Tonight at 7PM, award-winning poet and author Michael Blumenthal will be at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, to read and discuss his new short story collection “The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History.”
I first noticed Michael Blumenthal’s saucy collection of short stories, “The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History” on a front table at the Brookline Booksmith.
This was a couple of months ago but I remember it because 1. the hyperbolic title (who was the greatest Jewish-American lover in Hungarian history? What made that person the greatest?) and 2. the cover art—an illustration of a fetching redhead in an inviting pose, who, between the hem of her dress and her thigh high stocking reveals a bare patch of creamy white skin. Was she the lover in which the title referred?
Then I read the book and realized the title was not a reference to someone who possessed a great deal of skill in bed, but was a title to which one man—“a humble American writer from New York”—aspired. Fifty-five year old Marcus Bergmann, married to a French woman and father to one son, decides that at middle age he wants to remake himself into a more successful Hungarian lover than even his neighbor, the Hungarian writer Kepes, a formidable opponent who has slept with both married and unmarried women, the leading prostitutes in Budapest, and his “proudest conquest”, author Susan Sontag.
Bergmann’s first dalliance is with a bartender blessed with beauty, seductiveness, and plenty of curves. Then he moves onto a lusty widow, also with ample flesh (Blumenthal’s characters like their women with some meat on their bones. Angelina Jolies of the world need not apply.)
I asked Blumenthal if he meant to provoke readers with a character who so freely pursues sexual conquests while his lovely wife, Beatrice, accuses him—quite justly, I might add—of wanting to have his cake and eat it, too, of being “simply a child in a man’s clothing.”
“I wasn’t trying to be provocative, but I don’t mind being provocative,” Blumenthal said. “It’s not my job to make my characters likable. I’d rather they be real, touching, and believable.”
But before you get the impression that it’s just the men who are highly sexed, you must read the lead story. “Three Beds” concerns a wife and mother who seduces two young sons of a family friend, and ultimately winds up in a third bed.
The boys’ parents look the other way, even as they hear the woman’s nightly moans coming from one or the other of the son’s rooms, because, as members of the Israeli intelligentsia, the couple does not want to deprive their children of the pleasures of the flesh. The husband and wife even play “the three-bed game” over dinner—a sort of Kevin Bacon-six degrees of separation—except in this case it’s strings of lovers, not co-stars, which they name out loud.
Ultimately American readers may have to confront their inner Puritan, not to mention quell their knee-jerk objections to women being compared to Hungarian dishes (in the story “The Whores”, prostitutes working a road between Tapolca and Szigliget are given names like “Stuffed Cabbage”, “Fried Chicken Breast”, and “Chocolate Bread Pudding.”) After reading further, it becomes apparent that Blumenthal—like his hyperbolic title suggests—is pushing the envelope of human sexuality as well as human foible.
In “He Had Tried” Blumenthal lists all the assorted paramours, exotic locales, and improbable positions one man tries in order to achieve sexual nirvana (or perhaps, just a simple orgasm.) The list is so exhaustive that it’s more amusing than erotic. And there are many more examples of this humor coursing through Blumenthal’s collection.
One of the first things Blumenthal said to me when I interviewed him by phone was that I probably thought he was a horny old man. I laughed him off because one of the first things they teach you in creative writing class isnot to assume a writer’s fictional story is merely a thinly disguised autobiography.
Sure, if you read his bio there are some parallels between the author and the characters and details in his stories. Blumenthal does have a French wife and a son. He is a middle-aged writer. He is Jewish and is from New Jersey/New York. He has traveled to places he mentions in the book. He does speak multiple languages. And so on.
But he quickly dispels any doubt by addressing the matter head-on in the Author’s Note—which I almost skipped over. I include it here because it so succinctly sums up the very point of fiction writing.
What follows are works of fiction, howsoever they may depend for their genesis and some of their details on actual occurrences and actual people in my life, myself included. What they are decidedly not, dear readers, are mere autobiographical vignettes disguised as something else. We fiction writers are not, like Bartleby, copyists—we are rather embellishers, inventors, liars, exaggerators, people who, as the poet Robert Pack, once put it, tell personal lies in order to tell impersonal truths.
I love this description of fiction. It’s exactly right. And as if to hammer home his point, midway through “The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History” Blumenthal includes an exchange between a professor and his young and vivacious female student that takes this idea of truth versus fictional flight-of-fancy and reveals the consequences of confusing the two.
I think I can detect an unembellished, personal “truth” in one of Blumenthal’s stories, though. In the tender and beautifully written “My French Wife”, he details the quick courtship and marriage of a couple—an American man and a French woman—their myriad differences and the ways in which they clash. Some of their issues are cultural and some are just typical of married life. Still, their love and affection for each other is clear, even when the husband is shaking his head at his wife when she declares she’d rather live a full life than sit and watch sports and be a potato couch.
When at the end of the story the wife asks her husband if he thinks they should divorce, his answer is so nuanced that it felt true to me—and “real, touching and believable”, just as Blumenthal intended.
—By Jennifer Campaniolo
