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Friday February 18, 2005

‘Seventh Beggar’ pleads for cohesion

by jay schwartz
staff writer

Pearl Abraham goes for broke in her new novel, “The Seventh Beggar.” She tosses a ton of glittering balls in the air, trying to create an epic story of ideas that falls somewhere between Tolstoy and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

It doesn’t work. Abraham’s heart is there on every page, but so is a visible strain in the writing. She begins to create compelling characters that fall down in the story because the descriptions of their thoughts and actions are spelled out in strangely brief language, like notes for a work yet to be completed.

“The Seventh Beggar” is a bundle of tantalizing premises. The first half of the narrative revolves around a young yeshiva student who is the heir to a Chassidic dynasty. Joel is a sensitive, smart kid who becomes fascinated by the writings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav, mystical texts that are considered too powerful for a young person. He experiences seizures, strange sexual visions and has long internal dialogues with excerpts from texts by Nachman.

Joel becomes obsessed with trying to create a female golem by reciting combinations of Hebrew letters. Then, he dies.

That’s when many of the balls Abraham has been juggling come crashing down. Much of the narrative energy of “The Seventh Beggar” has been invested in Joel’s character, and the tale loses momentum amid the sprawl of ideas that follows.

Among the narrative strands that fail to coalesce in part II: JacobJoel, Joel’s nephew, is a student of artificial intelligence who ruminates on the rights of robots. The same character, who holds inner dialogues with the ghost of Joel, dates a non-Jew with whom he organizes a quasi-Chassidic hippie folk festival in upstate New York.

Abraham uses this festival as a platform for recasting Nachman’s famous story of the Seven Beggars in light of all that has come before.

Let’s not forget the full translation of one of Nachman’s tales. Or the subplot about the wedding entertainer.

At this point in the story, it took effort to finish reading the novel. The excerpts from Nachman’s texts and biography felt like lengthy interruptions, despite the fact that Nachman’s stories are, on their own, beautiful and compelling. The details of the program from the folk festival felt unearned in the scheme of the story and simply seemed like a ludicrous and lazy insertion.

It’s clear that Abraham is capable of creating fully realized characters, and that she can put together a string of ideas worthy of investigation. “The Seventh Beggar” does not wed these two, merely offering glimpses of what could have been a great book

Pearl Abraham will read from her book 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California

“The Seventh Beggar” by Pearl Abraham (348 pages, New York, Penguin Group USA, $25.95).

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