The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold by Kate BernheimerEvelin Sullivan
Kate Bernheimer. The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold. FC2, 2001. 192 pp. Paper: $11.95
The tales in The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, Kate Bernheimer’s intriguing first novel, are the stories Ketzia tells about herself as child and adult and the stories an omniscient narrator tells about her. Much of Bernheimer’s book is based on traditional German, Russian, and Yiddish fairy and folk tales. She updates these by changing time, setting and events, and replacing the innocent-or not so-characters of the original tale with Ketzia, Jewish and born in America in the late sixties or early seventies, and with Ketzia’s sisters, parents, grandparents and other relatives, and her husband. Thus “Clever Else” in the original Grimms’ tale becomes “Clever Ketzia” in the retelling, and poor Else’s misfortune as someone with an overabundance of imagination and no common sense at all is mirrored in a broken leg accidentally inflicted by Ketzia on her fiancé and in the unraveling of her marriage. The effect of learning about Ketzia’s life in this way is beguiling because although Bernheimer moves the tales out of the once-upon-a-time frame into that of the recent past, she maintains the peculiar quality of the originals, with their mingling of the fantastic and the ordinary. Far from being merely an interesting device, this choice of narrative perfectly reflects the oddity of Ketzia’s mind, a mind at times close to psychotic, and battling alienation, depression and despair, yet also capable of astute observations, dry wit and sympathy for others. Dovetailing with the fairy-tale structure and motifs are not only Ketzia’s perception of the frequent cruelties and rare delights of life but Bernheimer’s knack for capturing the world experienced by a child-how what the child sees and hears is distorted by the inability to distinguish clearly between fiction, dream and reality. A captivating debut novel. [Evelin Sullivan]