I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE MOUTH. I read this whenever I get too depressed to sit down at the computer and write.
Presentation of Wallant Award for Eileen Pollack for In the Mouth.
In the sort of work that Thane and Vicki and I do in making these decisions on behalf of the Wallant Committee, there are no rules of reading and judgment. Yes, of course, the purpose of the prize is to promote the work and the name of a Jewish writer whose writing is either just getting underway or, for one reason or another, underappreciated. They haven’t achieved the national acclaim that in our estimation their writing deserves. So, the uncovery of the unknown or underappreciated is of course a ground rule. Apart from that, we have no guiding instructions, no shared principles, no dominant aesthetics, no imperatives of subject matter or cultural orientation. We don’t bring any fancy equipment or theories to our work. … we apply the only test we permit ourselves: the reader’s test, which any of you might apply as well in our place. The book we are looking for is one that says to us: “Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” I suppose then that reading is not much different from falling in love or buying a car.
We settled by easy consent on Eileen Pollack’s collection of stories, In the Mouth. In it, Eileen Pollack has managed to take the lives of retired Jews and reveal the strangeness and desperation of aging. Yes, she writes of other things too, but the stories of aging Jewish men, usually dentists, leave indelible marks, like ornate tattoos, in the reader’s mind. She presents us, for example, with Milton Rothstein, a retired dentist dying of AIDS that he picked up from a Latina woman who had been at one time a hooker. Another Jewish man kills himself years after taking the life of a Chinese worker whom he had gotten pregnant in his work place. Both of these stories are set in Boca Raton, that mellifluous Spanish name for “Rat’s Mouth,” but which one of Pollack’s characters calls “Boca Loca.” And with good reason. Boca was never more loca than in Eileen Pollack’s stories.
In other stories, we discover Siamese twins who share a 3-chambered heart. We have a mother whose milk won’t come for her own baby but will come for the baby of another woman. (Is this the ultimate milchige story?) We have an old Jewish man who turns out to have lied about his past all his life and now wants his son to arrange a bris for him so that he can be buried in an orthodox graveyard next to his wife. (So, a fleishige story next.) Such situations reflect Milt Rothstein’s late life bitter observation: “I never read a single true word about getting old. Not in any book. Not in any newspaper. The truth about getting old is that every single person you’ve ever loved dies. And you’re not supposed to care. It’s the natural order of things. Well, let me tell you. When every person you’ve ever loved dies, you feel like dying with them.” Pollack’s characters are tormented by age and its losses and its strange turns. And along with those who are younger, they are tormented by sex: the sex they get, the sex they don’t get, the sex they no longer get, and the sex that kills them or drives them to kill. The body ages, but eros never dies.
However, Eileen Pollack doesn’t give us sociology-as-fiction, though there is plenty of that to be found. She gives us the world she knows – the world of aging Jews, and her Boca Loca is an imaginary condo with real Jews in it. So it is no surprise to find her blurbed at the back of the book by such a writer as Lorrie Moore, since Moore is one of the writers she reminds me of. But the writer she calls most to mind is Bernard Malamud, and I remember thinking to myself as I read “Bris,” “This is Malamud reborn. A true transmigration of souls, the soul of one leaping mystically into the body of the other, almost like the birth of a Dalai Lama. The voice is his, the rueful human predicaments are his, the tragic-absurd universe is his, the Catskill Kafka is his, the intimations of mortality are his, the gall bladder attacks of reality are his, as is the incurable heartburn of love, the fusion of the gemutlich and the meshugah is his, the ordinary world transfigured into something tabloid-strange is his, Pollack’s way of turning the plain borscht of experience into the Manischewitz Kosher Wine of art recalls him. The distant God who presides like a cosmic Sid Caesar over the great comedy special of piety and pratfall recalls him. Certainly the story “Bris” could be bootlegged into the next Malamud anthology and nobody – nobody but us – would know the difference.
And I find myself smitten by the voice: the intentionally style-less style. The utterly confident plain speech whose metaphors are so casually a part of the voice that they never have to announce themselves. A wholly self-assured writer, Eileen Pollack lets the situation do the work: she is a situation writer rather than either an action writer or a “slow-down-for-the-glorious-texture-of-life” writer. She can do the latter: there are plenty of fully-realized tableaux in the stories, and I particularly admire the way she handles the banter between old Jewish men. There is no corresponding banter among her women, and a woman has to join the company of men, as on a golf course, to enter into the charmed circle of joking, chiding, nudging, and kvetching. But Pollack doesn’t ply us with portentous descriptions that topple over into deep symbols. She simply writes with the human situation always in front of her and lets the human surprises do the work of astonishing us. Her motto could be the motto of Raymond Carver: no tricks. She has an easy way with the English vernacular, and I suspect that the pulse of her prose may owe everything to a childhood in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, where she was born, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist.
Though she is a younger writer, Eileen Pollack is saturated in that world of older Jews, the generations of her parents and grandparents and, one senses, generations before. She presents us with something of an old world vision, a world conceived years and years ago in Yiddish and carried out in English In her writing one hears tales of love and duty and trouble and deep intimacy, of domesticity achieved and domesticity squandered. One hears generations of keening, grumpy, joking, lamenting Jews, the criers and the kibitzers, as the late, wonderful writer Stanley Elkin called them. Little wonder that In the Mouth spoke to the judges right away, saying ““Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” And we didn’t.
On behalf of Thane Rosenbaum and Victoria Aarons.
Mark Shechner
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