Novel delivers Yiddish intellectual world with zest

Chauncey Mabe
Sun Sentinel

Reviewing each new book by Curt Leviant, I open with some variant of the same line: "Curt Leviant is the best unknown novelist in America." His latest gives no cause to change that practice.

Set in New York in the early 1970s, "A Novel of Klass" takes place in the overlapping realms of Manhattan's art scene and the fading Yiddish intellectual world, once centered on The Jewish Daily Forward, which produced such talents as Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Ayzik Klass, Holocaust survivor and self-styled "Yiddish painter," has worked in obscurity for decades, known only to a small coterie of fellow Jewish intellectuals, when by chance he meets a gallery owner named Breslauer at a bookstore.

Breslauer, visiting Klass' small apartment, is impressed to learn the old painter was a friend of Marc Chagall's. Looking at Klass' own pictures - all with Holocaust themes - he's amazed to see they are works of real artistic value.

But Breslauer's efforts to mount a show and gain Klass the attention he deserves (and make some money in the process) are complicated by the artist's wife, Griselda, a homely woman with the figure of a goddess. She's also paranoid, scheming, endlessly argumentative. She takes an instant dislike to Breslauer.

Further barriers arise in the form of Gimpl Englander, a Yiddish poet in a long-running feud with Klass; a gentile Holocaust expert who turns up embarrassing information about Griselda, and Klass' own eccentricities.

Writing with verve and wit, Leviant mines his story for sly comedy. He writes with great affection of his characters and their foibles, yet avoids sentimentality. Here, for example, is the Yiddish speaker Englander struggling with English: "A good thing is worth repeating. Like Emerson said, 'A hobgoblin is the inconsistency of little minds.' "

Leviant's use of Yiddish words and phrases, and the layering of Yiddish rhythms into the English prose, recalls Junot Diaz's use of Spanglish in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

Indeed, if Diaz were a retired Jewish scholar and translator, instead of a young, Latin, English professor, this is the kind of novel he might write.

For all of its comic brio, "A Novel of Klass" is about the Holocaust and the price exacted from its survivors. Leviant shows it can be refreshed by the application of talent, sensibility and energy.