Books |
Down Under
Sonia Taitz
By
Published: Oct 28, 2014
Category:
Fiction
Back when Mel Gibson was Mel Gibson, he made some movies on the block where Sonia Taitz lives.
Sonia Taitz is married. A mother. Not looking to stray.
But…. Mel Gibson.
“Imagine the sizzle of seeing Mel stroll by the MealMart on West 79th Street, slipping into this trailer!” she recalls.
Then Mel stopped being Mel and starting spouting anti-Semitic clichés.
Sonia Taitz’s grandfather was killed by Cossacks. Her father spent World War II in Dachau. She learned languages in this order: Yiddish, then English, then Hebrew.
Mel Gibson faded as a fantasy. And ascended as a character:
“What makes people hate like that? And how could my local hero feel that way? In researching Mel’s childhood and adolescence, both of which took place in New York State, I began to create a plausible story of how he was wounded, and warped, as a child. I added a Romeo and Juliet/ Jew and non-Jew slant to the fictionalization: The boy based on Mel falls in puppy love with a Jewish girl who spurns him. He wants to run away with her, but the plan fails, and he is whisked, instead, to Australia. This romantic disappointment, coupled with his father’s views on Jews, lights a dangerous long fuse. Decades later, a star in decline, he journeys back to find the girl who jilted him.”
First love, second chances — that’s the engine for a novel. (And love between apparent opposites is, for Taitz, a logical step. In her excellent novel, In the King’s Arms, her heroine is a young New York Jew at … Oxford.)
“Down Under” starts with this: “In the middle of the journey of her life, Jude Ewington realizes that she is starting to see real lapses in the looks department.” How cool. An echo of Dante (“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost”) followed by contemporary slang (“the looks department”). I took out my pen and started marking.
Here’s the first chapter. Brisk. Smart. Really well observed. With a least three perceptions you might want to mark and think about. [To buy the paperback of “Down Under” from Amazon, click here.]
What are the odds Jude will leave her marriage and zoom off to Tahiti with a man she hasn’t seen in decades? Not good. Collum Whitsum — that’s Mel — isn’t aging like Jude in a suburban, American way. This is not “the middle of the journey” for him. He’s an actor, a star. He’s old. So his suffering — his “constant boring pain” — puts him on “a hero’s sort of quest.”
We flash back and forth from Jude to Collum. Her marriage, his marriage. Her childhood, his childhood. The comparisons are stark. Her childhood is modestly Jewish compared to his Catholic upbringing — his father is so crazy that if he were Muslim, he’d pledge himself to jihad. So there’s real tension as a badly damaged Mel — I mean Collum — leaves Australia and makes his way to Westchester.
I’m not a fan of fancy plotting. Taitz isn’t either, but the book is much more than Collum and Jude. Jude has a troubled son and her sort-of-friend has a troubled daughter, and these kids — new generation versions of the young lovers that Jude and Collum once were — are crucial to the plot. There’s good stuff in those chapters, but I was eager for the Jude-Collum fireworks to begin. And Taitz kept me… waiting. Which proves two things. 1) She’s good. 2) I’m impatient.
Better than the story, in any case, are the perceptions. Sonia Taitz knows a lot about people: how they are, what they want, “the broken-hearted child that often lies beyond the rise and fall… of complex people who self-destruct.” Of recent books I’ve read, in fact, no one knows more about what she calls “emotional kamikazes.” Who are, in our fantasies, many more than Mel Gibson and his long lost high school sweetheart.
