A NEW TWIST ON THE `ROOTS' MYTH

Author: By Mark Greif

Date: SUNDAY, July 19, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

Seventeen-year-old Esther comes to Cameroon from Israel at the invitation of her Uncle Sicourelle. In Israel, she had been rebellious. In Douala, she doesn't know what to rebel against. The tyranny of her hosts proves too slippery to oppose. Uncle Sicourelle buys Esther gifts but holds her passport hostage in the office safe. Aunt Marie-Ange mixes savage criticism with sympathy. Breaking free of her relatives' racism, Esther resolves to make friends among the household's Cameroonian servants, only to discover that the servants don't want her friendship. She cannot escape her role as a privileged white.

Reduced to fishing mango leaves out of the villa's swimming pool, Esther dwells on the ambitions and follies that landed her uncle in Africa and her mother in Israel. Cairo, the family's home before World War II, takes shape in her daydreams. A lost world emerges, rising like a Mediterranean Atlantis from fable and memory. It gains substance from the old photographs that members of the family preserve and exchange as the mute currency of their unspoken love.

Much of the sparkling originality of ``The One Facing Us'' comes from its innovative use of these photographs. Matalon has assembled a collection of actual black-and-white snapshots, whose subjects she recasts as the invented personages of her story. A picture appears on the first page of each chapter, and then reappears in the chapter transformed into prose. Uncle Sicourelle sits casually on the docks; Marie-Ange scowls on her wedding day; a pudgy-cheeked, 6-year-old Esther poses at her mother's side. The mature Esther, gazing at the pictures, brings these frozen figures alive in descriptions as kaleidoscopic and vigorous as if her words themselves formed the light and shadow of each new image. ``A photograph offers evidence of what is remembered,'' she declares, ``but it also intimates what might have been.'' The immediate, visual presence of the past spurs fantastic invention, just as the formal constraint of 14 lines invigorates the composition of a sonnet.

Reading the novel is at times like coming into a movie during the second reel. So many relatives crowd the book that one loses track of who is a sister and who a cousin. Episodes collide like rocks tumbling down the slope of the past. But the book's magnificent exuberance depends upon this heady sense of overpopulation. Workers, orphans, guests and strangers, dogs and cats, mob each scene like dieters at a dessert cart.

The crowded tale of migration and memory also makes a serious argument about the individual's search for identity. The questionable premise of many ``roots'' novels is that the past should supply an authentic identity to its heirs in the present. Ancestors are imagined to have been less lost and alienated in the shtetl than their descendants are in the suburbs. If the truth could be known about our forebears, the genealogist-heroes of roots books believe, it would tell us who we really are today.

``The One Facing Us'' debunks these sentimental illusions, even as it pursues the lure of the family past. Ancestors' identities prove to be just as unexpected and arbitrary, even kooky, as anyone's self-definition in the present day. Italian-born Grandpapa Jacquo -- a Jew in Egypt -- admires Mussolini while doing charitable work on the streets of Cairo. Esther's Egyptian-born father, Robert, ``spurns his Jewishness'' to embrace Arab nationalism even as he moves to Israel and takes up work on a kibbutz.

The firmest identities in the novel turn out to be the ones forced on individuals by other people's expectations. After a fight with his wife, Esther's Uncle Henri goes out to walk aimlessly through the night. This simple romantic gesture of despair, in Israel, takes him accidentally across the Jordanian border, where, as dawn breaks, he is clapped in prison and tortured. Henri considers himself a scorned French lover, but to the world he is a Jew, an Israeli, and most likely a spy. It is the world's preconceptions, and not private understanding, that hold force.

Matalon's version of the ``roots'' novel aims at a more flexible sense of identity, as she reminds us with some pointed self-parody. The American writer Zuza, a distant relative of Esther, shows up in Israel with a tape recorder and a plan to write a book about the family's past. ``Roots are a very hot topic in America at the moment,'' she explains, and Zuza is certain Americans are going to love the family's story: ``Colorful characters, the disintegration of the family, the disintegration of the colonial world, the dispersal -- it's all very exciting.'' This could be the book-jacket blurb for the novel the reader holds -- except that it idealizes the past while obscuring the compromises and constraints of present life. Esther's baffled mother finally has to set the eager American straight. ``Roots, roots, roots,'' she announces, exasperated. ``A person doesn't need roots, Zuza, a person needs a home.''

This clear-eyed search for a present-day ``home'' stands as the final ambition of ``The One Facing Us.'' Esther learns to seek an identity that works in a particular place and time -- in Cameroon, in Israel -- honoring the past without surrendering to it. Modern heirs, she discovers, may well pick up building-blocks from the tumbled past to strengthen the foundations of a new habitation. But no one can reside safely within history's ruins. With brash inventiveness, a swift-running lyricism, and fidelity to life, ``The One Facing Us'' renews the drama and importance of the novel of roots.