Emigrant World

A HOUSEFUL OF LOVE, by Marjorie Housepian (222 pp.; Random House; $3.50), is a succulent shish-kebab of a novel. Its thin skewer of a plot is strung with pungent morsels of Armenian-American characters. The time is 1929; the place, ten blocks south of Manhattan's Empire State Building, but the real locale is the world within a world of the emigrant. In the case of these emigrants from the Near East, it is also a world as self-contained as a harem, with a temperamental streak of reverse xenophobia ("Americans, Uncle Pousant had always maintained, were strictly cold soup"). Author Housepian, 34, herself Manhattan-born and of Armenian parentage, conjures up this world rather like a fortuneteller, as if she could see it all at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee.

There is mustachioed Uncle Pousant, the autocrat of his own restaurant tables, whose fierce assaults on the pots, pans and help are only equaled by his war with English. There is Grandmother, known as Marta-mama, a crumpled nonagenarian with a rage to live, who claims unconvincingly to be praying for the Lord to take her. There is sad-eyed Kelesh, who came to the U.S. on a student visa and is going into his seventh year at Columbia. And there is Levon Dai, the family's rich man, who lands in the U.S. with a suitcase full of 50 one-pound cans of sesame-seed oil and parlays it into the dry-cleaning monopoly of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The plot, what there is of it, turns on whether Levon Dai will come to New York and marry the plump Armenian girl the matchmakers have picked for him, or will opt for an Iowa paleface. A paleface named Shirley Adams wins Levon, but, filtered through the Armenian palate, her name becomes "Shirlan Edemus," and Marta-mama is spared possible heartbreak as she muses: "Edemus, Greek name, isn't it? . . . The Greeks are fine people. They cook much the same way we do." As for Author Housepian's cooking, her specialty is life, as it bubbles, hisses and spills from the great U.S. melting pot.

THE AWAKENED, by Zoe Oldenbourg (493 pp.; Pantheon; $4.95), is an equally arresting novel about emigrants. The scene is Paris between the wars, a city that was less a melting pot than a frying pan for the refugees from the fires of Europe. Ely Lanskoi springs from a Russia that is no more; Stephanie Lindberg comes from a Germany that is fast disappearing under Naziism. Ely's world is cramped by poverty, the dead Czarist past, the lack of a real homeland or future. Stephanie's is confined by her own indecision and the contradictions of passion and frigidity. She is also faced with the selfish love and the strangely mixed faith of a Jewish father who has become a Roman Catholic and believes that he can regenerate the world through "Jewish Catholicism" (says one sarcastic character of him: "[He] thinks himself better than the Pope--because, you see, the Pope's only a goy after all"). Since both Ely and 'Stephanie are young and proud, dreamy and easily hurt, they treat each other with unconscious cruelty. Their absorbed self-torture blinds them to the massive shaping of events and, when war and chaos overtake them, it is too late to undo the hurts or recapture the wasted years.

Author Oldenbourg is an accomplished writer of historical tales (The Cornerstone, TIME, Jan. 10, 1955). In this, her first contemporary novel, she is at her affectionate best in dealing with the island of Russian life in Paris and peopling it with vain, talkative, ineffectual men and meek but iron-willed women. The unhappy love affair of Ely and Stephanie is as exhaustively detailed as the fine-print stipulations of a million-dollar lease, but it serves to emphasize the author's point: "Shout, then, shout at the top of your voice that this life was unfair, and terrible, and humiliating, and that even so you wanted to live and live free."

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