THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407270330
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
THE PRINCE OF WEST END AVENUE
ALAN ISLER
Bridge Works. 246 pp. $19.95.
TAKE PHILIP ROTH'S sharp eye for satire. Mix in a little of Saul Bellow's bent for intellectual discourse and a touch of Isaac Bashevis Singer's randiness. Transfer to a tony Manhattan old-age home, and you've got the flavor of Alan Isler's novel, The Prince of West End Avenue.
If the analogy suggests the richness of Isler's first novel, it also slights both him and his illustrious predecessors.
Isler, an English professor at Queens College in New York, displays a singularly elegant prose and adroitly juggles plenty of themes - Holocaust remembrances, love stories, geriatric rivalries. Yet he can't quite match Bellow's vivid exploration of ideas or Singer's playful handling of relations between the sexes.
The narrator, Otto Korner, was a poet in Germany - a protege of Rilke, a hanger-on in the Dada crowd - before being sent to a Nazi concentration camp. He survives the war and spends a quiet life in New York as a librarian. After retiring, he moves into the Emma Lazarus, ``the Plaza of old-age homes,'' on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
There, he inherits the unenviable task of directing and starring in the home's production of ``Hamlet.'' He's got to deal with death, disinterest and general kvetchiness: ``Salo Wittkower, for example, still does not know his new lines; Lottie Grabscheidt, in the scene in which I `talk daggers to her,' fell asleep in her chair in the midst of my impassioned outburst; others walk about like zombies.''
Then there's Tosca Dawidowicz, ``waving her arms aloft in great sweeps, her fatty tissue jingling,'' who threatens to walk out if Korner doesn't omit all references to ``Christian burial'' from the play. Turns out her son and non-Jewish daughter-in-law plan to attend the performance. ``It's me they're giving a Christian burial,'' she says. ``. . . I wouldn't give that shiksa, Muriel, the satisfaction. Forget it.''
The motley crew also includes Hermione Perlmutter, ``a short, dumpy woman with the little arms and hands of a chipmunk, who dresses like Shirley Temple,'' and the Red Dwarf, an alcoholic, unrepentant Marxist.
The production takes center stage in the novel, but the last three chapters bring us powerfully back to the Holocaust. The biggest problem in the camps, Korner recalls, was not hunger or pain, but maintaining ``the merest shred of human dignity. . . . My solution was simple: I re-entered the past,'' patching together memories and reliving days, even weeks. ``Where I was was the past; what I seemed only to `remember' was the present. It was a deliberate effort of the will, and it saved my life.''
Even more chilling is the revelation of the fatal mistake that led Korner to give up his writing. The war leaves him, like the early Hamlet, without will or conviction. But also like the Danish prince, Korner ends up renewing his sense of purpose. For Korner, the play's the thing.
Maybe he's no Olivier and Isler isn't quite the Bard, but this carefully crafted novel deserves a string of curtain calls. Encore! MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer. by CNB