Imagine that you're a chronically unhappy Jewish man, the grandson of Holocaust victims, married to a Gentile woman who both enchants and confounds you. When an obnoxious colleague invites you to take a "dour pilgrimage" with him to Auschwitz, you accept because you think there'll be others on this journey—important scholars in your own field of musicology. Instead you find yourself alone in Poland with the most annoying man alive, retracing the steps of your dead relatives.

"Traveling with Leibowitz," says Charles Belski, hero of The English Disease,

is like traveling with a child whose mother has neglected to pack his Ritalin. I've been with him barely twelve minutes and already I'm exhausted. He has literally not stopped talking since I arrived, encyclopedically rehashing every detail of his trip from the minute he left his adoring wife on their doorstep in Sebastopol to the moment he met me at the gate, wearing a seersucker suit and a white straw hat identical to mine.

Belski's compassion runs as deep as his melancholy (the "English disease"). Few people could pity a blathering narcissist like Leibowitz, but Belski sees him as "a victim of his own unfortunate personality," and for quite a few pages tolerates Leibowitz's brilliantly weird discourses on Wagner and Jung, Herzl and Hitler, until finally even he has had enough and tries to escape. He ducks out of their hotel room while Leibowitz is in the bathroom, only to meet up with the inexorable idiot again in a synagogue in the old Warsaw Ghetto: "Aha! I thought I'd find you here," says Leibowitz. "I do so apologize. I hadn't realized how very long I was taking."

At dinner that night as "bits of kielbasa entangle in his beard or land on the serving platters," Leibowitz launches into another grand lecture, tracing Jewish man's "path towards assimilation" by way of the Marx brothers and their linguistic prowess. He labels silent Harpo "the ultimate alien," the Hasidic Jew in his big coat and hat "denied a language of his own." Chico, with his halting English, represents Jewish man's first steps toward assimilation with the Gentile world. Last comes Groucho, who "masters the master's tongue" and then uses it as a weapon against his own cartoonishly over-drawn Jewishness.

"And what about Zeppo?" says Belski.

"Zeppo," says Leibowitz, "is so assimilated that ultimately, like most Jews, Belski—well, like you yourself, for instance, with your blonde shiksa wife and your goyishe daughter—he eventually leaves the act altogether!"

This is the defining moment of the book. In the next chapter ("Zeppo in Auschwitz"), Belski marches his completely assimilated but sad and guilt-absorbed self into the symbolic center of the Holocaust. Walking among depressing concentration-camp displays, he feels detached: "the actual exhibits—the mountains of human hair, the tall alps of shoes and eyeglasses, the long dunes of luggage—all seem less powerful and disturbing than their familiar photographs." Yes, this is a terrible place, but what does it have to do with him? Why should he have to own the suffering imposed upon his people by outsiders?

Detachment doesn't come easy to Belski, though, and it's not long before his resistance falters. Returning to the States, he knows that he must claim his Jewish identity—at least, as much of it as he can claim without giving up religious skepticism. What follows is the hilarious quest of Belski's wife, who, knowing that he wants her to convert and feeling disgusted at his lack of zeal, drags him backward along the path of Jewish assimilation.

The English Disease has many charms, not least of which is the way Joseph Skibell makes us love and hate Charles Belski at the same time. We feel his pain—his marital worries, his anxiety in Poland, even his flashes of sadness over ridiculous things (glue-eating children)—but like his wife we occasionally want to shout "Shut up, Charles!" And Leibowitz has my vote as one of the funniest and most fully drawn characters in recent American literature. In fact, its title notwithstanding, The English Disease is a distinctively American novel: a look at what it means to be Jewish and also to be from Texas. How does one grieve in a world where there is so much to feel ironic about?

The Irish novelist John Banville's Shroud is also about being Jewish after the Holocaust, and, like The English Disease, it begins in California. Professor Axel Vander (whose story appears to have been inspired by the case of the late Paul de Man, the influential literary theorist) is an elderly literary critic of enormous reputation and body, a towering, bird-like man with an eye patch and a limp from injuries he supposedly received while fighting off a German stormtrooper in his native Flanders. One day, not long after his wife's death, Vander receives a letter from a woman in Europe who says she's discovered his secret. He assumes that she's found anti-Semitic writings submitted under his name long ago in a Flemish newspaper. He's been expecting, avoiding such an "unmasking" for years, but for reasons that go much deeper than worry over professional disgrace. The truth is that Vander is not Vander at all: he's a Jewish man who long ago took the name of a dead friend, leaving behind a people, a family, and a self that never seemed to fit him.

Vander returns to Europe to face his accuser. They meet in Turin, the city where the famous Shroud—the cloth that allegedly took on the image of Christ's face—is kept. Such symbolism is everything in this moody, dreamlike novel. Not only does John Banville describe a man hiding behind a mask, but he often masks the factual content of his story in self-consciously literary, metaphor-heavy prose. Some of his characters seem merely symbolic. A carrot-haired man strides in and out of the plot, periodically assaulting Vander. Is he real? Does he represent death, discovery, or some element of the past bubbling up? Names often have obvious significance: the mad, vulnerable girl who would separate Vander from his fictional self is Cass Cleave. Vander's patient, faithful wife is Magdalena. Vander poetically envisions himself as Harlequin, Frankenstein, Judas, and of course, Christ:

Wet still from the bath, I dripped on the marble floor, in the darkly gleaming surface of which I could see yet another, dim reflection of myself, in end-on perspective this time, like that bronzen portrait of the dead Christ by what's-his-name, first the feet and then the shins, the knees, and dangling genitals, and belly and big chest, and topping it all the aura of wild hair and the featureless face looking down.

Eventually, a resurrection takes place, either within Vander's mind or in some realm between reality and dreaming. The only other witness is the semi-lunatic Cleave, who by now has become Vander's disciple and lover (quite improbably, but then again, this is a book where facts matter less than symbols).

Shroud is as European as The English Disease is American. Though Vander's humanity is never in doubt, what lasts when the book is over is not the experience of an individual man (monstrous and pitiable as he is). What lingers with us, whether we like it or not, is the superb literary artistry of John Banville. Banville haunts rather than entertains, disturbs rather than enlightens. For a novel set in the shadow of the Holocaust, this approach is probably just right.

Betty Smartt Carter is the author two novels. Her new book, Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace, has just been published by Paraclete Press.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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