Synopsis
Hollywood mogul and Holocaust survivor Morris Cohen becomes obsessed with making a film about Theodor Herzl, who spent his life working to create a Jewish state, leading Cohen into a world of heroism, love, struggle, and purpose
Reviews
At once comic and heartbreaking, Blau's novel is by turns a fiercely loving inquiry into Jewish identity, an acid satire on Hollywood and a touching interfaith love story. Having fled to America after narrowly escaping the Holocaust, Morris Cohen becomes a devoted supporter of Israel--even to the point of covertly manufacturing bazookas for the struggling new state under the cover of his sewing machine business. Years later, now a Tinseltown horror-movie mogul, Cohen wants to redeem a schlocky career by producing a serious movie about Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. His instinct to hire gentile screenwriter Zachary Barthelmes proves ironically successful when, in the process of retracing Herzl's travels from Jerusalem to Paris to Istanbul, the writer discovers that he himself is half-Jewish. Barthelmes's affair with Baptist advertising copywriter Kalia Wiggins yields further surprises, including revelations of childhood sexual abuse by her Bible-thumping father. Cameo walk-ons by David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Teddy Kollek and John Wayne, plus snippets of Barthelmes's emerging film script, enliven a sprawling meditation on religious faith and the centuries-old rift between Christians and Jews. Blau, a director, producer and author of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris , has taken many risks in this novel and succeeded on all counts.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Zachary Barthelmes is a Hollywood scriptwriter and director importuned by a Holocaust-surviving movie mogul, Moe Cohen, king of the horror flicks, to write a screenplay about the life of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist founding father. In the doing, Barthelmes--with ad-exec girlfriend Kalia Wiggins always in supportive tow-- discovers Israel and his own buried half-Jewishness (he'd been raised in his mother's Gentile faith). The Herzl script becomes a life's-work, a white elephant of sorts; but filtered through it, Barthelmes's views of the political jockeying around the Yom Kippur War and his own ambivalence about Jewishness become quite acute. Stage writer, director, and producer Blau (best known as the creator of the musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris) sticks his nose so far into Barthelmes's project--filling page after page with completed scenes for the Herzl script--that a reader feels the book itself is a sort of mythical project, to which are sacrificed such narrative felicities as plot complication and rounded characters. There is occasional fine portraiture here- -Moe Cohen the haunted producer; old shul Jews in the Bronx at the story's wind-up--but the air of quixotic self-discovery pretty much rarefies the realism and leaves it an urbane but one-note flog. (First printing of 25,000) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Blau's splendid, ambitious novel relates much of the history of Israel from before its founding to the near-present through the research of a screenwriter working on a film biography of Jewish politician/visionary Theodor Herzl. This history lesson, which includes the mogul producer's escape as a child from Poland, is surprisingly fluent. Blau also tackles such conventional themes as identity (the writer unearths his own half-Jewish roots), and he manages to work in lengthy scenes from his MacGuffin , the movie that ironically will never be made. This is far from a panegyric to his subject; Blau acutely observes both positive and negative aspects of Israel and Judaism (especially in the film industry). An intriguing, remarkable work, perhaps autobiographical; Blau is also a producer and director. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/93.
- David Bartholomew, NYPL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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