Seven Days of Mourning

With its very own stack on the floor of the Coop, Seven Days of Mourning has quickly established a Cambridge following unequaled anywhere. True, the author, L.S. Simckes (rhymes with HYMN-kiss) is an English C section man at Harvard and writes in the popular bagel-and-lox genre. But even without such ties to the Establishment, Simckes' slim novel would have its appeal.

The characters are as memorable as they are grotesque. Short, fat Ma Shemansky rules her Lower East Side tenement to cruelly that "she thinks she's just." Zelo Shemansky counters his wife's attacks by going into fits, "twitching like a toilet chain." While balancing the Shemansky powers, crippled son Barish fiendishly maximizes tension and antagonism. Then there are the long-absent daughter, Yahina (another Ma in the making), her husband, Feivet, a deaf mute, and her son, Pildesh, who while urinating from a fourth floor window, tumbles out. The savior of this twisted family is old, orange-eyed. Vossen Gleich, with his lopsided chest ("one side sunk in, the other humped and swollen to his chin"), who ends his virginity with poor, sickly Mrs. Charpolsky--from downstairs.

The story is an incredible one. Bracha, a Shemansky daughter long in the charge of a local housekeeper of nitwits, commits suicide. Yanins, who fled from Ma's begemony seven years earlier, hitchhikes from Boston with her husband and child for the funeral. Ma had telegraphed Yanins, "Come!," but, of course, had already buried Bracha. And, although everybody is gathered at Brooms Street, nobody is mourning Bracha.

Everyone does contribute to an exacerbating and profound disharmony; but everyone is such a nut that their trials seem unbelievably aboard. These few days could be taken as a Yiddish parody of No Eric and Jack or The submission: It is Simckes, not Jonesco's. Ma who abouts at her husband, "Zelo! Did I say you could have strawberries? I said farina and you know it. Oh, I see you've disobeyed me and taken off your pants."

Into this madhouse prances Vossen Gleich with an admonitory "Oi, Shemanskys!" He pours out a stream of instructions on how to live together and how to mourn. Gleich is a nut too, but different from the Shemanskys: fortified with faith in ritual and his own deep warmth, Gleich temporarily stuns the Shemanskys into their tradition: to mourn, to rend their clothes, to talk compassionately of the dead idiot child. The Shemanskys, however, soon evict Gleich (who had moved in with Mrs. Charpolsky) and, as Ma dictates, do not mourn for Zadie (the Shemansky grandfather and financial supporter who died the next week). Zadie lived downstairs too, but nobody visited him.

Simckes creates some fine comic scenes, the funnist of them in a scatalogical vein. Who can forget-Mrs. Charpolsky stuffing the toilet to block off the cold draught and hanging desperately over the bowl in her effort to remain untouched by the seat? Or Ma Shemansky's shame and indignation when she hears Fievet declare, not the expected I have to make pippy or trickle or ich darj ghen pishen, but the treasonable, "I want to urinate!"

Though his book is wildly comic, Simckes also means to be profound. Gleich's humanizing influence on the son, Barish, is subtle and significant, awakening in the previously uncommitted and detached narrator pity--even for the most twisted form of life. Simckes also suggests the crucial necessity of ritual and law in giving life dignity. Such lessons are well taken but, I'm afraid, seem contrived; Gleich is too much the deus ex machine. He appears abruptly, expounds Simckes' orthodox panacea, and departs suddenly. The Shemanskys are too incredible. From the first page, they are fantastic, insufferable, sick; who can identify with a Shemansky? Can it be said, what's good for the Shemanskys is good for the U.S.A.? Simckes, like his Vossen Gleich, has an acute humans concern, but too limited a focus. Yet, within his unique realm, Simckes tells a grotesque and Rabelaisian tale that does create philosophic reverberations.