THE FINAL OPUS OF LEON SOLOMON

by Jerome Badanes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1988

The puerile, famous memoirs of a Holocaust survivor written in the few days before his suicide, focusing upon his sexual fantasies, fetishes, and humiliations. Skillfully enough written, but always raising the question of why written at all. Yiddish historian and Auschwitz survivor Leon Solomon, caught cutting pages out of rare books in the Judaica collection, is banned from the New York Public Library. Having decided on suicide, he has moved to a seedy hotel on 42nd Street. From this point until the end of the book, when he overdoses on phenobarbital in the hotel lobby phone booth, he writes of various incidents in his past. There's some effective material on his childhood in Poland, his parents, and his sister, Malka, beaten to death by Nazis. But it becomes clear that Leon is more interested in his unconsummated but incestuous relationship with Malka than anything else in his youth. Moving about through his memories, Leon inevitably returns to one or another sexual event. His humiliation by two Poles who forced him to perform fellatio replaces his imaginings of his estranged wife making love to another man, which gives way to his fantasies about Fulani, a black, pro-Palestinian radio personality whose show he regularly calls. The blurred line between fantasy and reality fades away when he writes of his ex-neighbor Kristin, the beautiful daughter of a Nazi, who made herself his sexual slave, and, when rejected, turned into Malka. First-novelist Badanes is, perhaps, attempting to address the historical process, memory, and Jewish self. hate in light of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, though, the unpleasant Leon Solomon is more an obstacle than a key to the process.

Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION