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Characters who exist in eternal exile

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Special to The Times

The Bride From Odessa

Stories

Edgardo Cozarinsky, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 164 pp., $22

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In Edgardo Cozarinsky’s new book of short stories, an exiled German musician ekes out a living playing piano in a Buenos Aires nightclub for an audience of veiled women and “polished men whose arch looks and brilliantine [speak] of unsurprising intentions.” He wanders the streets and the harbor at night, pushed on by “complete uncertainty, the absence of any imaginable future.” At work, he is intrigued by anonymous requests, written in a woman’s hand, for obscure German songs “he thought had been long forgotten.” He is offered a job playing for a radio program called “Nostalgia for Europe.” The show is canceled. He decides to take his chances and embarks for Germany in July 1937. There his story ends.

Perhaps he dies in a shipwreck, in the war or in bed. The author doesn’t tell us, concluding the musician’s tale instead by speculating that as we die “fragments of awareness, memories, voices and images” subsist “like islands floating in a nighttime sea,” and that the flotsam that clings to the shores of those islands is hardly material enough to create a portrait of the dying individual. “Perhaps it is only as shards,” he suggests, that they can catch our attention, in “their condition as brief fragments of a truncated story, the random pieces of a jigsaw that will never now be completed.”

These fragments and truncations -- or mutilations, to cleave more closely to the author’s original Spanish -- are the substance of “The Bride From Odessa.” Cozarinsky, an Argentine Jew who has lived in Paris for three decades, is better known as a filmmaker. His first literary effort, “Urban Voodoo,” went largely unnoticed when it was published here in 1991. Cozarinsky wrote that he composed those stories in English, then translated them into Spanish, his first language, “in order to erase the notion of the original ... to the point that the original itself becomes translation.”

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It is an emigre’s concern, this obsession with lost originals, and his latest, published in Buenos Aires in 2001, now translated into English by Nick Caistor, is very much an emigre’s book. The subtle, elegant, enigmatic tales are about exile in its various forms, about identities abandoned or exchanged.

The characters are emigrants or the children of emigrants: Europeans living in Buenos Aires or waiting to embark for New York; Argentines in Paris or Geneva. In the title story, a Jew from Kiev loiters by the Odessa harbor three days before he is set to sail for Argentina. He meets a pretty girl “staring at the landscape with a gaze every bit as melancholy as his own.” She is a gentile, a much-abused millinery shop assistant. He tells her of his loveless arranged marriage, of his wife’s fear of travel, of his plan to send for his bride after he has established himself abroad.

Exulting at the possibility of escape, the girl persuades him to let her travel under his wife’s name. Together they begin a family in the new world. In a Paris hospital room 110 years later, the couple’s great-grandson, also himself an emigre, reads in a letter about his origins, “passed down ... as if it were a piece of dangerous, perhaps forbidden knowledge” and suggesting that because Jewish identity travels matrilineally, the narrator’s inheritance of a tenuous, secular Judaism “expressed ... only through occasional gastronomic outings” is not legitimately his. Thus Cozarinsky begins with another false original, an emigration not merely geographic but an exile from an exiled clan, and a voyage in which the possibility of return is foregone, as is any stable genealogy, any history that can be tracked and comprehended.

Like his countrymen Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges, Cozarinsky writes in a universe centered in Europe and North America, with little reference to the literature of his own continent. This typically Argentine cultural displacement broadens in Cozarinsky’s writing into a deep and almost inconsolable sense of nostalgia: Home becomes another site of exile. The original cannot be recovered. No place exists that can offer solace.

All is not lost, perhaps. In the story “Literature,” a man reads the obituary of a Russian woman with whom he had years before studied the great Russian novels. “Beyond the Russia ... that formed the basis of our relationship,” he writes, “there sprawled an Argentina that seemed to me both monotonous and colorless. Terrible years were brewing there but at that time, its reality seemed to me immeasurably inferior to the fiction in which I was immersed.” Art, Cozarinsky appears to suggest, can provide some refuge, literature some brief home.

To the narrator’s surprise, the Russian wills him a collection of Keats’ verse. The book opens to “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” its last two lines underlined: “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” “They seemed to me ironical,” the narrator concludes, “with an irony Keats never intended, but which History had stealthily deposited on them, like a thin film of ashes, aimed at me and me alone.”

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Ben Ehrenreich is a regular contributor to Book Review.

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