Up From Orchard Street
by Eleanor Widmer
Bantam

We've all succumbed to the fiction reader's weakness of conflating the invented with the actual. Helped along by the recent mania for memoir writing, novels that bear even a seed of personal reflection, or simply adhere to the common wisdom that writers should "write what they know," are abundant and aggressive in their march towards the cross-genre border. The result — many a post-reading Q & A session in which the audience demands of its scribe "did that really happen?" or "who is the real Giuseppe?" So it was with some puzzlement that I recognized a reverse phenomenon while reading "Up From Orchard Street," a coming of age tale set in the Lower East Side of the 1930's and 40s. Here is a novel that challenges the reader to discern what, in its nearly 400 pages, could possibly be fictional.

Eleanor Widmer's Orchard Street is immediately recognizable as a prototypical tenement neighborhood. The grand dame of the street and her story is the magnificent Manya, a meydela from Odessa who comes to America on the wings of love and is promptly widowed. With one offspring and a formidable talent in the kitchen, Manya transforms herself into a ravishing, warm-hearted bubby; it is her granddaughter who narrates the family saga.

As sagas go, this one is refreshingly mundane. Widmer, who died at age 80, just after the final revisions to her novel, is no Doctorow — "Up From Orchard Street" spans little more than a decade and is far more interested in celebrating the modest joys and triumphs of its subjects than in trotting out the requisite trials, tribulations and rats of its era. It is this rose-colored reflection that marks the novel for memoir, for only in the hindsight of a full life, one feels, can happiness follow happiness unencumbered by plot, conflict, or climax.

"Up From Orchard Street," concedes Eleanor Widmer in an afterword, "is part memoir, part social-history, and part fiction. Nevertheless, every word is true." Without quibbling over the inherent contradictions in the final statement, readers might note that in writing nothing but words of truth, an author is immediately beset with some limitations. For much of her novel, Widmer seems constrained by a duty to authenticity. Relatives, neighbors and benefactors swarm the pages without purpose as chapters congeal around charming but interchangeable anecdotes: These were the days when matinees, show tunes and smoked sturgeon ruled, and life was marked by illness, convalescence, guests and cholent. It's the story of a young girl blossoming in spite of, or because of her family's insistence on living hand-to-mouth dressed in tailored suits and foxfurs. It is like and unlike any other account of growing up Jewish, a second generation American, in New York in the first half of the 20th century. But there is a stealth element in this reimagined childhood, a slight warping of the boilerplate, that manages (albeit late in the game) to transform a nostalgic stroll down memory lane into a revelation.

The clearest chronological divisions in the story come from the family's three successive summer stays in Connecticut. These diversions, told with the same lack of pretext as the rest of the narrative, convey the first sense that Widmer may have a literary device up her sleeve. It is here on the bucolic farmland of a Jewish guesthouse that we first feel the presences of not just one gun, but a whole rack of firearms waiting to go off. And then, they don't. Instead there is vaudeville, fried chicken, letters home and a rather passionless unrequited love.

Still, it is somewhere in these passages, that the novel finds its real progression in the discovery of its leading lady. By now Manya, the beloved bubby and regal matriarch has faded into an ubiquitous obscurity; her son Jack has likewise retreated from his flamboyant introduction into a character study of hair pomade and horse tips, even the young narrator, maturing nicely into a first class story-teller, has somehow withdrawn in maturity. Like the high-kicking chorus of an MGM musical, these choreographed generations eventually pull away from their close circle to reveal the real star in their midst — the girl who Jack married. She has, of course been there all along — a resplendently beautiful, maternally challenged, fun-loving girl with a congenitally weak heart. And yet, when Lil emerges in the final pages of the memoir to capture her daughter's once-ambivalent heart, she captures ours as well. And suddenly a memoir becomes a literary feat in which every true word is fiction.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)