Lenny could guess what the author anticipated — some vain amateurish history with at best a little anthropological interest. And when weeks passed with no news from that quarter, he began to think the busy man would not bother to keep his word at all. Meanwhile the Cotton Carnival proceeded in the shadow of the fixed cloud that hung over the city, and the demolition of Beale Street progressed in the name of urban renewal. A local Reform rabbi blasted the congregation that had turned its back on him for his defense of the garbage strikers, then retired soon after in despair. There were more riots, bloodshed; the segregationist George Wallace declared himself a candidate for president and named as his running mate General Curtis LeMay, who said, “I don’t believe the world’ll end if we splode a nuculer bomb.” Midsouth Select Properties Inc. dunned Lenny for rent and threatened him with eviction, and the hospital demanded prompt remittance of their bill. Lenny managed to forestall immediate action on the part of the latter by submitting partial payments with cash acquired from the sale of an occasional book. (There was of course no question of peddling drugs anymore, since the onetime vendor knew better than to apply to sources still smarting from having been burned by Lamar Fontaine.) Then, long after he’d abandoned the hope of hearing from him again, the author sent Lenny a letter.
Dear Mr. Skarew,
I’m afraid this reader’s tastes tend too much toward the traditional to allow for a plenary appreciation of the liberties Mr. Pinsker has taken with narrative convention. Nor am I a fan of violating common reality with such liberal incursions of the preposterous; whatever claims the book makes to historical authenticity are patently absurd. However, I am not entirely unaware of certain trends in contemporary culture, and I suspect there are camps in which Mr. Pinsker’s brand of whimsy might be indulged. I suppose there are even those who might take some pleasure in the calculated ingenuousness of the author’s voice, despite its clannish ethnicity. That said, I found the inclusion in the text of a character I assume is yourself to be a needless contrivance: it’s a gimmick clearly designed to give the work a “metafictional” stamp and seems a deliberate pandering to the fashion of the day. Still, though I judge the book to be finally a curio without enduring literary merit, it would be ungenerous not to concede that it nevertheless deserves its moment in the court of popular opinion, and I have forwarded The Pinch to my agent with that endorsement.
Yours, & etc.
P.S. I believe the illustrations, chimerical as they are, have also their own kind of currency in this climate and can’t hurt the book’s marketability (hateful word).
Lenny was contacted by the agent in the fullness of time. At the suggestion of her valued client she was passing the book along to an editor at a well-respected publishing house who she thought might be receptive. She cautioned the book dealer, though, that he shouldn’t get his hopes up; the chances of a self-published volume being picked up by an established press were extremely remote.
Things happened thereafter with a startling alacrity. The agent, confessing her own surprise, got back to Lenny in a matter of days with the news that the publisher had made a better than reasonable offer for The Pinch. There were legal issues that needed ironing out in order to resolve Lenny’s dual role as both executor and beneficiary of Muni Pinsker’s literary estate (he should see a lawyer). Once the details were settled, he would receive half the advance upon signing the contract and half on publication of the book. While Lenny’s head was still spinning from what sounded to him like an astronomical figure, the agent increased his vertigo with talk of print runs and marketing strategies. There had been some debate over just how to categorize the work, but it was finally decided the subtitle, A History, would be retained, further qualified by the sub-subtitle: A Novel. Ambiguity, it seemed, was a selling point. Though the publisher intended to target “the obvious niche audience”—Lenny wondered who exactly that was — it had a broader readership in mind, and toward that end engaged an eminent writer — Jewish though not to an onerous degree — to tout the book’s universality in a preface. The writer, unable to locate any biographical information about the author of The Pinch, was told all roads led back to a book dealer in Memphis; so he appealed to Lenny for a chronology of the major events in Muni’s life. Having spent the publisher’s advance on settling accounts with landlords and bill collectors and making initial improvements to the store, Lenny agreed, with his fledgling chutzpah, to provide the timeline for a supplemental fee.
The book was published the following autumn in a handsome, octavo-sized volume, its contents printed in an elegant Garamond type font on acid-free, Bible-grade stock. The title was embossed, the glossy dust jacket a reproduction of one of Tyrone’s extravagant polychrome mirages, others appearing at intervals throughout the text. Removing it from its padded envelope, Lenny pawed the book and fanned its pages, hoping to revive something of the heart-stopping emotion he’d felt on encountering the original. (That particular volume had been filed away among the shop’s labyrinthine shelves under History.) But The Pinch no longer seemed to belong to him. He had the awful sinking sensation upon cracking the spine of the newly minted edition that, in selling the book, he’d betrayed Muni Pinsker and the entire vanished community of North Main Street. The feeling was not much relieved when he turned to his own contribution, attached as a historico-biographical appendix:
Significant Biographical Events
1889—Muni Pinsker is born to Zalman and Itke Pinsker in town of Blod in the Russian Pale of Settlement.
1892—Enters as pupil in cheder of Reb Yozifel Glans, called by his students Death’s Head.
1898—Transfers to more advanced school in Tzachnovka, thirty versts from Blod; Muni begins “eating days” and writing poetry.
1906—Enters yeshiva of famed Chazon Ish in Minsk, where he is exposed to radical politics.
1907—Passover pogrom in Blod: Muni’s father is murdered, sister assaulted, mother left deranged.
1908—Joins Jewish General Labor Bund.
1909-10—Is arrested for distributing socialist paper the Hammer, accused of conspiracy, and sentenced to four years’ hard labor and permanent exile to Siberia; marched to the mica mines at Nerchinsk, a journey from Moscow of more than five months.
1910–11—Escapes from the labor camp: walks from Nerchinsk to Irkutsk across frozen Lake Baikal; travels (funded by smuggled currency from American uncle) by train through Russia to Bremen; then by SS Saxonia to New York and train to Memphis, Tennessee.
1912–13—Works on North Main Street (the Pinch) in the general merchandise owned by uncle Pinchas Pin; becomes romantically attached to funambulist Jenny Bashrig; earthquake occurs.
1913–21 (an approximate span of years perceived by population as single cyclical day) — Stricken with graphomania, Muni retreats into room, begins writing chronicle of the Pinch in which events seem to happen concurrently if not all at once; after terminating pregnancy, Jenny joins circus.
Children of flooded North Main Street begin fainting at wilclass="underline" entering hiver-betim (deathlike trances), they emerge with occult knowledge; permutate letters of Tetragrammaton with alphabet blocks to summon cosmic monsters for the purpose of remembering fear.
Millie Poupko’s son Myron slices open big toe, inserts chit inscribed with name of God, sprouts wings; Izzy Grinspan’s daughters pluck scales from dragon Rahav, use as mirrors in which to view future husbands.