Added spice to mother-daughter goulash
Reparation
Honno, £8.99
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
T SOUNDS like a script by Roman Polanski,” says TV crime journalist Elizabeth of her life. Aranca, her mother (mutti) an elderly Hungarian-born alcoholic and nicotine addict has just announced an indefinite stay in her daughter’s London flat. “Let’s just hope,” Elizabeth adds drily, “neither of us meets a sticky end by way of the rear balcony.”
Elizabeth’s mutti should by rights be at home in Wales with her long-suffering husband. But the elderly pair have hit the financial buffers and Aranca is belatedly bent on claiming war compensation from the Hungarian government to prop up their precarious finances. In this debut novel, Gaby Koppel could have settled for a darkly comic study of a Jewish mother’s relationship with a singleton she has gripped in “a psychological half-nelson”. The year is 1997 and Aranca seems a troublesome Magyar Maenad scented with Madame Rochas. She’s just been thrown, drunk, off the flight to Ibiza where she was heading to sell the holiday home. She went AWOL at the airport. She’s poisoned her brother-in-law Bernie’s big birthday lunch with an unsolicited speech that outed his shtupping of the cleaning lady while his wonderful wife died of cancer. And she swallows sleeping pills with a bottle of vodka. All this would try the patience of the most gemutlich daughter, and Elizabeth is anything but — she’s an assimilated, stressed-out, spiky, career woman. Their unspoken common ground is doubt about Elizabeth’s fiancé Dave, the latest in a string of unsuitable boyfriends. He’s a non-Jewish, arty, freelance photographer quite devoid of the materialistic gene. Yet, when all is said and done, he could be a possible progenitor, at last, of grandchildren.
What raises Reparation above and beyond a clash-of-generations character novel is that both mother and daughter are also grandscale seekers of justice:
A little girl has been murdered in Stamford Hill, where the Charedi community seeks to close ranks against investigating outsiders.
Playing upon the Jewishness she more usually disregards, Elizabeth wins over a rabbi and sleuths her way to the heart of this tragedy. To the heart also of the Strictly Orthodox mother whose bitter loss would, historically, remain invisible to the wider world, but who Elizabeth now persuades to open up on TV.
She’s a campaigning warrior for answers: could the killer come from within? Might his crime be covered up with a hasty air ticket to anonymity in America?
While Elizabeth is thus distracted, Aranca sets off in her own fight-andflight mode, deeming it time to reveal her own, wartime, wounds.
Unsurprisingly, with her track record, she gets herself arrested at Budapest airport. Rushing to retrieve Mutti, Elizabeth is caught up in a voyage to the past which illuminates the present — the mystery of Aranca’s pain and the source of her long-term volatility.
Reparation is an ambitious, crisply chronicled story of little girls lost across separate time zones. It deals with challenge, change and personal growth.
Koppel weaves together themes of criminal concealment, culpability too close to home, and restitution that can never truly atone for the losses incurred. To suggest that, at times, this novel is almost too busy would be to cavil: if reprised in further fiction, Elizabeth has the makings of a cool, home-grown, V. I. Warshawski.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer
(Vallentine Mitchell, £40), his nephew, the academic and writer, David Caute, has attempted to reclaim him for today’s generation by editing a series of interviews, given by Perlzweig to Columbia University in 1981.
Perlzweig’s father was a chazan at a synagogue in Finsbury Park. He himself broke away from Orthodoxy, becoming a minister at St John’s Liberal in 1924 and then moving to Alyth Gardens Reform in 1938. A wunderkind at the universities of Cambridge and London, Perlzweig’s talents were recognised by Claude Montefiore, doyen of Liberal Judaism. Montefiore cultivated the young graduate despite Perlzweig’s passionate adherence to Zionism (at that time, the Liberal Synagogue prayer book omitted any mention of “Zion” and Montefiore was convinced of “the evil of Zionism”). As Perlzweig recalls in this book, to define yourself as a Zionist in polite circles was the equivalent of being “a believer in a flat earth”.
Perlzweig was also an early member of the Labour party, yet he was highly critical of the Fabian Sydney Webb, the Colonial Secretary in 1930 and author of the Passfield White Paper that castigated the “Zionist experiment” in Palestine.
Perlzweig became involved with the newly founded World Jewish Congress in the mid-1930s as the storm clouds gathered over Europe. Among his initiatives was an attempt to secure free passage of Jewish refugees into fascist Spain, to stop antisemitism in Romania by meeting the king’s mistress, Magda Lupescu, and trying to persuade the Poles to take in the Jews of Zbaszyn, on the border with Germany, forced out by the Nazis.
During the dark days of the Battle of Britain, Perlzweig’s friend “Rab” Butler at the Foreign Office told him that, if Britain fell, then the struggle would be carried on from Canada. Butler asked Perlzweig for a list of vulnerable British Jews who should be taken to Canada. A nonplussed Perlzweig responded that he would have to consult his colleagues — in effect, who would live and who would die in the event of a Nazi invasion. Perlzweig’s mentor, Chaim Weizmann refused to allow his name to go on any list.
Perlzweig was a committed and independent man who was called upon to act in the most difficult of times. His nephew has created a fitting memorial to him. COLIN SHINDLER
Charedim seek to close ranks after girl’s murder Zionists were rated alongside flat earth believers