Tangles and Bloodnests

SOMEWHERE ELSE by ROBERT KOTLOWITZ 373 pages. Charterhouse. $7.95.

"In my family," Robert Kotlowitz writes at the beginning of this first novel, "we tell stories about each other all the time, and what we're not told, I try to pick up by eavesdropping. I like the real stuff, inside information, the sight and bristling sound of other people's dramas, especially when the plots are taken from family life and its fractioned heart, the snarled bloodnest of fathers, sons, and everyone else; there lies the source of every clue about ourselves." Kotlowitz has been the managing editor of Harpers magazine, and is currently a director of New York's Channel 13. In Somewhere Else, Kotlowitz's imagination fetches back through Jewish generations not only to find the bloodnests and tangles of family life in 19th century Poland and Edwardian England but to reinvent the precise gestures and textures and words and smells of those times. That of course is what any historical novelist tries to do--a kind of retrospective new journalism. But Kotlowitz's premise is more complicated. His novel seems an act of familial, almost racial piety.

Kotlowitz means to recover the moments of profound transition, when the Jewish life of Eastern Europe began to be borne forward into the 20th century. Other writers--most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer--have handled this familiar theme with more versatility, more dramatic elan. Not all of the novel is totally alive, but Kotlowitz writes extraordinarily well at times. His act of conjuration is clear-eyed, without a trace of sentimentality.

Mendel, the son of a rabbi, grows up in Lomza, Poland. He breaks away and, on forged papers, emigrates to London, where he encounters the seductions of assimilation--oysters, Christian girls, spats, the troublesome dogmas of secularism. By degrees, Mendel sheds his Jewishness, finally adopting the professional name of Maurice Moritz. He becomes a party entertainer, singing The Amorous Goldfish and There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea in drawing rooms while aristocratic guests snooze in their dinner jackets.

Some of Kotlowitz's set pieces are fine. Great-Great-Grandfather Eliezar, 104 years old, flatulent, pedantic, almost abstractly randy, argues minutiae of the Talmud with his 75-year-old son and dies one Friday night when he falls asleep and sets fire to himself. Kotlowitz's best creations are the Pilchik sisters, a pair of earthy, lively, possibly stupid originals from Odessa who try to convert Mendel to socialism. They disappear into the larger historical drama of the October Revolution with an over-the-shoulder verdict that Mendel "is not a serious man."

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