True identities

TWO Tristans figure in “The End of the Jews,” one the grandfather of the other, both of them writers. But there’s an intriguing twist to this family saga: The elder, Tristan Brodsky, is a novelist who began his career in the 1940s, and the younger, Tristan Freedman, is a “writer” in the hip-hop sense: a graffiti artist, who signs his work “RISK ONE.” As imagined by novelist Adam Mansbach (“Angry Black White Boy” and “Shackling Water”), they represent the yin and yang of the Jewish American experience. “Where’s the joy?” is Brodsky’s refrain; the younger Tristan’s quest is graver: “Find something no one can deny.”

The novel’s title is ironic of course, but it signals Mansbach’s theme: How far can one stray from one’s Jewish identity and still call oneself a Jew? “I can be as Jewish as I want,” one character says, which can be taken to mean that some Jews are bound to their tradition by only a slender thread and some not at all. Thus do both Tristans, each in his own way, define themselves by reference to various aspects of black culture. Brodsky manages to sabotage his career by writing a controversial novel about a Jewish slave-ship owner, which succeeds only in offending his readers and critics. “Why do the Jews applaud me when I’m exploiting and exposing their weaknesses -- when my fiction is nothing more than a crude account of the experiences of a kid from the shtetl -- then turn around and stone me when I train an eye on history’s greatest cruelty?” he muses. “Now I’ve abandoned the cliches, and the Jews have abandoned me.”

When the younger Tristan turns to novel-writing, his book results from his youthful efforts to reinvent himself as a homeboy. He sat at “the black table” in the high school cafeteria, and when he worked as a DJ at bar mitzvah parties he played “rap records and breakbeats” rather than the Top 40 music the kids expected: “Tris grew up with this music, this culture, these ever-diffusing cosmic b-boy energy ripples -- hip-hop raised him as much as anything or anybody, so of course he wrote about it.”

The same themes appear in a second strand of the novel: Nina Hricek, a young photographer, half-Jewish, escapes from Communist-era Czechoslovakia by attaching herself to an African American jazz band on a State Department tour. The bandleader dubs her “Pigfoot,” and the band’s photographer becomes both mentor and lover, so Nina too can be as Jewish (and as black) as she wants. On her college application, she checks the box next to “African/African-American/Creole” and applies for a scholarship for “Black Achievement in Photography.”

“The End of the Jews” is set against some of the great events of the 20th century -- World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet bloc -- each of which figures in how the characters see themselves, their relationships and their art. Nina, for example, seeks not only freedom and opportunity but also an explanation for her father’s abandonment of the family when she was 12. As Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution sweeps away the old order, she reacts with visceral resentment. “It is ludicrous, shameful, but a part of Nina resents the revolution for scouring away her past, rendering her trials irrelevant. The ogre that stole away her father, poisoned her mother, locked Nina away in a dark tower, scattered her family like bread crumbs . . . lies dust-covered in the town square, brought down by a band of villagers wielding torches.”

Mansbach creates a problem when he sets out to write about writing. To understand the crisis in Brodsky’s life, we must know that his novels are flawed; to appreciate the tensions in his marriage, we must know that the poetry his wife, Amalia, writes is not. Yet we’re not shown any of their work, and Mansbach is reduced to describing one of Amalia’s poems as “the best thing she’s written in months,” leaving it at that. Still, he captures the writerly angst over meager advances, half-hearted agents and distracted publishers, not to mention reviewers: “Novel two has gone untouched since the first review of novel one came out,” he writes of the younger Tristan. “Those two hundred words flash-melted Tris’s jittery anticipation into a molten lump of dread, so heavy that he’s barely moved since.”

Mansbach brings off some extraordinary scenes. Unique in my reading experience is an incident that takes place as Amalia struggles to nurse her baby daughter. He sets Tris and Nina on a romantic collision course. A rivalry between the two Tristans when they both publish novels touching on graffiti art is an occasion for wry humor (Brodsky’s “could kill a man if dropped onto his head from a second-story window, whereas Tris’s novel would need six or seven stories to do any real damage”), although the stakes are higher by the conclusion.

“The End of the Jews” is mostly a novel of manners, less concerned with plot than with what goes on in the characters’ heads and hearts. Sexual betrayal matters less than emotional betrayal; self-betrayal matters most of all. The defining moment comes when Tris confronts the tension between his aspirations and his authentic self -- the challenge of finding “something no one can deny.” That’s the real story here, and it’s one that never ends.