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The Many Faces of Eve
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19889 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
2,262 Words |
| Author
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Suzanne Fields
Suzanne Fields, columnist for the Washington Times is
nationally syndicated. She is the author of Like Father, Like
Daughter: How Father Shapes the Woman His Daughter Becomes and
was editor of Innovations, a magazine for mental health
professionals. |
EVE'S TATTO
Emily Prager
New York: Random House, 1991
198 pp, $19.00
Emily Prager is an irritatingly ingratiating author. Her book succeeds almost in spite of itself. At any given moment, paragraph, or page, Eve's Tattoo reads as though it might descend into a trite and vulgar abyss, trivializing the Holocaust, reducing victims of the Nazis to cardboard banalities.
But it doesn't, quite. Instead, the author--who also wrote short stories in A Visit from the Footbinder and the novel Clea and Zeus--sustains this slim novel with a lively inventiveness that gives the horror of the death camps a contemporary reality that seeps into the consciousness of her characters and readers.
The strength of Eve's Tattoo resides in Eve flick, the complex protagonist, a humor columnist for a man's magazine who gets a tattoo to celebrate her fortieth birthday. This eccentric decision is more than a weird adventure to forestall a midlife crisis. It is more than a trendy decoration; tattoos are the latest emblems of bizarre chic for young women in New York. It is a moral statement, a political event, a consciousness raiser.
Eve does not choose a pretty bird or butterfly or a heart with her lover's initials. She chooses numbers for her wrist, the same numbers she saw on the wrist of a woman in a photograph taken at Auschwitz in 1944. Eve believes that the woman in the photograph bears a strong resemblance to her, and she wants to turn the long-dead woman into an alter ego: her "doppleganger," as the Germans would say.
She carries the photograph to Big Dan's Tattoo Parlor and shows it to Big Dan, a gruff biker type who will draw the purple numbers. She asks him to make the numbers look like real numbers on a prisoner of the death camp.
"You can see it here, can't you?' Eve goes on. 'Six numbers facing outward, along the underside of the arm? Five Zero-zero-one-two-three. See how they're squiggly, done in a hurry, badly? That's just how I want them, not straight and well done like you would probably do them. Okay?'''
At this point, the reader naturally imagines Eve to be a Jew or a gypsy, a woman who has lost
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