The Empire of the Senses

January 12, 2015
The clashing forces of nationalism and romantic love wage war in Landau’s vivid but uneven debut novel. Lev Perlmutter, successful businessman, German citizen, and assimilated Jew, volunteers to fight for Germany in the first World War, mainly to earn the respect of his gentile wife, Josephine, and her elitist family. Stationed near Riga, his experiences of war’s horror and deprivation are tempered by a passionate affair with a local Jewish woman, Leah, whose earthiness and humor are a beguiling contrast to Josephine’s icy perfection. Yet inevitably Lev must return to Berlin, where the Nazi Party’s gradual rise to power forms the backdrop for the Perlmutters’ own family drama: Josephine’s obsession with psychoanalysis, son Franz’s fearful overcompensation for his homosexuality, and daughter Vicki, stylish and rebellious, who stumbles into an unlikely connection with her father’s wartime affair with Leah. Landau evokes the Weimar Republic era with spellbinding detail and nuance, deftly capturing the zeitgeist in the characters’ colorful pursuits—jazz clubs, a nudist colony, a séance. Lev’s struggle with his Jewish identity is also fascinating, as his nationalist countrymen and Old World friends each challenge his loyalty to the faith. Yet when Lev’s past catches up with him at last, the pieces fall into place much too perfectly, dulling the novel’s shine. The dream fades and the mechanics are revealed—an allegory for the era, but one the reader could do without. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

January 15, 2015
This first novel follows one family through two wars, four romances and one death with enough thought and craft to remain several shelves above the potboiler section. Lev Pearlmutter, a Jew with Eastern European roots who lives a financially comfortable life in Berlin with a German gentile wife, wants to escape "the shadowy presence of another past, another history"-i.e., his Jewishness. Yet after he joins up at the war's outbreak in 1914 and leaves for the Eastern front, he soon falls in love with Leah, a poor, beautiful Jewish Russian peasant. She haunts him when he's back in Berlin after a relatively easy war, but it's only when her nephew arrives in the city and falls in love with Lev's daughter, Vicki, that the possibility of a reunion arises. Meanwhile, Lev's son, Franz, has grown interested in the clothing-optional men's nature camps that foster the Brown Shirts and make it difficult for the young man to conceal his homosexuality. Lev's wife, Josephine, risks tilting the book into bodice-ripping territory in the hot and heavy moments she spends with her therapist. The rising Nazism has a fair number of targets in this one family, and Landau derives much of the novel's meager tension from the reader's certainty about what the characters only suspect: That it's not a good time or place to be Jewish, gay or ambivalent. The author's sense of history is strong in scenes of well-chosen detail, whether in village or city. At the same time, her World War I is largely bloodless, and WWII passes by in a few mentions and pages-a shadowy presence indeed. Landau's talents suggest she might do well with a more directly historical novel, but she has produced some strong characters in this highly readable, oddly sanitized look at assimilation and its discontents.

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February 15, 2015

This highly ambitious first novel by an author currently working on a PhD in English literature and creative writing sweeps us from a village on the Eastern Front during World War I to postwar Jewish settlements in Palestine and Buenos Aires, while the main story unfolds in Berlin, with World War II on the horizon. Though in one respect a historical saga, the work is especially an intimate look at the four members of the Pearlmutter family. Lev, a successful Jewish merchant, longs for Leah, whom he met at the front, while his marriage seems to have lost all appeal for his aristocratic, gentile wife, Josephine. Son Franz is both politically and sexually confused and makes bad choices that lead to disaster. Rebellious yet fashionable daughter Vicki falls in love with a young Jew from Aunt Leah's village who miraculously materializes in Berlin with news of his aunt. VERDICT Told with a wealth of detail, the novel seems to transpire in real time; the pace here is stately but engaging. Recommended for those who enjoy stories of this time period and, more broadly, those that deal with age-old human emotions and dilemmas against a foreign backdrop.--Edward B. Cone, New York

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Starred review from January 1, 2015
A top-notch literary saga with a gripping plotline, Landau's debut explores the complex questions of loyalty and ethnic identity in its depiction of a mixed-faith family living through social change during WWI and late 1920s Berlin. Lev Pearlmutter and his gentile wife, Josephine, have a strained relationship even before he enlists. When he returns, having been emotionally transformed by his service in a close-knit Russian village, he has more reason to regret his marriage, but he loves his two children, Franz and Vicki. Lev always considers himself more German than Jewish, and by 1927, they are a family of affluence that mixes well in society, or so it seems. However, disconnection from their heritage affects each of the Pearlmutters differently. Even as anti-Semitic sentiment increases, ebullient Vicki is romantically drawn to a Jewish man. For Franz, a repressed gay man desperate for belonging, generational rebellion manifests itself in a particularly insidious way. Each perfectly crafted individual is fully involved in the surrounding world. In Landau's hands, even a simple trip to the barber, in which Lev muses on his own and the country's problems, becomes meaningful and illustrative of the novel's themes. The characters' actions and thoughts are so three-dimensionally human that readers may forget they're reading fiction and not experiencing their real lives alongside them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)