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Books: With Truth on His Side
Samuel G. Freedman
Critics scoffed when Oscar Hijuelos published a novel about a �degenerate� musician being swept up by, but surviving, the Nazis, but he based his hero on a real-life character
Six or seven years ago, the Cuban-American novelist Oscar Hijuelos tossed out an idea to his friend Chico O�Farrill, a Latin-jazz bandleader in New York. They could develop a ballet based on one of the most durable of Cuban popular songs, a 1928 number called "El Manisero" ("The Peanut Vendor"). Hijuelos started to do some research on the songwriter, Moises Simons, and learned that he had been a quite prominent composer of orchestral music, even if he was most remembered for a jaunty ditty he had scribbled down in 20 minutes on a tavern napkin.
Perusing one particular reference book, though, Hijuelos chanced upon a more dis- cordant detail. Simons, it said, had spent two years in Buchenwald. A Sephardi Jew, he had been living in Paris at the time of the Nazi conquest, impossibly believing he could evade capture by altering his surname to the more gentile Simone. He died, in Madrid, less than a year after liberation. "Here," Hijuelos remembers thinking, "is a gigantic subject."
In the end, the project took the form not of a ballet but a novel, "A Simple Habana Melody," which became the most ambitious and misunderstood of Hijuelos�s six books. Hijuelos reimagined the factual Moises Simons as the fictive Israel Levis, a devout Catholic with a Jewish-sounding name, a Jewish lover, and a talent for what the Nazis called "degenerate" jazz. All of which proves more than sufficient for the Germans to register Levis as a Jew, require he wear a yellow star, and ship him off to Buchenwald, where his tortures include having to give private piano recitals for the Nazi officers. His hit song, "Rosas Puras" ("Pretty Roses"), becomes amusement for murderers.
In a confirmation of the novel�s historical integrity and sensitivity to Jewish experience, it has been purchased by Israel�s Keter publishing house for release in Hebrew later this year, and was bought in Sweden by a publisher, many of whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. (It will also be released in paperback in the United States in May.) Yet several major American reviewers, ignorant of the novel�s historical basis, dismissed the story of Israel Levis. "Misguided and contrived," declared Daniel Zalewski in The New York Times. Jane Ciabattari in the Washington Post, while generally praising the book, contended, that "it is hard to believe" Levis as a non-Jew gets swept up in the Holocaust.
Though a few journalists and readers have corrected the record, Hijuelos smarts from the attacks. Not only does historical truth support him, but the roots of this novel are surprisingly personal, reflecting both Hijuelos�s experiences with Holocaust survivors growing up in postwar New York and his own ruminations over identity. In its concern with God�s presence in a seemingly Godless world, "Habana Melody" stands as a kind of companion to Hijuelos� highly acclaimed 1995 novel, "Mr. Ives� Christmas," a retelling of the Job story in working-class New York.
The child of two Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos, 51, was reared in the racial and ethnic mix of Upper Manhattan�s Claremont Avenue, the setting for many of his books. He grew up both intensely religious and intimately aware of mortality. He spent 18 months hospitalized at ages 4 and 5 with a nearly fatal case of nephritis. And he was just 17 when his father Jose, a hotel cook, died while moonlighting at his second job as a waiter. Hijuelos�s mother Magdalena took odd jobs, including house-cleaning, to support Oscar and his older brother Jose.
Hijuelos first encountered a survivor while working as a teenager at a summer camp; by gruesome coincidence, the man presided over ovens as the camp baker. Several years later, working at an advertising agency, Hijuelos sat near another survivor, a woman given to sobbing in the middle of the day, particularly at any show of kindness. Human frailty and divine mystery ultimately informed much of Hijuelos�s fiction. His childhood illness figured in his autobiographical first novel, "Our House in the Last World" (1983). Like the author�s mother, the protagonist of "Empress of the Splendid Season" (1999) is an immigrant cleaning lady, investing all her unfulfilled dreams in her son. The title character in "Mr. Ives� Christmas" finds his faith decimated when his teenaged son is shot and killed shortly before entering Roman Catholic seminary. Elsewhere in the novel, Hijuelos inserted a thinly veiled version of the survivor at the ad agency. In one brief, poignant moment, she weeps when the sight of a Mickey Mouse puppet improbably conjures the memory of a Russian soldier rescuing her at age 10 from Auschwitz.
Despite this ample gravitas, Hijuelos�s popular image rests inordinately on one book, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" (1989), the saga of a Cuban-American mambo band that brims with music, food and sex. When the book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film of the same name starring Antonio Banderas, it fixed the image of Oscar Hijuelos as the poet laureate of the appetites. Even in "Mambo Kings," that was at best half-true, for the novel is set, after all, on the day an aging musician, his powers sapped, is about to kill himself.
So there was precedent, perhaps inevitability, behind the creation of Israel Levis. Hijuelos himself puts a great deal of stock in superstition, it emerged in an interview with The Jerusalem Report at the author�s apartment on Manhattan�s Upper West Side. When he found out that he and Moises Simons shared the identical birth date of August 24 -- Simons in 1890, Hijuelos in 1951 -- he considered it "a sign to move forward." Soon after deciding, he got into a discussion with a cousin of his named Sarah. "She said to me we probably have Jewish ancestors going back," Hijuelos recalls. "The name Hijuelos is a hard one to track down. And there�s a whole side of my family that looks very Semitic. I was intrigued by the idea I could have some Sephardi blood, even if it�s centuries old. A converso somewhere, generations back. My cousin got me thinking about identity and how one is defined by a name, by an appearance. As Carlos Fuentes once said, there�s not a Spaniard walking around without these roots."
Before starting to write "Habana Melody" in September 1999, Hijuelo had read and been deeply influenced by Primo Levi as both chronicler and rending example of "how later lives were formed by what happened during the Holocaust." In fact, Hijuelos named his character Levis as a homage. He also was familiar with "The Bass Saxophone," Josef Skvorecky�s novella about jazz musicians in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, which he slyly mentions in the novel. "Swastika Over Paris," by Jeremy Josephs, provided him with a baseline of information about French Jews during the Nazi occupation.
Still, two aspects of Simons�s experience confounded Hijuelos in forming Israel Levis. Why would a Jew, or someone thought to be Jewish, have remained in Paris during the German takeover? And why would someone think that slightly changing his name would spare him discovery? The search for a "plausible answer" led Hijuelos to shape Levis as a profoundly self-involved artist. The concentration, the focus, the sort of narcissism that allows him to compose with such fecundity in Cuba, Tin Pan Alley, and Paris also lets him ignore Cuba�s political turmoil in the interwar decades and then the imminent Nazi threat. He is a man given to hesitancy rather than action, unable to declare his ardor for those he loves, unable to flee France when there is still a chance.
At once respectful of and intimidated by the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, Hijuelos set very few pages of "Habana Melody" in Buchenwald. Rather than try to describe its horrors, he simply writes of Levis as he is sent to the camp, "[F]or the next fourteen months, the maestro did not believe the things he saw, nor the sounds he heard." The novel gathers its impact instead by means of counterpoint, as Hijuelos presents a reader with three depictions of Levis -- in the prewar years as the gifted musician, grown literally and metaphorically fat on his talents; during the Nazi occupation as the na�f too gradually awakening to the danger around him; and after the war as a shattered specimen.
The descriptions of Levis returning to Havana in 1947 spare nothing. He haunts the pages, gaunt, bearded, prematurely gray, devoid of hunger or passion, fearful "he would never compose another piece of music again." When the household radio catches his famous "Rosas Puras," he switches it off; he turns down orchestral commissions and movie soundtracks. A devout Catholic before the war, in its aftermath, "He would sit for hours in a back pew, under the high ceilings, surrounded by columns, stunned that he now felt nothing at all."
"I�m always asking, �Where�s God? Is there justice in the world?�" Hijuelos says. "People in the 13th century said God died with the coming of the plague. But for me, like other people, God died in the Holocaust. I can�t go to church myself anymore. If I�m in a reflective mood, it�s too emotional an experience. I start thinking of the goodness of man versus what the world is like. The lack of virtue, the lack of introspection, the lack of sympathetic imagination." Hijuelos�s imagination, however, has proven capacious in its sympathies -- for the rich man�s cleaning lady, the sonless father and now the Holocaust survivor. In the hands of another gentile novelist, William Styron, the Shoah was turned on its head. Not only was the heroine of "Sophie�s Choice" a Christian, forced by the Nazis to send one of her children to death, but her persecutor in postwar Brooklyn is a Jew. Israel Levis, in contrast, essentially becomes a Jew.
And while some American critics found his story implausible, Dorotea Bromberg, the publisher of Bromberg Books in Sweden, gauged it against the experiences of her own family, Polish Jews who had variously resisted, eluded and perished before the Nazis. "Oscar�s novel impressed me in many ways," she says. "And the biggest surprise has been that he writes with such knowledge and feeling about the Holocaust. His way of writing just felt very, very true. No exaggerations, no banal clich�s, just as true and sensitively as any great Jewish author could treat the subject."
Samuel G. Freedman, associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of "Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry."
March 10, 2003
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