Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

The Gilgul doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its cover, however. It honors the beautiful traditions of the Jewish people with the story of a young possessed bride who sprays blood from her nipples. When her future groom witnesses her finger-banging a nurse in the local nuthouse, he flees for Miami to swill Jack Daniels and pick up every hooker he can find. The memory of the Holocaust is evoked by a touching scene in which an army of Jewish concentration camp victims comes back from the dead in a Bay Shore living room and ascends into the heavens while singing. And an American psychiatrist is tied up and injected with HIV-infected blood by two of his patients, a bisexual Puerto Rican and a black pimp, after they sneak a peek at his notes stating that people who get AIDS do so because they lack the self-control to put on a condom. (Don’t judge. It was the ’80s.)

Coming the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union started to disintegrate, David Saperstein’s Cold War thriller Red Devil is a book no one was in the mood for. The premise: Satan (actually Shaitan, the Arabic jinn who refused to kneel before Adam), ditched the Nazis when they lost World War II and assumed the identity of a dead Soviet intelligence officer. Now a higher-up in Soviet military intelligence, Shaitan has recruited a cadre of loyal Satan worshippers and is planning a coup. It’s up to a band of loyal KGB agents, allied with Israeli intelligence, to arm themselves with super-shofars that can blast demonic spies and prevent World War III.

Red Devil is Yiddish Cold War camp of the highest order, but it feels like yesterday’s cold kugel next to Bari Wood’s deeply felt immigrant love song The Tribe. Wood started her career as an editor for the medical journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, which sounds like the most depressing job ever. Later she had hits with Twins (1977), which was adapted into David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers (1988), and Doll’s Eyes (1993), adapted into the Neil Jordan film In Dreams (1999).

The Tribe’s opening sequence is guaranteed to make readers’ hearts sink: a prologue set during World War II. In Nuremberg. If you’ve read five horror novels from the ’80s, then you’ve read four prologues set during WWII. But this one asks a question whose answer is intriguing: how did the Jews in Barracks 554 of the Belzec concentration camp survive the war while the SS officers guarding them were starving to death?

Cut to Brooklyn, 1981. On Flatbush Avenue, a Jewish philosophy professor named Adam Levy is stabbed to death by a gang of kids who can barely grow mustaches. His best friend, Roger Hawkins, an African American cop on the rise, gets the grim task of telling the family their son is dead. Roger and Adam are practically brothers, and their surrogate father is Jacob Levy, Adam’s father, who survived Belzec and now functions as the revered elder of a tight-knit group of Holocaust survivors who, unfortunately, hate Roger because he’s black. Before Roger can track down the kids who killed Adam, an enormous stranger tears them to pieces. Roger suspects the survivors have something to do with it, but his suspicions drive away Jacob and Rachel, Adam’s widow.

Years later, the Levys have ditched Brooklyn for Long Island, raising Adam’s son in the safe suburbs. But when a black family moves into the neighborhood, the Jewish homeowners panic over potentially plunging property values. Then another murder is committed by an enormous stranger who leaves his African American victims torn to shreds. Suddenly the past is bubbling up through the floorboards: Adam’s murder, Brooklyn, Belzec, Barracks 554, all the way back to the village in Dabrowa where Jacob Levy was born. The war never ended, and it’s hauled its stinking carcass onto Long Island.

This is a book about tribes—found families who put their backs together and face outward, defending themselves against invaders—and how toxic they can become. It’s also a book of grace notes and details. A broken bottle of perfume whose scent still haunts a garage thirty-five years later. An incongruous flowered curtain that acquires menace as the reader slowly realizes what it conceals. And a murdered man whose last thoughts, as he’s stabbed to death on Nostrand Avenue, are not of fighting back but of a trip he once took with his wife. The way she looked, paddling clumsily at the bow. Of her profile as she turned to smile at him. He’s dying, and all he can think about is that impossibly perfect afternoon a long, long time ago.

A Jewish historian and an ancient evil fought Nazis in The Keep, which spawned five sequels, while the KGB teamed up with Mossad against Satan in Red Devil. Credit 25

A true novel of New York City, The Tribe is about gentrification, urban blight, and super-rabbis. Credit 26

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