Impossible Life: A False Family History

Though spiked with savage humor and wild imagination, Black's parable of Jewish identity and survival is so antic that it spins away from its own gravity. The subtitle calls it a bobeh myseh, a Yiddish term for an old story that may or may not be true. Searching for his Jewish roots, Manhattan TV producer/scriptwriter Leo Poolishook is haunted by two questions. The first: What was the cause of his 63-year-old mother's sudden mental breakdown after his father's death? Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Ethel is in a Rhode Island mental hospital. The behavior of Leo's father, Abraham, a chronic adulterer, Trotskyite union organizer, atheist and high-school English teacher, inspires Leo's second preoccupation: Why is there injustice? Seeking answers, Leo conducts a fiercely loving imaginary dialogue with his father's spirit. He simultaneously explores his family tree through handed-down memories fused with a whirligig of Jewish folk legends, biblical stories, messianic lore and Talmudic commentary. The tales feature angels and a baby possessed by a dybbuk, holy men and fools, Adam and Eve, not to mention God, who sits down in a Lower East Side cafe to chide Leo's paternal grandfather Moses, a dapper gangster and Prohibition-era bootlegger. Through Moses we are privy to New York's Jewish criminal underworld of the early 1900s. Through Binzy, onetime drummer in Abraham's jazz band, we get the vaudeville era. Through Bella Gordon, Leo's maternal grandmother, we witness the pogroms and poverty of 19th-century Eastern European Jewry. Other ancestors take us back to the Crimean War and the Enlightenment. The satire swings uneasily from broad farce to black comedy: Leo's high-school girlfriend, named Eva (after Eva Braun), is the granddaughter of an unrepentant Bavarian Nazi. Black (The King of Fifth Avenue) gets so carried away with his phantasmagoria of tales, we almost lose sight of Leo's current situation and learn next to nothing about his gentile ex-wife or their small daughter. (Mar.)