The Manuscript: The Life and Times of James Weymore

By Xlibris US

The Manuscript: The Life and Times of James Weymore, is an absorbing first novel by Joel Z Wagman, which will keep the reader engaged in non-stop page turning from its first page to its last. Thirty-nine years in its writing -- including eighteen when the original manuscript was thought lost; it is a unique and compelling work of fiction. Commencing in Russia in 1892 and ending in Paris in 1978, with most of its events focused in Toronto and southern Ontario, its captivating story of lost dreams and renewal, is a landscape of love, suspense, hope, faith and struggle -- familiar to everyone in its commonality of poignancy and joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499013399

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Copyright © 2014 by Joel Z Wagman.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014908051

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-1340-5

                 Softcover        978-1-4990-1344-3

                 eBook              978-1-4990-1339-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book is a work of imagination and entirely fictional. Except whenever and wherever, the actual name of a person is used or otherwise by reference to historical events appears in this book, any resemblance to anyone living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/10/2014

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgment

A Note From George Kahn

Prologue

A Letter For Lorna

Foreword

Part One Ari

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Part Two Smythe

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Three Eckstein

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Part Four Canary

1

2

3

Part Five Weymore

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Part Six Lorna

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

An Afterword From Lorna

To Adeline, who taught me love

To Albert, who sought love

To Georganne, who gave me love

And to my children and grandchildren, who I shall always love

You are my past memories and future hope

April 7: 2014

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong neither yet bread to the wise, time and chance happens to them all

Ecclesiastes 9:11

On three things the world rests: on justice, on truth and on peace.

Know then full well, that if you wrest judgment, you shake the world, for it is one of its pillars.

Deuteronomy: Rabbah 5:1

The dictum that truth always triumphs over prosecution is one of those falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplace, but which all experience refutes.

John Stuart Mill

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

T he author remembers with affection and gratitude those many persons, who during the course of thirty-eight years, made this book possible. That this work exists at all, is a near-miracle. To all of you, wherever you are; I joyfully acknowledge your friendship, support, generosity and assistance. For every one of you helped create this folly of my youth: this champagne of my seniority: this book—once thought lost and fifteen years later, rediscovered. You are:

Georganne Seltzer Greenstein, Pamela Greenstein, Stuart Baltman, Patricia Jane Shapiro-Wagman, Daryl Ann Wagman-Collier, Barbara Black, Barrie A. Rose, Carol Seltzer Rose, Barbara Coven, Myrna W. Kaplan-Aaron, Frances Massey, Paul Kates, Margaret Fitzpatrick, Rose Solomon Friedman, Susan Willis, Millicent Chira, Joseph Martin, Marie Giles and Anna Mazzaoccchi

JOEL Z. WAGMAN:

April, 10, 2014

A NOTE FROM

GEORGE KAHN

M y name is George Kahn. Some of you will recall me and my wife Lorna when we owned and managed the Montreal based publishing house known as Purpose & Company. To make a very long story somewhat shorter, Purpose & Company was absorbed back in the early nineties in one of those media mega mergers that make so much news. Anyway, the price for our block of shares was more than fair. So, we accepted the offer, took the cash and retired to Naples, Florida, where we enjoyed the better part of a decade playing golf, travelling and doing our share of philanthropic and community work. There was only one problem and that was the Manuscript. It kept coming up in our conversations. It didn’t matter where or when; on the golf course, on cruises, in the car or airplanes. It was always the same, either Lorna or I invariably got around to talking about it.

Well, it’s now twenty years since Lorna received the Manuscript and all those bizarre events took place, happily leading to the two of us falling in love, getting married and buying Purpose & Company from the Gregson Group. Twenty years of agonizing, to put it mildly, have been quite enough. So we’ve decided to publish the Manuscript.

We returned to Toronto about six months ago, where somewhere around 1892, this unusual, but very human story began. We established New Purpose & Company with the single explicit mission to put the Manuscript into book form. It had to be done. There was no other reasonable resolution, we had to finally get the Manuscript off our minds and conclude what came to be referred to by us as the events. This seemed the only possible way to do it.

Lorna’s spoken to her father, James Weymore, and obtained his consent. He’s presently a grand old guy of eighty-six, who prefers the company of his grandchildren to most others. For those of you who don’t know us very well, Weymore has two grandchildren, our eighteen-year-old twin girls, Jona and Georgie. I don’t mean to be trite, but they’re beautiful like their mother and smart like their grandfather. To everyone else James Weymore is a somewhat legendary figure, remembered simply as Weymore. But to those two special girls, he’ll always be Poppa Jim.

As of the date that I’m writing this, Lorna is in Israel with our daughters helping to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. She’s also trying to locate some long lost cousins from Russia, who as Weymore informed her, may have settled there, about seventy-five years ago when it was part of Ottoman Palestine.

If we break even after publishing the Manuscript, we’ve decided to stay in Toronto. We’d like to help a few blossoming Canadian poets and then perhaps follow up with a sequel to the Manuscript. To say the very least, a great deal has happened in the last twenty years.

As Weymore has repeated on many occasions Life’s not only a circle but didactic and a healer. Too bad we don’t pay more attention to its message. Soon, you will come to understand, that more than anyone else, he should know.

So here it is—The Manuscript—unaltered and just the way Lorna received it back in March of 1978.

Have a good read.

Toronto, Canada

May, 17, 1998

George Kahn

PROLOGUE

A LETTER FOR LORNA

I n the five months since that never-to-be forgotten late October afternoon in Paris, she had neither seen nor heard from him. And now, as there always was with everything he did, she felt the pang of a sudden awkward surprise: a surprise, which had arrived a few minutes earlier with that day’s mail in a parcel sent from London some two weeks previously. Untypically cautious and unsure, she guardedly lifted the parcel for the briefest moment. As she tenderly held it, she became unpleasantly awakened to a growing sense of inner foreboding, best described as somewhere between loneliness and loss that she knew was ridiculous. Yet it was over. All those vanished years, irrevocably gone in the turmoil and confusion, which once composed the tangled fabric of their lives: Ended forever in the awful finality of a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson.38 revolver sliding across the burnished lustre of an ebony and gold ormolu desk, seconds before his departure.

She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture more of incredulity, than ennui, sighed softly and began pulling apart the brown wrapper carefully securing the package. An embossed envelope bearing the ornate crest of the Hotel Dorchester was the first item to appear. She immediately retrieved an ivory-handled letter opener from a nearby writing-stand, stabbed at the sharp corner of the envelope and in one quick motion sliced it open. In spite of her resolve to remain calm, her fingers noticeably trembled as she unfolded the letter:

The Hotel Dorchester

London, England

March 10, 1978

My Dearest Lorna,

I was very pleased to learn that you and George are to be married. You have my blessing and assurance that I’ll be in New York on the 27th to share in the profound joy of the festivities.

The bulky package containing this letter also holds two other enclosures, 850 century old Russian rubles and a manuscript.

The manuscript is in six parts, and while novel in many respects is in no manner or respect a novel. As for the rubles, they have been in the family for a very long time. Their story will enrich you. Cherish them.

With all my love

Dad

As she grasped the letter in her hand, warm tears of relief gathered in the corners of her eyes. At one time crying, for whatever the reason had been difficult. But now, as a result of the complex and strange events of that late afternoon at 45 Rue Papillion, tears came easier. She picked up the manuscript mentioned in his letter, and taking the closest chair, sat, crossed her legs and began reading its first page.

A MANUSCRIPT

Being a Narrative in

Six parts

By

Isaac Goldenberg

FOREWORD

T here is no reason to life. Life’s direction is a vast ambling, sweeping before it as does some great wave, every event. As to events, what are they in the perspective of time, save mere accidents; ultimately of little consequence either in human affairs or the order of the universe. This is a story of some of those events. Even more, it is a narrative of life’s irrationality.

PART ONE

ARI

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—

deliberate, contrived and dishonest—

But the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

1

T his tale begins a moment before the prelude to destruction, when epochs were coming and going with such rapidity that no one bothered to take notice either of their birth or demise. To be exact, its genesis was the precise second, when the four horsemen of the Apocalypse mounted their steeds to run rampant throughout a savage and weary land. It is a story commencing at the conclusion of an age of hemophiliac emperors and angry anarchists, during a period so clearly comfortable in its own crucible that its very ending would eradicate forever every vestige of its inception.

Although that period has come to be considered as little more than an interlude between eras, its apogee—no doubt, was reached the night of the famed ball hosted by Count Dubrinoff to honour his daughter’s forthcoming marriage. Despite the incontestable fact that it was only one of many balls celebrated that night in a decaying autocratic empire. The Dubrinoff ball, above all others, indisputably, was its most magnificent and golden. It was a ball that found its many memorable moments in a nation contemptuous of its citizens, ambitious in its scope, unforgiving to its enemies and void of all compassion: A ball, which in the future, invariably would be described only in the uppermost degree of the superlative. A singular incomparable ball that beheld four hundred elegantly gowned and coiffed ladies, dance mazurkas, waltzes and gavottes, to the music of a forty-piece concert orchestra, accompanied by gentlemen impeccably garbed in ebony-black tailcoats and handsome high-born officers, selected from the smartest regiments of Russia’s Imperial Guard resplendent in the multi-hued uniforms of lancers, dragoons and hussars.

Beyond that, it was a ball enhanced not only by the attendance of the decorous local gentry, but due to the bloodlines of its unsurpassed host, by at least one Grand Duke, several minor princelings and a generous sprinkling of Barons. It was a ball as none other held that night in Czarist Russia; and, as was known from the storied accounts of anyone who had been graced by being there, it was a ball most worthy of the Dubrinoffs and more opulent than most.

That extraordinary episode ensued during the evening of April 26, 1892. In that auspicious year, many miles distant in the City of St. Petersburg, all was particularly well at the Empire’s grand Imperial court, and as was well known, as went the court, so the nation including: if judged by his happy appearance at the ball, the ever placid, contented life of the Czar’s most loyal of all subjects, His Excellency, Count Mikhail Vasili Dubrinoff, who would awaken at two on the afternoon following the ball, with a mild headache.

Mikhail Vasili Dubrinoff, Count of Kiev, holder in fief of the Baronies of Odessa and Prymsl, Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, was not a man who under any circumstance could be easily disregarded. Both a Colonel of Cavalry and a veteran some fourteen years earlier of the Russo-Turkish War, his face bore as a souvenir of those tumultuous events, a scar caused by a vicious Ottoman saber wound. That sometime febrile wound was by no means, of the ordinary scratch or nick variety; but, composed a wide, red, half-inch slash extending down his cheek from the furthermost corner of his right eye, which ultimately blunted itself against a particularly thick upper lip.

While Dubrinoff’s demeanour was undeniably imposing; his general manner was less aristocratic than typically Dubrinoff. Being characterized by an odd amalgam of peasant-like vulgarity and self-importance, exceeded by an arrogant hauteur, second only to that possessed by the Czar himself.

Subsequent to the 1854 Crimean conflict, where to the praise and plaudits of his colleagues he had acquitted himself with a modicum of valour against the British and French; he was posted to the Preobraschenski Grenadiers in St. Petersburg. It was there, as a result of a decade-long tour of duty at the Nevsky Palace that he acquired by genteel osmosis, what universally was regarded as a distinct, but slight sophistication.

When, in 1890, Russian national interest became threatened by the incipient might of the new Wilhelmine Germany, necessitating a subsequent, incongruous and eventually disastrous alliance with the Third Republic of France; that same largely presumed sophistication acquired for him in Paris, the position of Deputy Military Attaché to the Imperial Russian Embassy. It was during his late tenure in the French capital, that he familiarized himself, not only with what he assumed was the decadence of Parisian fin de siècle culture; but also the consummate skill of a talented English tailor, from whom he purchased a bespoke frock-coat. Styled, it was said by men of fashion, in the same elegant manner as once worn by His Royal Highness, Prince Albert of Sax-Coburg and Gotha, the deceased Consort to Victoria, the British Queen.

In spite of the punctilious advice of his fastidious valet, who knew far better of such matters, Mikhail Vasseli Dubrinoff chose to wear his recently acquired frock coat to his plump daughter’s ball. After all, it was common knowledge that the coat reminded him of the gaiety of Paris, and in view of the fact, he would be returning to his duties in less than a month, he thought it nothing less than appropriate that he should wear his new coat on such a gala and auspicious occasion

Sometime after midnight during the early morning hours of that momentous ball, there had been an incident, which at the time to both the Count and his guests seemed quite commonplace, and of nothing more than minor import. Yet, to those persons, who would be touched by its extraordinary circumstance; it was an incident of lasting substantial significance.

That otherwise innocuous incident, occurring in front of a chinois Sheraton buffet, generously heaped with Caspian sturgeon and Strasbourg pâté; was duteously serviced during the course of the ball, by several obliging Dubrinoff retainers. And, as was observed by most of those present, each one—in an ostentatious display of wealth—meticulously costumed from powdered wig, to knee breeches and patent slippers, in the family’s green and gold, brocade livery. One of those ever-diligent servants, in passing a rare Sevres plate to someone or other, quite accidentally brushed the arm of a noble guest, nobly holding a long cigar. In the confluence of events relating to that fateful night, neither the noble guest, nor Dubrinoff standing beside him, noticed that some microscopic flecks of the cigar’s hot ash slowly had descended onto the lower left sleeve of the Count’s frock coat, and in consequence, burned—a tiny, barely discernable hole.

Upon awakening, Mikhail Vasseli Dubrinoff failed to remember much, if anything, of the remarkable festivities of the night before, including; how the sleeve of his new coat had come to be burned. In truth, the bleary-eyed Dubrinoff never would discover the damaged lower left sleeve. For to those who insulated the life of this benighted Russian, the prospect of Dubrinoff’s anger incumbent upon such a discovery, was too fearsome to contemplate and at all costs must be suppressed. And suppressed it was. The burned sleeve would be repaired as without exception, was all of Dubrinoff’s clothing; by the village tailor. By him—the Jew tailor—who did, as he was bade in lieu of rent. So Dubrinoff slept on, supremely confident that the holy archangels were forever fixed in heaven, and that the devil was eternally tormented in hell.

At or about 11:30 a.m., on the morning following the ball, Dubrinoff’s valet was seen carrying a silver tea service to the room where his ennobled master rested. To the rear of the oversized mustard-and-white bedchamber was a smaller dressing room, and by it, the valet quietly entered, carefully closing the baroque double-door so as not to disturb Dubrinoff, who still snored the sleep of the spiritually unconcerned. The tea, now void of purpose and redundant, was placed on an embellished side-table and soon would turn merely tepid, from very hot.

Near the table lay the damaged frock coat, its back broken over a chair, having been abandoned there by Dubrinoff in a mood of jubilant stupor some five hours earlier. No stranger to duty, the dedicated valet upon seeing the coat was quick in its retrieval and set about to properly hang it. While the fingers of the valet’s right hand tightly grasped the neck of the coat, his left hand began to brush off the visible remains of the previous night’s celebration. At that juncture, to his complete dismay he noticed on the coat’s left sleeve the ubiquitous hole, Small though it was. Charred though it was.

Since its Parisian purchase, the coat had been regarded by the Count as a particularly favoured article and in less than a double fortnight, was destined to return with him to France. This salient but common fact was not lost upon Dubrinoff’s devoted man-servant, whose mind activated with keen trepidation in an instant, became completely committed to the fate of the burned sleeve. As he exited Dubrinoff’s bedchamber, his palpable nervous agitation was witnessed by several other household domestics, causing the very small burn to assume a disproportionate vital urgency. An urgency, demanding that the sleeve to be repaired not only with skill and celerity, but most assuredly, long before the Count awoke and detected the tiny almost imperceptible flaw.

Pressed by the valet to deal as expeditiously as possible with the damaged coat, the same sense of gravity soon was replicated in the frenzied activity of the entire assembled staff. First, the valet, who by every indication of his flushed face was conspicuously upset, rushed the imperfect coat to the steward, shouting as he carried it that the coat must be taken in all haste to the Jew tailor for instantaneous repair. In turn, the steward, finding himself ensnarled in the tide of events, just as hurriedly entrusted the coat to one of the downstairs servant girls. With the unrestrained exhortations of the whole staff hard upon her back, she ran from the rear of the Dubrinoff mansion to dispense the coat to the tailor. There, she left the precious coat for repair. But not before she gave the tailor exacting instructions that on the pain of onerous punishment, the coat’s burned sleeve, was to be quickly and perfectly mended. And, even more importantly, that this lazy Jew, quite understood he should begin his labours without delay.

This insignificant tailor who took precise instructions from a servant girl; this little man whose wont was to sit cross-legged on a battered table as he sewed, was weary. At forty-two, what else was there for an indentured tailor to expect? Denied almost everything, he owned as his most cherished possession, a thought; a single pure thought, which was that his beloved God, also loved him. And to his beloved God, the tailor gave vigilant silent praise for every blessing bestowed. Including, the great honour that on this day, he should sew the sleeve of a fine worsted frock coat, patterned and cut exactly as formerly worn by the British Queen’s late Consort.

And, while the tailor sewed, Dubrinoff slept.

Less than a mile from Dubrinoff’s bedchamber, there was a pitifully small village, whose focal point, if slightly magnified, was a narrow street dividing its westerly four hundred feet from its easterly three hundred. In reality it was hardly a street at all, being nothing more than two twisted ruts of black greasy mud. Overhead, above the deep ruts and watery mud, canopied within the semi-darkness of a late April day, the sky sat stationary; silent and heavy with slowly drifting clouds of impending rain.

The second structure from the easterly end of this caricature of a thoroughfare was a dwelling, more a hut than a house erected from crude stone and mortar, some fifty years previous to the birth of its oldest occupant. Inside the hut, under a thatched roof sodden with mid-spring melting snow, a small log, enclosed by a squat fireplace, burned unevenly. Its semi-wet fire intermittently squinted and smoked, but in vain, only occasionally radiated a few forlorn flames; wholly failing, to exude warmth to the chilled air. Smells of frying onions and wheat grouts, intended as the mid-day meal, permeated the single room of the hut’s interior; and, in the furthermost corner by its solitary window, sat Dubrinoff’s Jew tailor, burdened by his forty-two years.

There clung to this tailor an impression of age and solemnity not justified by time. An impression, which remained undiminished by his grey-streaked beard covering a chin once prominent, once young. Below the tailor’s thick eyebrows, two eyes void of life, watched as still-nimble fingers wove a worn needle and taut thread through black cloth. Above the eyes, on a narrow forehead, immutably fixed in an everlasting frown, were the lines of a million thoughts. Beneath those eyes, upon stooped shoulders and concave chest, he wore a shirt of coarse fibre. In summary, he projected a struggle to which he had already surrendered; and, even when judged by the meager standards of his lowly village, he was a most lamentable creature.

To his left stood a woman presumably his wife. Like the other women in the shelters, which bordered the rutted street, she was beset by a multitude of problems. Todays were not unusual. It happened every day. They concerned the stretching of the contents of a bubbling pot and, of how to feed her family from it in vaguely equitable portions. If need be, she would do as she had done many times before. She would do without her share.

At the opposite end of the room there was a stark bedframe; bearing a paillasse stuffed with straw, upon it slept two young men respectively, fifteen and seventeen years of age. Close to the bed, in a cradle passed down from one generation to the next, which by this time, had obtained a patina of well-worn use, a baby wept; its cry hungry and persistent.

The tailor, who sat next to the window, turned his head, disturbed by the weeping of his youngest son. This man, until now nameless, did have a name. It was simple: It was biblical: It was Isaac. The same Isaac to whom Dubrinoff’s coat had been delivered for repair, the same Isaac, who was Dubrinoff’s indentured tailor and upon whose vast estate, he was privileged to struggle. In the language of the times into which he had been born; Isaac was a free man. In fact, he was little more than a chattel; held in bondage, simply because he was a Jew. The terms of his servitude being the same as when first declared in 1791, by the Great Empress, Catherine II. Thus, while at liberty to move about within that prodigious 20 per cent of the Czar’s Empire, once known as the Pale of Settlement—Isaac, as almost every other Jew, under admonishment of severe castigation, including Siberian exile, was forbidden to leave it.

Nor was there any incentive to do so, for there was nowhere to go. At least in this small village of hovels, less than a mile from where Dubrinoff slept, there was a roof over his head and that of his family. Still, even this spartan existence was subject to duties to be performed gratuitously for the Dubrinoffs. In fairness, however, it must be acknowledged that whenever time permitted, Dubrinoff’s largesse allowed Isaac to eke out whatever puny living he could from the infrequent work provided by his neighbours, usually in exchange for services and not for money, the rarest commodity of all.

Yet Isaac’s name was unknown to Dubrinoff. Of him, Dubrinoff neither knew, cared nor recalled. For Isaac was but an insignificant minor Dubrinoff possession; just another of his Jews who lived in their filthy hovels in their equally filthy village. ‘Satan’s own people’, Dubrinoff often had said of them: ‘a cursed confusing and clever lot who change family names every time a son is born. They’re untraceable, un-taxable and unbearable. A Cossack’s knout is too good for those Christ-killers.’

This Jew tailor, who believed that God loved him, knew his place and was bereft of complaint. He toiled steadily, working today no differently than he had year after year, always in the same humble manner, always in the same surroundings, and always with the same prayer both in his heart and quietly on his lips. Next year, Lord: Next year in Jerusalem.

So Isaac did as had his father before him, and as had his father’s fathers for decades past. He sewed, cut and pressed. When he would become too old to work, he again would do as his father and his father’s father had done for generations. He would peacefully die—his place at the ancient oak table adjacent to the window, to be taken by the elder of his two sons, who still slept deeply and tranquilly on the narrow bed.

His sewing completed, the coat was held up to the single-paned window for closer inspection. Isaac’s soft sigh of satisfaction indicated that the hole now was totally invisible. After snipping a few pieces of uneven thread, the sleeve was laid gently on the table, ready and waiting for the careful pressing about to begin. Of the entire task, this had to be performed most delicately, for a scorch would be irreparable, spelling to the family a disaster of the highest magnitude. It would take more years than Isaac had to repay his Count the cost of such a coat. In the corner, the baby’s insistent cries caused Isaac’s sons upon the shallow bed to stir. Their short well-earned nap concluded; they would eat lightly before returning to their work at Dubrinoff’s imposing chateau-like riding stables.

Almost finished, Isaac turned the coat over to ensure that each fold was perfectly pleated. He had just begun to press the flap of a pocket when the iron collided with a large bulge. From the corner of his eye, as would a thief, he stole a furtive glance to ascertain if anyone watched. No one was. Reassured by his own suspicious gesture, Isaac plunged into the pocket. In an instant his hand clutched something. Without reason or further consideration and impelled solely by his overwhelming curiosity, he quickly withdrew his hand, and the something it held. He uncurled his fingers—slowly, deliberately—and when at last his palm was fully opened, he saw it revealed a thick roll of bank notes. He counted them. They totaled a thousand. Yes, one thousand rubles! And upon each banknote, staring at him with baleful, exalted and loving Romanoff eyes—was the benign Imperial visage and striking demeanour of Alexander III; Czar of all the Russia’s, King of Poland and Grand Prince of Finland.

In the cradle the baby’s cries became hushed. Nevertheless, weeping from a different source was heard, as tears of terror began rolling down Isaac’s hollow cheeks. Then, from his lips a plaintive, totally helpless wail called out to the God who loved him, to help him.

Even as she heard Isaac, the woman, Isaac’s wife of twenty years, suddenly sprang to life. At once, she shuffled to his side and, seeing what his hand held, emitted an equally pitiful cry, which in every way matched his. Upon her penetrating shriek, madness erupted in the room as everyone save the baby moved to Isaac’s table. As if one, their eyes became fixed upon the hand that clutched the money; Isaac’s hoarse words, emitted from his choked raw voice, finally emerged to ask a barely discernible question.

Esther, Esther! What shall we do?

Isaac, you must return the money!

I cannot do that! For if I do the Count will say there was more and that I kept some and if I do not, he will one day find out and say I stole his rubles!

Isaac did not wait for a reply. Instead, he reinforced his statement by a muffled plea, which plainly once more asked, Esther, what will we do? Oh, Lord help us. And then, directly

Reviews for The Manuscript

[grrleditor · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The weirdest book I read in all of 2007. A bizarre cross of Don Quixote and the Decameron. A crazy framework of stories within stories within stories ... at one point even one of the characters within the story starts taking notes in order to keep it all straight. Conspiracy theories, romances, hanged men who keep coming back from the dead, great adventures, quite a bit of sex, a lot of fun! Who would have guessed it was written around 1800!

[branduno-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mysterious, unsettling, and a great deal of fun, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a frame tale that contains as many styles of storytelling as it does characters. The confident but naive Alphonse Van Worden makes his way across the mountainous Spanish countryside, encountering seductive Moorish princesses, worldly nomad kings, monks, demoniacs, mystics, mathematicians, and the Spanish Inquisition, each of whom has a meandering and multi-layered tale to tell, and any of whom could be a vampire, or a member of an Illuminati-like secret society, or just a lying crazy person. Except the Spanish Inquisition. They neither have a tale to tell nor are they suspected of being vampires or heathens, but they do plan to torture Van Worden, so I suppose that makes up for it. The author, Jan Potocki, was a 19th Century explorer, ethnographer, Freemason, and balloonist whose obsessions with The Thousand And One Nights and secret societies show in his book. This translation by Ian MacLean is very readable, and he cerainly had a job of it--the book's publication history is as convoluted and mysterious as the stories within, as detailed in this edition's introduction.

[bibliobeck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating book - shame about the cover... looks like some sleezy 60s thing! Far from it, this is a book of stories and of stories within stories. Some romance, some magic, even some mechanical underground dwarves. Loads of bandits and vengance and as I was reading the book I kept thinking how wonderful if Quentin Tarantino turned some of these tales into film. They are the perfect vehicle for his style of production, add some of his amazing music choice and I think it would be a sure winner. That also illustrates how well the book has moved with the times. These stories could fit into any culture and any time. So glad I found this little gem of a book.

[naggedman · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I didn't bother to finish the book, having got through one third without finding anything other than mild distraction. Others have scored it highly, so perhaps just not my cup of tea!

[liz.wuerker · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

have bought it as a gift for two other people since reading it and recommended it to two others. It's a captivating and complex book and a humorous one. It feels very modern. One of its characteristics is the story within a story (within a story within a story...). I found myself drawn in quickly and entertained. Potocki parodies ideas of chivalry and honor while exposing real human motivations. The stories in the book are interesting if sometimes confusing. Often one is started and alluded to or continued later, so the version I read included a guide that could help you refresh your memory.

[amaliagavea · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Without pretentious pseudo-philosophies and further ado, this book is one of the best examples of Historical Fiction ever produced, in all its weird glory, beauty and fascination. History, Myths, Apocrypha, Religion,Philosophy....you name it.

[william345 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Unlike many so called classic texts I have read this one doesn't seem to have dated much. At least not in its first half. The writing is thought by scholars to have begun about 1809. As Salman Rushdie says in an attached blurb "...it reads like the most brilliant modern novel." I think that might be an effect of the recent English translation offered here that seems to give the text such a contemporary feel, like a modern-day historic novel.

The premise is that in the 1760s a Walloon officer named Alphonse (commissioned by Philip V) while traveling on leave in Andalucia, for centuries an Islamic land until the Reconquista, finds himself skirting a realm of ghosts, phantoms, specters, kindly bandits, storytelling gypsies and cabbalists. Because he does not at first succumb to the erotic offerings of these creatures--he has a very obnoxious sense of personal honor--he is able to preserve enough presence of mind to chronicle the many weird goings on.

The book is full of the so called Magic Realism used by Garcia Marquez and Rushdie himself. There are stories nested within stories nested within stories. The narrative is very straightforward. The characters wake up, go out, have dinner, come home, have sex, go to sleep, get up in the morning, and so on, and all of this action occurs during the briefest passages of text. There is the sense of the action moving full-tilt, almost out of control, but never really. It is only the impression created by the author's highly compressed style.

Among the treats offered by the narrative are vast underground hideouts carved out of the stone, sun-scorched landscapes à la Don Quixote, convincing erotic encounters between men and women, abrupt murders, sometimes by the score. At a haunted inn phantoms show up at the stroke of midnight, though it is not known from whence the tolling comes. A motif of two men hanged on a gibbet, supposedly brothers of the bandit Zoto, who tells his story here, recurs throughout the early pages. At night the men leave the gibbet and get into mischief.

There are strange elixirs to be drunk, seeming transportations through time and space, usually during a dream. On the whole the book a kind of onieric wonderland where men are men and women are women of a thankfully extinct old school, except when they're murdering succubi who only wish to eat young men because of the wonderful effect their blood has on the demonic constitution.

Then the Walloon officer succumbs, as he must, to the charms of the two Muslim women, who from the start have told him they are his cousins. A man who watches their erotic encounter sees only Alphonse sexually intimate with the two hanged men. From then on Alphonse seems to take some leave of his senses and is never sure if those Muslim women are his cousins / defacto wives or not. He sees them here in a pair of gypsy sisters, there in two women walking in the desert, but again it's not them. Later, he casts caution to the wind when he goes to meet them in an underground chambre d'amour. Who can blame him? It's either go insane or enjoy great if perhaps demonic sex with hot sisters!

In the meantime the gypsy leader tells his story, the geometer or mathematician tells his, the Wandering Jew tells his, the two Muslim "cousins" tell theirs, the male cabbalist tells his, the female cabbalist tells hers, and so on. All of the characters seek to tell stories that seem realistically within their realm of competence/experience. It is only the geometer's tale that seems to falter in the mid to late stages. One gets the impression that author Potocki had committed himself to a line of disquisition that he could not sustain. An astonishing novel of enormous complexity that is nevertheless highly readable, even difficult to put aside when sleep calls. Please read it.

PS. Some time later I began reading Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk. It seems unlikely that it was not a model for Potocki.

[moghedianx7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an amazing book to get lost in! And at times I do mean that literally! Stories within stories within stories...I think I counted 6 stories deep, don't take my word for it it's been a few years.