Epstein, Leslie 1938–

(Leslie Donald Epstein)

PERSONAL:

Born May 4, 1938, in Los Angeles, CA; son of Philip (a screenwriter) and Lillian Epstein; married Ilene Gradman, November 1, 1969; children: Anya, Paul and Theo (twins). Education: Yale University, B.A., 1960, graduate study, 1963-65, D.F.A., 1967; Oxford University, diploma, 1962; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1963.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Creative Writing Program, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University, 236 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215. Agent—Lane Zachary, Zachary/Shuster/Harmsworth Agency, 1776 Broadway, Ste. 1405, New York, NY 10019. E-mail—leslieep@bu.edu.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, and educator. Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, lecturer, 1965-67, assistant professor, 1968-70, associate professor, 1970-75, professor of English, 1976-78; Boston University, Boston, MA, director of graduate creative writing program, 1978—.

MEMBER:

International PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rhodes scholarship, 1960-62; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1972; Fulbright fellowship, Council for International Exchange of Scholars, 1972-73; CAPS grant, 1976-77; Guggenheim fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1977-78; Most Distinguished Work of Fiction nomination, National Book Critics' Circle, 1979, and notable book citation, American Library Association, 1980, both for King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust; Award for Distinction in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Rockefeller Institute residency, Bellagio, Italy; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant; National Endowment for the Arts grant.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

P.D. Kimerakov, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

King of the Jews, Coward (New York, NY), 1979, reprinted, Handsel Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Regina, Coward (New York, NY), 1982.

Pinto and Sons, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1990.

Pandaemonium, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory, Handsel Books (New York, NY), 2003.

The Eighth Wonder of the World, Handsel Books/Other Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Steinway Quintet Plus Four, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976.

Goldkorn Tales, Dutton (New York, NY), 1985, published as Goldkorn Tales: Three Novellas, with a new foreword by Frederick Busch and a new preface by Epstein, Southern Methodist University Press (Dallas, TX), 1998.

Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

OTHER

Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Nation, Antaeus, Playboy, Tikkun, TriQuarterly, Yale Review, Nation, New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Partisan Review, Harper's, and Antioch Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Leslie Epstein's first novel, P.D. Kimerakov, is a satire of cold war tensions between the now-defunct Soviet Union and the United States. A New York Times Book Review, praised the skillful characterizations and elegant style found in P.D. Kimerakov, but found the humor somewhat forced. However, the reviewer noted: "this defect may be a sign of Leslie Epstein's honesty: he cannot hide the essential grimness of this particular corner of history." The reviewer concluded that while Epstein's tone is at odds with his subject, "one senses in him what is rare enough at any time: the presence of a sly, appealing, grave, and humorous talent."

Epstein's next book is a collection of short fiction, The Steinway Quintet Plus Four. The humor in the title story comes through the voice of its narrator, Leib Goldkorn. Called "a truly enchanting character" by New York Times contributor Michiko Kakutani, Goldkorn personifies the dignified Jewish culture that once inhabited New York City's Lower East Side. He is the pianist in a quintet that plays in the Steinway Restaurant, once a popular meeting place for notable Jewish luminaries, but now just a relic of the past. Epstein contrasts that faded culture with New York's contemporary atmosphere of violence when two young street toughs, armed and high on drugs, terrorize the Steinway Restaurant and hold its customers and employees hostage for a ridiculous ransom. Her review highlighted the story's deft humor, but Kakutani emphasized that the author makes a powerful statement on his deeper theme as well: "In its juxtaposition of Old World culture and contemporary violence, [The Steinway Quintet is] an organic and wholly complete work of art."

Leib Goldkorn is also featured in the story collections, Goldkorn Tales and Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail. Kakutani deemed the former volume an "energetic, densely patterned" work, one which illuminates "revenge and forgiveness and the stunning tricks that life can play on its victims." In Ice Fire Water, Epstein takes on the Holocaust, in what Houston Chronicle reviewer Harvey Grossinger called a "profuse, digressive, and meticulously crafted" book, which is "an uncompromising philosophical meditation that conjoins a universal human catastrophe with individual misfortune in order to comprehend the unthinkable and demoralizing horrors of history." By the time period of Ice Fire Water, Goldkorn is in his nineties, but his libido seems to be unflagging. He reminisces about his attempted Holocaust-era romances with Olympic figure skater-turned-movie star Sonja Henie, swimmer-turned-movie star Esther Williams, and Brazilian movie star Carmen Miranda, and about the operetta, A Jewish Girl in the Persian Court, that he was trying to get produced during those years. In the present day, Goldkorn is still striving to seduce women, including real-life New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani. "Beneath the masterful linguistic and critical performance," a reviewer commented in Publishers Weekly, "Epstein slyly plants speculations about survivors' accountability, the responsibility of memory, and the relativity of taboo."

Epstein's most controversial work has been his 1979 novel King of the Jews. In it he examines the role that some European Jews played in betraying their own people to the Nazis. The story focuses on the leader of the Judenrat, or governing council of elders, in the ghetto of a Polish industrial city. The Nazis ordered the establishment of Judenrat to control the population that they had forced into the ghettos; the councils' duties eventually included drawing up lists of passengers for the trains to the death camps. Forced to choose between their people and the Nazis, Judenrat leaders knew that if they did not supply the required quotas for the trains, the entire ghetto might be destroyed in one stroke. The ambiguity of this position led at least one Judenrat leader to take his own life. Until King of the Jews was published, "no work of fiction [had] opened up so fully the unbearable moral dilemma in which the Judenrat members found themselves, governing with a pistol at their heads, administering the processes of death, corrupted of course by their awful power, yet trying to preserve life when there was no real way to preserve it," Robert Alter wrote in the New York Times Book Review.

Epstein's protagonist in King of the Jews is based on Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, the real-life elder of the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. Rumkowski remains notorious for having relished the power of his position. Like him, the fictional Isaiah Chaim Trumpelman eagerly volunteers for the position of council elder. Then he exploits his privileges, riding in a limousine or on a white stallion and even having his picture printed on the currency and stamps used in the ghetto. Many critics praised Epstein's characterization of Trumpelman for its depth. The man is depicted in larger-than-life style as someone who enjoys his role; yet Epstein also shows the elder's apparently real concern for orphans, his uncertainties, and the rationalizations that allow him to continue in his position. For example, when the grisly destination of the trains is made clear to him, he justifies his cooperation with the Nazis by saying that by sending ten Jews away, he is saving one hundred others. He even begins to think of himself as a savior, "the King of the Jews."

Epstein told Atlantic Monthly interviewer Daniel Smith that his novel is an accurate depiction of life in the ghetto. "In King of the Jews there are dozens of jokes. I don't think I made up a single one. I made up the humor of the book, but not the formal jokes. They were all taken from Jewish sources on the spot, like Ringelbaum," an inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto who buried cans full of records about daily life there which were discovered after the war.

Taking place in the nineteenth century, Epstein's novel Pinto and Sons, relates the quixotic tale of Adolph Pinto, a Hungarian Jew who has immigrated to the United States to study at Harvard Medical School. After a botched experiment involving the newly discovered anesthetic ether, Pinto is expelled from Harvard. He travels to the American West, where his adventures include adopting and raising a Native American as his son, educating a tribe of Indians in mathematics and poetry, mining for gold, and attempting to discover a cure for rabies. Despite Pinto's good intentions, one catastrophe after another besets him. According to Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, Epstein is using "his hero's dilemmas to examine large historical and moral questions," namely, the inability of science and reason to solve basic human problems, the tendency of large man-made schemes to go awry, and the failed promise of the American dream as embodied in the frontier. Although Kakutani praised Epstein's "verbal exuberance" and his "gift for invention," she found Pinto and Sons "ultimately a disappointment," lacking the "moral resonance" of King of the Jews and sending the reader on an arbitrary "roller-coaster ride" where expectations are raised and then dashed. On the other hand, John Crowley of the New York Times Book Review wrote that Pinto and Sons, despite being too long, "is a fantastic epic of the heroic age of applied science, a fit book to put on the shelf with the great tall tales of American expansion."

Epstein's novel Pandaemonium, returns to the era of King of the Jews, the late 1930s and early 1940s, and again deals, though in less-direct fashion, with the Holocaust. It is a complex and multi-charactered book, narrated in part by a fictionalized version of Jewish actor Peter Lorre and in part by a fictionalized version of Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons. The title of the book is drawn from seventeenth-century poet John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Pandaemonium is the capital of Hell, where Satan's fallen angels gather. David Freeman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described the novel as "an exuberant mixture of high art and low comedy … a big, funny, and bold book that is a virtual catalog of literary, historical, theatrical, and cinematic devices and references." The action of Pandaemonium opens in Salzberg, Austria, in 1938, where director Rudolph Von Beckmann is staging an outdoor production of the classic Greek drama Antigone. International star Magdalena Mezaray will play the title role. Magda, a fictional creation of Epstein's, is reminiscent of both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and plays opposite male lead Peter Lorre. Lorre, who has been trapped in Hollywood in a series of mediocre films based on the exploits of the fictional Japanese detective Mr. Moto, sees this as a major career opportunity. Unfortunately, Hitler invades Austria before the production can be launched. Lorre, because he is Jewish, is soon displaced to a minor role. Magda is forced to become Hitler's consort. Von Beckman is eventually exposed as Jewish himself—the "Von" is assumed—and is sent to an internment camp. The action of the novel switches to Hollywood where Lorre, once again playing Mr. Moto for Granite Studios, futilely pursues his co-star and becomes increasingly dependent on cocaine. Fictionalized versions of real Hollywood personalities abound in the narrative and fictional events—Lorre's attempted suicide, the decapitation of Victor Granite, the kidnapping of Granite's daughter—occur in what Richard Bernstein in the New York Times referred to as "dizzying succession." "Von" Beckman turns up in Hollywood and, through a series of machinations, takes over production of Mr. Moto Wins His Spurs. Casting the newly liberated Magda opposite Lorre, Beckman transforms the movie into a kind of Antigone set in the Old West. Filming proceeds in the Nevada desert in the ghost town of Pandaemonium, where Beckman becomes a mini-Hitler himself, turning the town into an armed camp and ruling the production with a fascist hand. Epstein portrays the Hollywood power structure as fascist in nature, and is highly critical of the failure of Hollywood's Jewish community to respond to the Holocaust in any meaningful way.

Freeman commented of Pandaemonium: "There is lunatic comedy here as well as moral seriousness. Epstein blends these disparate forces with considerable panache…. While I was there, in Pandaemonium, I didn't want to be anywhere else."

In 2003 Epstein published San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory, which is based very closely on Epstein's own family life. The narrator is Richard Jacobi, who in the 1940s and 1950s is a boy of about Epstein's age. Jacobi is the son of a director/producer who bears a striking resemblance to Epstein's father, a famous screenwriter. The first four chapters of the book are set between 1948 and 1960; in them, Jacobi's family suffers humiliation and the loss of their home on San Remo Drive when Jacobi's father is accused of being a Communist and, soon after, dies in a car crash. The remainder of the family learns to cope with life without him, and Jacobi and his brother, Barton, become adults. In this section, "Epstein conjures up Southern California in the '50s with an abundance of deftly observed and deeply evocative details," Jonathan Kirsch wrote in the Los Angeles Times. The second half of the book is set in the present; in it, Donna Seaman wrote in Booklist, Epstein "muses eloquently on the profound impact childhood memories have on both art and life." In the New York Times, critic Elizabeth Frank praised the novel, writing: "Losing and finding, [Epstein] shows us love between fathers and sons as the most powerful and enduring in life, capable of transcending death, time, folly, and a Hollywood childhood. In doing so he has given us, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon, Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, and his own Pandaemonium, one of the four best Hollywood novels ever written."

Epstein's next novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World, returns to a fascist milieu in World War II-era Italy, when Benito Mussolini ruled with a dangerous, often deranged hand. The protagonist of the novel, Amos Prince, is an American architect charged with creating a soaring monument to Mussolini and his conquests in Africa: La Vittoria, a mile-high tower and architectural wonder that will encapsulate the magnificence of fascism in a single dramatic structure. In a farcical narrative that shifts between the present day and the World War II era, Epstein tells the story of the clever and sarcastic Prince's often outlandish efforts; his interactions with Mussolini and Il Duce's primary assistant, Max Shabalian; and the ill-fated course of Mussolini's brutal dictatorship. Amos and Max are both obsessed with completing the tower, but Prince's attitudes are contaminated by intensifying anti-Semitism, while Shabalian is deeply concerned with the fate of his fellow Jews. As the two interact, Max becomes involved with Amos's family and, soon, with Prince's lovely daughter. The story unfolds in three tiers: the modern-day recollections of the now-aged Max Shabalian; Prince's increasingly virulent journal entries; and contemporary accounts of events during the war. Though the story is complicated, Epstein's "artful writing sustains a novel as ambitious as the Babel-like tower it describes," commented a reviewer in Publishers Weekly.

In a more serious tragic layer of the story, Jews from around Italy gather as the construction project progresses, hoping to work on the tower and save themselves from a worse fate in the Nazi concentration camps. Shabalian develops a plan to save them from deportation into the hands of the Germans, but his efforts ultimately go awry, condemning those he had sought to rescue. "Compelling (if sometimes overdrawn) extended scenes vividly portray the accumulating madness, and Epstein offers rich expressionistic characterizations" of protagonist Amos and other real and imaginary players in his complex narrative, remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic.

One of the underlying themes of the novel is the prodigious mythmaking and the manipulation of image and public perception that occurred in order to make fascism, Nazism, and deadly anti-Semitism acceptable to the population. "Epstein's large, swirling, magical-realist novel of Italy in the war years, captures this era beautifully: he feels the madness of the Fascist dream at street level," when women would weep at the sight of Mussolini and declare that he was the true father of their children, commented Vince Passaro in a review in O, the Oprah Magazine.

Passaro called Epstein's writing "assured, evocative, and witty," and concluded that the novel "is an extraordinary artistic achievement." Booklist reviewer Debi Lewis observed that "a patient reader will enjoy the broad scope of this ambitious work."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 27, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, October 20, 1999, Daniel Smith, interview with Epstein.

Booklist, October 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, p. 417; May 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of San RemoDrive: A Novel from Memory, p. 1644; September 1, 2006, Debi Lewis, review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 54.

Boston Herald, May 13, 1997, James Verniere, review of Pandaemonium, p. 33.

Boston Magazine, November, 1982, Lee Grove, interview with Epstein, pp. 107-114; May, 1985, Lee Grove, review of Goldkorn Tales, pp. 98-99.

Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY), August 17, 1997, Mark Shechner, review of Pandaemonium, p. F8.

Harper's Magazine, August, 1985, "Atrocity and Imagination," pp. 13-16.

Houston Chronicle (Houston, TX), February 13, 2000, Harvey Grossinger, review of Ice Fire Water, p. 14.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2003, review of San Remo Drive, pp. 554-555; August 1, 2006, review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 741.

Library Journal, October 15, 1982, review of Regina, p. 2002; April 15, 1985, Herman Elstein, review of Goldkorn Tales, p. 85; October 1, 1990, Elise Chase, review of Pinto and Sons, p. 115; April 15, 1997, David Dodd, review of Pandaemonium, p. 117; September 15, 1999, Marc A. Kloszewski, review of Ice Fire Water, p. 114; May 1, 2003, Jim Dwyer, review of San Remo Drive, pp. 154; August 1, 2006, Molly Abramowitz, review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 68.

Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1983, Elizabeth Wheeler, review of Regina, p. 30; December 14, 1997, Jeremy Larner, review of Pandaemonium, p. 4; June 15, 2003, Jonathan Kirsch, review of San Remo Drive, p. R2.

New York Times, April 3, 1985, Michiko Kakutani, review of Goldkorn Tales, p. 19; November 16, 1990, Michiko Kakutani, review of Pinto and Sons, p. B4; June 2, 1997, Richard Bernstein, review of Pandaemonium, p. B7; June 12, 2003, Dinitia Smith, review of San Remo Drive, p. E1; July 20, 2003, Elizabeth Frank, "You'll Never Have to Leave," p. 10.

New York Times Book Review, August 10, 1975, review of P.D. Kimerakov, p. 6; December 12, 1976, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Steinway Quintet, p. 7; February 28, 1980, Robert Alter, review of King of the Jews, p. 47; November 21, 1982, George Stade, review of Regina, p. 12; December 5, 1982, review of Regina, p. 46; January 1, 1984, review of Regina, p. 32; April 7, 1985, David Evanier, review of Goldkorn Tales, p. 8; May 11, 1986, review of King of the Jews, p. 42; December 7, 1986, Patricia T. O'Connor, review of King of the Jews, p. 84; November 4, 1990, John Crowley, review of Pinto and Sons, and Judith Shulevitz, interview with Epstein, p. 3; June 22, 1997, David Freeman, review of Pandaemonium, p. 6; October 31, 1999, D.T. Max, review of Ice Fire Water, p. 15; January 14, 2007, Richard Lourie, "Il Duce's Architect," review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 21.

O, the Oprah Magazine, November, 2006, Vince Passaro, review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 238.

Present Tense, summer, 1985, Gerald Jonas, review of Goldkorn Tales, pp. 62-63.

Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1985, review of Goldkorn Tales, p. 69; September 7, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Pinto and Sons, p. 75; March 24, 1997, review of Pandaemonium, pp. 59-60; August 23, 1999, review of Ice Fire Water, p. 47; July 17, 2006, review of The Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 132.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), August 17, 1997, Dale Singer, review of Pandaemonium, p. 5C.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 4, 1997, review of Pandaemonium, p. C2.

ONLINE

Boston University Web site,http://www.bu.edu/ (April 10, 2007), biography of Leslie Epstein.

Leslie Epstein Home Page,http://www.bu.edu/english/epstein.html (April 10, 2007).

Phoenix,http://www.thephoenix.com/ (June 28, 2003), Michael Bronski, review of San Remo Drive; (October 31, 2006), Dana Kletter, "Fascist Dreams," review of The Eighth Wonder of the World.