Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "jewish"

According to the publisher, Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel, Daniel Stein Interpreter (published in the original in 2006), is “seen by many as the great Russian novel of our time.” Such a generous description may enlarge the number of readers, but it also runs the risk of raising the expectations too high. Personally, I might have enjoyed the novel more if I hadn’t read it with the constant hope that some great revelation will occur at some point (it didn’t).

My feelings about the novel have remained ambivalent from the beginning to the end. On the one hand, I admired the writer’s ambitious project, as she built a mosaic made of dozens of fragments (i.e., all the characters, each bringing his/her own perspective and story to the Greater Story of Israel). Structurally, the novel is very interesting and daring: written without a unifying “I,” it is a polyphonic novel made of multiple voices, and, although there is a voice that is stronger than the others—that of Brother Daniel, based on a real person—in the end, all the voices mingle to create a unique, hymn-like tapestry. Even the author appears with her own name at the end of each part—the novel has five parts—in a letter that addresses both her personal situation at that particular moment and her difficulties in putting together the novel. Indeed, most of the novel is made of letters written by different characters, or (tape) recordings of conversations between them, or speeches made by Brother Daniel on various occasions, in which he narrates his incredible life as a Polish Jew who worked as an interpreter for both the Gestapo and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), trying in the process to save as many lives as possible, and who, eventually, converted to Catholicism and moved to Israel.

But a novel with as many voices as this one is not easy to write, and this is where the writer comes short. Many of the voices sound the same, and some, in particular the American characters, are quite implausible. When Alex, an American teenager, informs his mother in writing that he is gay, and uses words like “bound by such vital passion,” the implausibility reaches such peaks that it’s almost comical. Some negative reviews of the novel have mentioned its “flat tone,” but I would rather describe the tone as restrained, and the style as paralleling in its asceticism Brother Daniel’s monastic life. There is a certain serenity that comes off the page, and this is no doubt because the simplicity of the style matches the content of the descriptions. And then, there are the numerous, long paragraphs in which various characters reflect on Judaism and Christianity, which I found intelligent and informative, but others might find tedious. All in all, this is an impressive historical document (indeed, not only Brother Daniel, but other characters have existed, or still do, in real life), but I am not sure it is a very successful novel. The main problem stems from its very premise: Brother Daniel is conceived as a model of humanity, and the entire novel, starting with the author’s foreword, reinforces this idea, as well as its corollary, the necessity of tolerance and understanding between people. I’m all for tolerance and understanding, but I don’t know of any great work of literature based on such an unambiguous, let’s-all-hold-hands kind of message. Ambiguity is (at) the heart of literature, and it is not an accident that the novel’s most vivid character is the least “positive” or “inspiring:” Rita Kowacz, the inflexible Communist and bad mother, who became a Protestant before dying.