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Deeply Flawed Saga of a Holocaust Deception : BLUE NUMBERS <i> by Bruce Goldsmith (Mercury House: $17.95; 432 pp.) </i>

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We have all seen the telltale numbers. It usually happens at a swimming pool, or on the terrace of a resort. A middle-aged woman in a dowdy swimming suit or a sleeveless summer dress accidentally exposes the underside of her forearm and we glimpse the blue tattoo, a single letter followed by a row of digits. From that moment, the woman loses whatever identity she had. She might have been a sculptress, physician, astrophysicist, or master gardener. Once we have seen the numbers, a whole, complex identity is reduced to two words-- Holocaust survivor .

The hero of Bruce Goldsmith’s novel, Sandy Klein, is a disillusioned, aimless 32-year-old loser. He has lost his child in an accident, his wife by divorce, his interest in life by the failure of his independent newspaper, his girlfriend by neglect, and his potential share of the proceeds of the sale of the family business by the machinations of his brothers. At the end of his rope, he dreams of reviving his journalism career with a scheme to uncover a Nazi war criminal in Los Angeles for a story in the New York Times Magazine.

The story unfolds when Sandy wakes up after a protracted pub crawl to find blue numbers tattooed on his forearm: A7549653. After an initial effort to have the numbers removed, he discovers that the tattoo is a solution to his malaise, an instant identity. Through a series of remarkable coincidences, he meets a spectacularly beautiful woman, Paula, and under the assumed name Uri, becomes a rage on the local Jewish lecture circuit as a Holocaust survivor.

Almost before he can enjoy the exuberant sex with Paula, poor Sandy is trapped in his new identity, afraid that at any moment she will discover his fraud. He decides to cover his deceits with what he contemplates as a singular moment of triumph. He will not only uncover the identity of a Nazi war criminal, but will kidnap him and reveal him to the world at a fund-raising dinner at which his father is being awarded a local man-of-the-year prize, which is to be shared by the mysterious Holocaust survivor Uri, alias Sandy.

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“Blue Numbers” is a novel of Los Angeles, with all the requisite locations: Pandora’s Box, Chasens, Scandia, the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton. The description of the back room at Ship’s Restaurant filled me with such nostalgia that I ran out for a hamburger in a local pub.

Even without the familiar spots, we know we’re in Los Angeles because the characters in the book are what they drive. Sandy, in search of identity, drives a Volvo 1800 ES, a mischling of a car, half sports car, half station wagon. His father, a German-Jewish immigrant who has made a fortune in vitamins, drives a “gleaming white-on-white Cadillac DeVille.” Sandy’s footloose friend Billy expresses his individualism in a 1965 Mustang GT350, an 8-year-old muscle car. When Sandy seeks anonymity, he rents from Bundy rent-a-wreck. In Los Angeles, if they don’t notice your car, they won’t notice you.

In case we miss the characterization by wheels, the clothes are unmistakable flags. The characters we are supposed to like, male or female, wear sport coats, sometimes silk and cotton, sometimes linen, always Italian. Sandy’s conventional brother looks like “a walking ad for Brooks Brothers, California-style.” And, of course, this being California, the women are flawless. Sandy’s ex-girlfriend Vicki has an “enormous mane of glistening black hair, and a perfect body,” complete with a “perfectly shaped, 38, D-cup, left breast.” Perhaps it is only a slip-up, but later, when we meet the beautiful Paula, we discover that she is a real beauty, not a “classic California blond” like Vicki.

Alas, although Paula appears to be the quintessential California yuppie (She serves a “perfect French-style” omelet on an “Indian cotton place mat” on the “butcher-block table”), her language is a bit hackneyed. After sex on her “king-sized” bed with its “plum-colored top sheet,” she asks Sandy, “Is it good for you?”

The cliches are not the real problem with Goldsmith’s novel. As the plot thickens, the book shifts from a novel of identity to an adventure farce. The hero, instead of a character in search of himself, becomes a world-class shlimazel, his scheming so absurd that we, like the other characters in the book, can only pull back in wonder that an author would really expect us to believe this nonsense.

The Holocaust is not terra incognita. To make a novel of Holocaust survivors (real or imagined) convincing, an author has to get his facts right. Sandy and his new love Paula’s parents are supposed to have been German Jews who were at Auschwitz. Auschwitz-Birkenau processed Jews from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, not German Jews. Sandy’s father is a German Jew who speaks with no trace of German, but the “cadence of his speech was distinctly Eastern European.” Goldsmith even tosses an occasional tochus or bubkes into the father’s speech for emphasis. It’s a nice touch, but German Jews do not speak Yiddish. Even the tattooed number is suspect. Jewish tattoos began with the letter “J” for Jude .

It isn’t only the Holocaust facts that are sloppy. One dinner is at an Italian restaurant named Parcheesi. The name is Persian, not Italian. Sandy identifies a poor Lufthansa clerk because the man wears the same cotton shirt to work night after night. If you’re poor, you wear polyester, not yuppie cotton; in any case, airlines supply uniforms to their airport employees. Sandy, who supposedly raced Stars for two years when he was a student at Berkeley, calls them “dinghies.” A Star is a keelboat, not a dingy.

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Ultimately, it isn’t the cavalier disregard for facts or the fantastic twists and coincidences of the plot that make the book unconvincing. It is the lack of conviction in the characters. Can we really care about a hero as ludicrous as Sandy, whose reaction to a flash of jealousy is to peek into Paula’s apartment from a perch on a wisteria vine? Can we believe Paula, supposedly a self-confident, sophisticated public-interest lawyer, who the first time she sees someone peek in her window (guess who?) runs out to a firing range and buys a black-market Smith & Wesson .38? Her own parents are supposedly natives of Auschwitz, yet she never questions how this 32-year-old man could have been at the camp 40 years before she meets him.

Goldsmith has a knack for piling on the plot circumstances and building toward a rousing denouement. Let’s hope that the next time out he does his homework first, gets his facts straight, and starts with characters we can believe.

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