ICE FIRE WATER: A LEIB GOLDKORN COCKTAIL

Novel by Leslie Epstein, 1999

The irrepressible Leib Goldkorn, the protagonist of Ice Fire Water, made his first appearance in "The Steinway Quartet," a l976 novella that centered on a group of Eastern European musicians working at the Steinway restaurant on Rivington Street in New York City. The work introduced Leslie Epstein's characteristic ploy of intertwining screwball comedy with moral seriousness. What should not have worked in fact did—partly because his longhaired protagonist has a sprightly narrative voice and partly because he stands for Old World values in a debased, often violent, New World setting.

There are at least a hundred ways of getting Goldkorn's accent wrong, but Epstein, as sportscasters like to say, "nails it." The convoluted, thickly textured paragraphs are as much a part of the Goldkorn leitmotiv as are his Admiral television set, Bulova watch, ersatz alligator briefcase, and much-lamented flute. Goldkorn's years at the Steinway are a study in fortune spiraling ever downward: he ends up working inside the restaurant as a shoe shine boy and outside it as a street musician, waving his highly trained musician's hands over water glasses. What remains in Ice Fire Water, despite Goldkorn's now sickly wife, Clara (diabetic, incontinent, altogether a burden), is a voice, seasoned by sorrow, that turns quotidian woe into bursts of language and dashes of poetry: "Waking? I had not once through the long night of anticipation closed my eyes. I heard, from my corner of the Posturpedic, the snores of my wife. In a glass, formerly containing seedless jelly, her dentures lay like a mollusk under inches of water."

Fire Ice Water alternates between memory and desire. Its italicized portions take the reader back to the era of Adolf Hitler and Goldkorn's seriocomic effort to produce what he regards as his masterpiece: Esther, A Jewish Girl at the Persian Court. The opera, Golkorn insists, might yet "change history's course. Surely the subtle French, so wise in the ways of the world, would understand the association of Haman with Hitler. Both begin with the letter H. Formez vos bastaillons." That Goldkorn, a graduate of Vienna's Akademie fur Musik, Philosophie, und darstellende Kunst, is destined to endure comic disappointments and oversized misadventures should not be surprising. The three novellas collected in Goldkorn Tales (an expanded version of "The Steinway Quintet"; "Music of the Spheres," about an over-the-top production of Othello ; and "The Magic Flute," about an assassination plot hatched against a suspected Nazi now serving as the restaurant's new owner) provide the template from which Ice Fire Water was struck. The difference, however, is that the Goldkorn the reader has come to love is now surrounded by a richer, more mature texture. Historical personages intermingle with a bulging cast of fictional extras. The result is playfulness of a high and delightful order, but the high jinks sometimes make for a complicated, unwieldy read. In each case, Hitler or his Nazi agents make cameo appearances as Sonja Henie finds herself at the mercy of Hollywood's Daryl Zanuck or Esther Williams gazes at the bubbling cauldron a group of cannibals have prepared for her death and their dinner.

Epstein, in short, gives Hollywood melodrama the comic send-up it deserves, and in the process turns the altogether predictable into art. This is so because Epstein renders his characters with just the tight-lipped, ironic treatment they deserve and also because he hides tragedy under the guise of an ever-darkening comedy. Only Goldkorn is immune because he holds fast to his belief that music constitutes mankind's slim hope for redemption. For Epstein the question, possibly the only one that matters, is how to limn the twentieth century and the oceans of blood it has occasioned.

Epstein chooses outrageous comedy as his preferred way of confronting the outrageousness that turned a generation of Eastern European Jews into ash. He seems never to have met a pratfall, pun, or misplaced preposition that he did not love. These entities attach themselves to the hapless Goldkorn like bananas to unsuspecting shoes. In this sense, Epstein's protagonist seems less a variation of Saul Bellow 's aging, increasingly disgruntled Artur Sammler than an avatar of James Joyce's bumbling Leopold Bloom. Like Bloom, Goldkorn's stream of consciousness is awash in misinformation. In one memorable scene, he convinces himself that the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani is, of all things, a Finn and thus misses a luncheon date. In another equally outrageous scene, a famished Goldkorn devours the artificial fruit that tops Carmen Miranda's trademark headdress.

Ice Fire Water is a "Goldkorn cocktail" that successfully mixes "real" characters with imagined ones, the beautiful with the ugly, and aspects of goodness with unspeakable evil. Granted, Goldkorn's beverage of choice is schnapps rather than a cocktail, but no matter. Epstein knows where under-statement and misdirection can take the reader, just as he knows that the Holocaust remains the twentieth century's most enigmatic mystery. In old age Goldkorn retains his essential trademarks, but his insights are both wiser and decidedly earned.

—Sanford Pinsker