The Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" and "Weekend in Mustara," by Curt Leviant
reviewed by Patricia Laurence

Untitled document

Curt Leviant. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet” and “Weekend in Mustara.” Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 156 pp. $21.95.

In these two novellas, two American Jewish scholars set out for foreign lands to find letters and artifacts from the dead that will advance their academic careers. The places they travel to, both foreign and mythical, lead them not to what they sought but to something of more value, “the undiscovered countries of the self,” particularly their Jewish selves. Their quest, in the tradition of other recent novels about scholar-adventurers, leads to tastes of the scholarly fruit of the tree of knowledge, a fruit that turns to ashes. They are led to questions: “Collecting knowledge and manuscripts and pitchers and coins; whom did this all benefit? Had any of this saved one human being from sorrow?” What joins the stories is the theme of “possession.” Though they overtly describe the waiting and struggle for possession of academic artifacts that will yield knowledge (and tenure!), the stories are not just about tepid academics in search of dead letters but about poets and mystics and the nature of desire. The energy and passion of this desire flashes in Leviant’s scintillating language and imagery that emerges from his knowledge of Jewish culture and literature. To foreground the two kinds of knowledge that the scholars discover—the conventional and the hidden—Leviant also uses surrealist techniques, juxtaposing reality and dream, as well as using modernist wordplay and punning (also a part of the Hebrew tradition). Writing, like music, is about “the shaping of the invisible,” and like any fine writer, Leviant provides us with things to see. His painterly effects and surrealistic scenes lift poetic, dreamlike, and mad moments out of the “cotton-wool” of ordinary life. And yet these stories have a strong sense of place, the gathering place for Leviant’s strong emotions about the history of the Jews. Ladies and Gentleman takes place in Budapest, “a convention of the mad: war survivors, survivors of attics, cellars, forests, sewers, survivors of death camps . . . survivors of fascism, nazism, communism.” In Weekend the island of Mustara, Italy, is presented as a place where Moorish, Christian, and Jewish cultures blend, a place that the Ashkenzai Jews fled to from central Europe to form a kehillah (community) that has survived Nazism and totalitarianism. What the protagonist, Leviant, finds in Mustara is his double, his name inscribed into the Book of the Dead in the Jewish Museum. In this book he also discovers the name of Ferdinand Friedman, the Holocaust survivor of the first story. It is then that he links to his past and “hears” the unbearable, silent melody of the Hebrew alphabet.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" and "Weekend in Mustara," by Curt Leviant reviewed by Patricia Laurence Untitled document Curt Leviant. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet” and “Weekend in Mustara.” Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 156 pp. $21.95. In these two novellas, two American Jewish scholars set out for foreign lands to find letters and artifacts from the dead that will advance their academic careers. The places they travel to, both foreign and mythical, lead them not to what they sought but to something of more value, “the undiscovered countries of the self,” particularly their Jewish selves. Their quest, in the tradition of other recent novels about scholar-adventurers, leads to tastes of the scholarly fruit of the tree of knowledge, a fruit that turns to ashes. They are led to questions: “Collecting knowledge and manuscripts and pitchers and coins; whom did this all benefit? Had any of this saved one human being from sorrow?” What joins the stories is the theme of “possession.” Though they overtly describe the waiting and struggle for possession of academic artifacts that will yield knowledge (and tenure!), the stories are not just about tepid academics in search of dead letters but about poets and mystics and the nature of desire. The energy and passion of this desire flashes in Leviant’s scintillating language and imagery that emerges from his knowledge of Jewish culture and literature. To foreground the two kinds of knowledge that the scholars discover—the conventional and the hidden—Leviant also uses surrealist techniques, juxtaposing reality and dream, as well as using modernist wordplay and punning (also a part of the Hebrew tradition). Writing, like music, is about “the shaping of the invisible,” and like any fine writer, Leviant provides us with things to see. His painterly effects and surrealistic scenes lift poetic, dreamlike, and mad moments out of the “cotton-wool” of ordinary life. And yet these stories have a strong sense of place, the gathering place for Leviant’s strong emotions about the history of the Jews. Ladies and Gentleman takes place in Budapest, “a convention of the mad: war survivors, survivors of attics, cellars, forests, sewers, survivors of death camps . . . survivors of fascism, nazism, communism.” In Weekend the island of Mustara, Italy, is presented as a place where Moorish, Christian, and Jewish cultures blend, a place that the Ashkenzai Jews fled to from central Europe to form a kehillah (community) that has survived Nazism and totalitarianism. What the protagonist, Leviant, finds in Mustara is his double, his name inscribed into the Book of the Dead in the Jewish Museum. In this book he also discovers the name of Ferdinand Friedman, the Holocaust survivor of the first story. It is then that he links to his past and “hears” the unbearable, silent melody of the Hebrew alphabet.

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