Wizard of Oz.
With characters like so many comic- book figures forever exclaiming, “Holy Shekhinah!” the novelty of “The Book of Esther” soon enough wears off and the author, like one of those steel-bodied stallions, runs out of gas. What started as inventive and amusing sinks under its pretensions into sheer silliness, something like Middle Earth peopled by Hasidic Hobbits. In all, a wasted opportunity: even young adult readers deserve better.
WHEN I told a friend I’d just got hold of Simone Zelitch’s “Judenstaat,” a novel premised on a Jewish state being established in Germany after World War II, the friend sniffed, “What’s the point?” Now having read the book, I’m inclined to ask the same question.
The setup is nothing if not provocative. According to Zelitch, Bundists (pro-Moscow German Jewish socialists) demanded Holocaust reparation in the form of an independent Jewish state in Saxony – from Leipzig to Dresden – under the protection of the Soviet Union. With the story set in 1988, on the eve of the country’s 40th anniversary, we find a state that very much resembles the former East Germany, complete with its own Stasi (secret police), closed borders and bumpy economy.
“Judenstaat” however also has feisty Haredim fighting to preserve Yiddish and their way of life, uneasy relations with its Saxon (German) minority citizens, and a murky political history.
That history includes a charismatic founder of the nation, a Trotsky-like anti-hero, and much meddling by Moscow.
But Zelitch never explores any of this; mostly she just drops in “historical background.”
We glean, for example, that Israel never became a reality because of the “failed” Rothschild agricultural experiments of the previous century; other than that, Zionism doesn’t exist in this novel. No, Zelitch is more preoccupied with her heroine, Judit Klemmer, who holds the tidy if clichéd position as a film archivist at Judenstaat’s National Museum. She believes the “true” history of her nation has been whitewashed (if only the right canister of film can be found!). Judit is equally busy with the mystery surrounding the murder four years ago of her husband, an orchestra conductor. (This reader couldn’t much care who killed Hans since it’s never clear why he was assassinated in the first place – although those German music critics can be harsh.) And Judit is further busy trying to avoid yet another miscarriage, this time following her affair with a Stasi agent.
Historical cover-up, murder mystery, pregnancy concerns – I couldn’t help thinking of the failure to move that intriguing background more to the foreground. But I did appreciate the novel’s sole light note, the reference to the Judenstaat’s homely national automobile – the Yekke.