Long may she reign

I have to make an important disclosure: I am singularly unqualified to comment on Irene Dische’s new book about an anti-Semitic, anti-feminist German grandmother living in Weehawken, N.J. (She is also, unforgivably, anti-New Jersey).

Here are my disqualifications: A) I am Jewish. B) I am a woman. C) I grew up in Perth Amboy, N.J. I’m also a Russian Jew and, therefore, historically disinclined to empathize with Germans whether Jewish, anti-Semitic or both. Perhaps worst of all, my own wonderful but imperious grandmother was known as the Queen of Perth Amboy, so I could be seen as trying to further her claims above those of Dische’s Empress of Weehawken. Of all people, then, I should be the last to review Dische’s book.

Sadly -- and I don’t mean to disappoint my grandmother of blessed memory, who I know is reading this over your shoulder -- it turns out that Elizabeth Rother, the eponymous narrator of “The Empress of Weehawken,” is every bit as peremptory and controlling as, and possibly more opinionated than, the Queen of Perth Amboy, and maybe even as meddlesome and bossy as my other grandmother, the Duchess of Deal, also of New Jersey, also of blessed memory. Frau Doktor Rother is also short-tempered and impatient. So she gets to keep her empress title.

Now it’s true that not everyone enjoys each minute spent with this type of grandmother -- instead of the idealized grandmother who wears an apron and half-moon glasses, praises you, buys you dollies and gives you a slice of home-baked pie each time you visit. And it’s certainly the case that I did not always adequately appreciate time spent with my grandmothers. So it was a surprise to discover that I was not only relishing every moment with the irksome Frau Rother but also looking forward to it. Loving it. (No doubt such a grandmother is more easily appreciated in pages than in person.)

“The Empress of Weehawken” is a novel in the form of a personal memoir, which isn’t all that rare, with characters based on real people, also not unheard of. What is unusual is that the main characters bear the real-life names of Dische, her mother, father, grandfather and grandmother. “Certain events and characters in this novel were inspired by real people and events,” her author’s note reads. “But the actual events, characters, and dialogue depicted are all fictional.” One wonders whether Dische secretly means “based on a true story,” the favorite line of fiction marketers these days. However, her book doesn’t suffer from the sensationalism of most “based on” novels. There are no jail terms, no methamphetamine abusers, no steamy sex scandals (and just a small dose of old-fashioned child abuse, this by a baby sitter).

Instead, there is the Holocaust, as experienced by Dische’s Christian grandmother and Jewish-born grandfather, a surgeon who converted to Catholicism. Frau Rother’s distant blood ties to German aristocracy cannot save her husband’s Jewish family from the Nazis, nor can it keep the couple safe in Germany under the Third Reich. So they are finally forced to flee. Speaking of her aristocratic bloodlines (which include thick blond hair, “chiseled noses, eyes blue and commanding as planets, and almost perfectly fleshless lips”), Frau Rother says, “Nowadays this doesn’t count for much, especially in the less civilized world, like New Jersey.”

The book takes the reader on a vivid, rollicking tour of Frau Rother’s exterior and interior worlds, and the wonder of it is that her life in the Jersey suburbs is as full of incident as her life in Hitler’s Germany. Because she is so stubborn and so intent on bringing her high-toned German ideals and snobbery to the New World, every moment is filled with conflict between her expectations and reality. Her husband never rises to the professional level he’d achieved in Germany, yet she keeps hoping, keeps pushing him. She can never approve of her daughter, Renate, a successful medical examiner -- first, because according to Frau Rother’s exacting standards, Renate’s not feminine enough. Worse, after a slightly rebellious youth, Renate marries a man her mother considers to be unacceptable, a Jew. He’s an intellectual, a medical researcher, a doctor -- and just as adamant as his redoubtable mother-in-law. They don’t get on.

It’s a story in microcosm of a time in history, of World War II and its aftermath. What keeps the book together is the high-handed but ultimately moving voice of Frau Rother, who is herself like history -- always flowing over everyone, carrying everything away with her, not mindful of the desires of humankind, yet entirely human. Her self-dramatization is hilarious and meant to establish her centrality to her husband, daughter and grandchildren. Every year, she tells them that this is the last year of her life. Here’s one memorable line: “After forty, if you wake up without feeling any pain, then you’re probably dead.” Here’s another: “It’s a mystery that I cannot explain, even from my special vantage point: why God singled me out practically to drown in Jewry.” Or this: “After seventy, the war between the sexes ends abruptly. Peacetime. Men and women begin to look alike; they are both hairless, and even a man’s breasts begin to dangle freely after he has lived long enough, while a woman’s behind becomes flat as a pancake. That is as close to paradise on earth as you’ll ever get.”

Although the story line follows the family from mother to daughter to granddaughter (another delightful female character is the faithful and stoic housekeeper Liesel, who follows the Rothers to America), it is the men who are most memorable. The character of the converted Catholic grandfather, Carl, is particularly moving. In 1946, after Frau Rother receives a letter informing her that her family in Germany is well, she tells her husband that she has put a notice in Der Aufbau, a Jewish newspaper, seeking the whereabouts of his family. She describes his reaction: “He stood up from the table awkwardly, as if he had forgotten the exact mechanism of standing up and pushing away from a chair, and he bumped his way out of the kitchen.” Carl leaves the house without his coat, though it is winter, and proceeds that very night to have a tryst with a young waitress. When news of his family finally comes from Carl’s despised younger brother in Australia, it is simply this: “Everyone is dead.” Carl never reacts to it, or even admits that he has read the letter. It’s a measure of the effectiveness of the real Dische’s portrait of this man -- who so desperately tries to be what he is (and is not) -- that the reader nearly forgives him when he explains to a seemingly naive American friend that in Nazi Germany “the Jews are getting what they deserve.”

Toward the end, the book moves too much into a narrative of the granddaughter’s life and away from Frau Rother, although she is still narrating. But that is a minor cavil. This book does a number of things beautifully, even brilliantly. It looks at the America of the 1950s and 1960s from a European refugee’s point of view, in all the infant superpower’s naivete, self-importance and glistening material success, as the refugees struggle to make the dream work for them too. It explains how life can appear to a person who is both a believer and a painfully practical realist. It also shows how character is inherited yet subtly altered over the generations.

The real grandeur of “The Empress of Weehawken,” however, lies in the narrator’s voice. Pure as a bell, always unerringly true to character, Frau Rother is drawn as accurately as the slice of a surgeon’s scalpel. And that’s what the author is doing here, performing autopsies on the characters of her family. The writer is the real medical examiner: What made them who they were? Why did they have to act like that? How am I like them, how am I different? Why did I have to be born to them and not to some other more likable family?

“I guess,” Renate says at one point about her father, “that he was not an ordinary mortal.” This is what families tend to do in little ways: create myths and fables, stories and nicknames, special jokes and words. But only a writer as poetic as Dische, who sees the humor in tragedy and the tragedy in humor, can work this back in the other direction. If only we could all take our bossy, irritating grandmothers -- in their flat-behinded latter days -- and raise from those specters the true mettle from which they were fashioned as children, as girls, as mothers and wives. Dische has done that.