Clara Mondschein's Melancholia by Anne Raeff (2002)

Clara Mondschein's Melancholia  

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Two generations of Holocaust survivors tell their grim, affecting tales in alternating chapters in this somber, slow-going first novel by short story author Raeff. The more interesting is the first person account of 85-year-old matriarch Ruth Mondschein, as told to a dying young man in the Christopher Street AIDS Hospice, to which Ruth treks most days from her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ruth hails from an upper-middle-class Jewish household in Vienna, where at a young age she falls into a disastrous affair with a wealthy gentile, then a stable marriage to the gay doctor who treats her father. The couple are eventually taken from a hospital where they are working in the Austrian Alps and deported to a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia (called, fictitiously, Pribor), where Ruth's baby, Clara, is miraculously and safely delivered. Alternately, teenaged Deborah Gelb tells of growing up in Englewood, N.J., around a mother (Clara) who suffers severe fits of debilitating depression, probably stemming from her traumatic camp birth. Deborah's voice is chatty and na‹ve, and her narrative is full of schoolgirl details. She tries to please her mother, but tends to awaken painful memories instead, as when mother and daughter flirt with the same lesbian painter, Marisol, on a trip to Madrid. In the end, Clara's so-called melancholia, depicted second-hand, remains incomprehensible to the family and to the reader. Ruth's tale, in contrast, is harrowing, and her voice luminously straightforward. Although its outcome is known from the start-allowing for little suspense-the novel is rich in detail and insight.

Review:                                                               A novel for a diverse audience

Clara Mondschein's Melancholia brings together an array of intelligent characters, as diverse as the historical and cultural conditions in which they live. Differences of gender, age, and sexual orientation--all are blended in a memorable tapestry of stories that become one story through the voices of the two narrators--the grandmother, a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, and her granddaughter, a teenage girl with musical talent and lesbian inclinations. Tying the two narrative threads together is the struggle of the grandmother and granddaughter to understand Clara, the daughter/mother who suffers from debilitating bouts of depression.

Anne Raeff's prose brings a smile to the lips, tears to the eyes, and enlightenment to the mind. No character or event is wasted. Even the most minor characters are well drawn, and the voices of the two narrators are particularly strong, honest, and insightful. The book was a pleasure to read, despite the need to treat harrowing events of twentieth-century European history. I was sorry it had to end.

 The book is in excellent like-new condition.     

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