Book Review The Japanese Lover Jewish Trivia

have recently read the Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende I This is the story of an elderly Jewish lady, Alma, who chooses to live in a modest care home even though she is extremely wealthy. The narrative covers her life in general terms, which I found sometimes lacking in detail. Some of the other characters are rather two dimensional and for me needed to be more substantial. Her lifelong love is a Japanese gardener, Ichimei ,whom she meets when he is working with his father on her uncle’s vast Californian estate, which is where her parents sent her from Warsaw in 1939 in view of the Nazi threat. The Japanese gardeners are serene non- emotional American-Japanese and the aunt and uncle very rich Jews living in palatial style with many servants and able to join any club or university. This certainly is stereotyping and takes no account of Jewish quotas, prevalent at that time.

The two, Alma & Ichimei, become secret lovers over many years, although there were gaps in between when their lives didn’t cross. They never married each other as Alma couldn’t face the problem of intermarriage to a poor man, with a different culture and instead chose the easy life of luxury, married, mostly platonically, to her first cousin, her great friend, with whom she had a son, although we eventually found out her husband was gay. Whilst she successfully grew her artistic business, grandparents mostly brought up her son. about which we hear little, but in later life, her grandson is devoted to her.

Without, in most cases, many details, the book covers along the way by dint partly of her memories the Holocaust, the terrible conditions of the concentration camps, where the Japanese Americans were forced to live, the Aids crisis, child cruelty and perverted wicked parents, drunken traumatised Europeans, illegal abortions , separated siblings etc.

JEWISH TRIVIA

A Jewish family named Karnofsky, who immigrated from Lithuania to the United States took pity on a 7 year boy and brought him to their home. There he stayed and spent the night in this Jewish family home, where for the first time in his life he was treated with kindness and tenderness. When he went to bed Mrs Karnofskt sang him Russian lullabies, which he sang with her.Later he learned to sing and play several Russian and Jewish songs. Mr Karnofsky gave him money to buy his first musical instrument, as was the custom in Jewish families. Later when he became a profession musician and composer, he used these Jewish melodies in compositions such Aa St. James’s Hospital ands Go down Moses. The little boy grew up and wrote a book a book about this Jewish family. He became Louis Armstrong