Just entertainment
Gifts from experience
Leslea Newman writes undeniably Jewish stories punchy
with the rhythm of her grandmothers' speech
—
B Y
A N N D E E
H O C H M A N
A Letter to Harvey Milk — Short Stories by
Leslea Sewman (Firebrand Books. 1988).
n epigraph by poet Muriel Rukeyser
opens the first story in Leslea Newman’s
new collection: “ To be a Jew in the twentieth
century/Is to be offered a gift . . . ” In these
stories. Newman offers us the gift of Jewish
A
lesbian experience, sometimes painful, some
times wry, sometimes dogged with joy. Her
mistake is in trying to make it a pretty package.
Newman’s subjects are tough, grim ones —
incest. AIDS, the Holocaust, homophobia. In
her stories, a Jewish woman reaches self-
knowledge only after years of subtle discrimi
nation; a lesbian couple grapples with one part
ner's chiIdhood sexual abuse; a student haunted
by the Holocaust believes the Nazis are back
and hides in her apartment for days; a woman
discovers that her college buddy has died from
AIDS after spotting his name on a panel of the
Names Project quilt. There are moments of
I truth in these stories, instants of irony, clarity
and humor But with the exception of two stand
out pieces. Newman clutters these moments
i with stale imagery, cliched language and tidy
endings that numb the stones’ impact.
Newman writes undeniably Jewish stories —
punchy with the rhythm of her grandmothers’
speech and sprinkled heavily with Yiddish
phrases. (A back-of-the-b<x)k glossary helps
with less familiar words.) In rare, strong
moments, Newman's prose is spare and salty,
full of the rock and gulp and richness of her
roots.
In the opening story. “ The Gift,” eight-year-
old Rachel is furious that her family can’t cele
brate Christmas. “ Rachel is so mad right now
that she hates everything about her mother —
her seuffy white slippers, her baggy stockings,
her flowered housedress, her yellow apron, the
shmate on her head, even the knaydlach she is
rolling into a perfect ball between her two small
hands,” Newman writes. She sees with clarity
and freshness through the eyes of her child-
protagonist. This story, a series of vignettes
spotting Rachel at 5, at 14. at 25, at 29, tells a
hard truth in hushed, simple tones. It may be
autobiographical, but it rings of shared experi
ence — the pain of EveryJewishLesbian in a
mostly Protestant, mostly heterosexual society.
Rachel suffers discrimination in all its subtle
forms, and the story follows her response, from
childhood petulance to assimilation and finally
to a devoted embrace of her own tradition.
In one scene, a Hispanic man flirts with a
17-year-old Rachel in a gift shop. “ No, you
don’t understand,” Rachel says to him. “ I’m
not Spanish, I’m Jewish.”
GALAXY ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS
with CHATA ADDY ê KPUNI ADDY
african dance and drumming
September 9 • 8PM • Silva Theatre, Huit Center, Eugene
Letter
short stories by
Leslea
Newman
“ No, you are no Jewish,” the man answers.
“ You are too pretty for Jewish. You speak
Spanish, yes?”
At the age of 20, Rachel attempts to fit in
with her college roommates by telling them she
only “ used to be” Jewish. In one of the most
expressive and tangible moments of the story,
she locks herself in a dormitory bathroom with
three potato latkes given to her by a Jewish
shopkeeper. “ Rachel eats the latkes ravenously,
then licks her fingers greedily, searching the tin
foil for any stray crumbs she may have left
behind.” In this single line, Newman gets at the
heart of Rachel's struggle to assimilate — she is
starved for Jewish tradition and desperate to
hide that hunger from the world.
By the story's end, Rachel has flourished into
the full meaning of Rukeyser’s epigraph: in the
synagogue, on Rosh Hashana, she “ feels her
heart swelling inside her chest. . . Rachel has
come home.” The story leaves us with a fitting
emotional foreground for the book — the joy,
warmth and sense of homecoming Newman
conveys simply by writing as who she is,
from what she knows.
Ironically, the best piece of the collection is
the title story, in which Newman's own voice
remains hidden. “ A Letter to Harvey Milk.”
narrated by a retired Jewish butcher, shows
Newman's grasp of truth not as a neatly
wrapped package, but as a complex, crotchety
thing, which answers our questions only with
deeper questions.
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The narrator of this story. Harry Weinberg,
lives in San Francisco. He used to own a
butcher shop in the Castro, where Harvey Milk
had his camera shop and launched his political
career. Weinberg and Milk became friends.
Now Milk is dead, and Weinberg attends a
writing class at the local senior center. The
teacher, a Jewish lesbian of about 30, urges her
elderly students to write about their lives. But
Weinberg shows that telling the stories,
unearthing the past, is a mixed gift. His
memory is clear, his writing blunt and vivid; he
is able to tell stories he can no longer bear to
hear.
“ These stories are like a knife in my heart,”
he writes. "Teacher, I want you should have my
notebook. It doesn't have nice stories in it. . . .
A bestseller it ain’t, I guarantee. Maybe you’ll
put it in a book someday, the world shouldn’t
forget.”
“ A Letter to Harvey Milk” won second
place in the 1987 Raymond Carver Short Story
Contest. It stands out as an example of how
good Newman’s prose can be when she shows
detail not through cliché but through specific
images and allows the truth to be as thorny,
complex and unattractive as it truly is.
In short stories, each word bears a critical
weight. To carry clout in 20 pages or less, short
stories must have a taut, wound-up rhythm,
clear pacing and judicious use of detail. In
Newman's stories, details often distract rather
than notching the piece together. Sometimes,
close to a moment of originality or insight, she
tosses in a cliché that blocks our clear view,
muddies the epiphany. A closeted lesbian
teacher “ stuck out like a sore thumb” ; a young
girl wishes for “ rose-colored glasses” to
relieve the grayness of her grandmother’s life.
Worn phrases like these can’t tell us anything
new.
A story called “ Only a Phase” has a
promising premise — that the life of a lesbian
who is just coming out and the life of her angry,
shocked mother hold surprising parallels. But
Newman uses the trick until we’re numb from
it, exploiting the gimmick to predictable ends.
Mom talks to her dog in the same way daughter
talks to her cat. Mom fixes coffee and, with
parallel pacing and language, daughter brews a
cup of herbal tea. By the end, the technique
speaks louder than the characters.
Two of the most interesting characters,
Gloria and Ellen, enact “ The Best Revenge,” a
story that appeared in different form in Com
mon Lives!Lesbian Lives. Gloria is an obsessive
list-maker, scribbling in her journal at every
spare moment. Her partner. Ellen, is an incest
survivor, a karate blue-belt who never cries if
she can help it. But Newman treats the incest
theme too lightly, giving the story sit-com
pacing and an ending as neat as new shoes. Her
characters, and the reader, deserve a less tidy,
more realistic send-off.
It's clear that Newman wants us not to feel
defeated by life’s traumas and inequities, to see
that her characters — and, by implication, our
friends and ourselves — can triumph finally
with their fierce love for each other, for their
heritage, for life itself. This is the message of
the final story, “ The World to Come.” an
allegorical scene of camaraderie and peace. It is
intended to be a bookend for the collection, a
vision of the future just as “ The Gift,” the first
story, traced its protagonist’s past. But “ The
World to Come” leaves an image that feels
shallow rather than hopeful.
The narrator, dreaming of a circle of Jewish
heroines, surrounded in reality by a circle of
friends in her apartment, says. “ As I slowly
recognized the smiling faces of my friends. I
realized the world to come and the world we
live in are not always so different after all."
It's a nice thought But if we have read
Newman s stories with our eyes open to the
injustice as well as the joy. we are not
convinced.
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