Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail - Hardcover

Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, and Esther Williams have something more in common than simply their film careers--all have been romanced by Leib Goldkorn, the nonagenarian hero of Leslie Epstein's Ice Fire Water. Readers familiar with this elderly Holocaust survivor from Epstein's 1976 The Steinway Quintet and 1985 Goldkorn Tales will already know that he is hardly the most reliable of narrators. Even a newcomer to the Goldkorn universe will quickly find his or her suspicions aroused by the amazing role serendipity plays in the protagonist's life--if not his star-crossed romance with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. (An October 29, 1999 Times front-page personal ad reads: "Dear sweet Miss Michiko K.--Call your Leib Goldkorn.")

Take for example, the circumstances surrounding Goldkorn's providential departure from Europe on the eve of World War II, detailed in "Ice": having failed in an assassination attempt against Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, he finds himself in Paris during Kristallnacht. Then a telegram from movie mogul Daryl Zanuck arrives, summoning him to Hollywood to compose a score for a new Sonja Henie film. The next novella, "Fire," has our hero on his way to Brazil where he hopes to convince the great Arturo Toscanini to sneak his operetta A Jewish Girl in the Persian Court into a presidential performance of Aida--all part of a plan to woo the Brazilian president away from Germany. On his way, of course, he meets Carmen Miranda and the rest is history--according to Leib Goldkorn. The final selection, "Water," finds this wandering Jew back in Hollywood where Esther Williams is slated to star in a film version of his operetta. But just when it seems Goldkorn's mission of warning the world about the Nazi peril is about to be realized, he himself blows it out of the water--literally.

Epstein presents these adventures as memoirs, remembrances of things past recollected by an elderly man as he tries to masturbate on his 94th birthday (his doctor has prescribed a yearly ejaculation). Goldkorn's amorous adventures weave in and around greater issues: the destruction of European Jewry, and the burdens placed on those who survived. Ice Fire Water is a very funny book, but its high humor coexists with a profound recognition that the other side of this very thin coin is stamped with tragedy. --Margaret Prior

Leslie Epstein heads the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.