Künstlers in Paradise

Julian is a nice 24-year-old college graduate from Brooklyn.  Intelligent, curious, and sensitive.  But, as we say, unfocused.  Like many of us, he has gone through one intense interest after another, abandoning each in turn.

Julian existed in an exciting, satisfying serial monogamy of intellectual pursuits.

And now, in quick succession, his roommate is leaving for law school, his girl friend has dumped him, and he has lost his job.  

His parents despair.  No, they tell him, nicely but firmly -- and to to Julian's astonishment and horror -- they won't allow him to return to the family home.  But then the phone rings, and his 93-year-old grandmother Mamie invites him to live with her and assist her at her home in Venice, California.  It solves two dilemmas for his parents -- what to do with their son, and what to do with the ageing Mamie.

Julian moves west, somewhat resignedly, and he and his grandmother gradually learn to enjoy each other's company.  And then the Covid pandemic hits, sweeping toward California from the east coast, and forcing Julian, Mamie, and her friend and "dogsbody" Agatha to huddle together in Mamie's small house and yard.  

Quarantine!

And so is set up something of a framing story for the rest of Cathleen Schine's novel, Künstlers in Paradise, a framing story within which, out of boredom and a sense of life's passing, Mamie begins telling Julian stories of her long life.  The stories begin in Vienna, where she lived as a child with her Jewish parents -- a highly respected composer and an actress -- and her own grandparents.  In 1939, after Austria has been annexed by the Third Reich, and when the Nazi hatred for Jews had become all too obvious, the family manages to slip out of Austria, leaving all their property behind.  Aided by a Jewish aid organization in Hollywood, Mamie's mother is offered a job as a Hollywood screenwriter, enabling the family to obtain American visas.

The saga of the family's move from Austria to America is told through the eyes of eleven-year-old Mamie.  To her, and to a large extent her parents as well,  America -- and especially Southern California -- was a paradise of vastness, openness, freedom.  The family moved into a small house on the Pacific coast.

The Künstlers discover that Los Angeles has become the new home for a vast number of Jewish intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians, many from Vienna themselves, who had fled the Nazis.  Julian listens wide-eyed, to her stories, as he begins to appreciate first, the upheaval his family had suffered leaving Vienna and coming to an unknown country, and second, the famous cultural figures in the Los Angeles milieu to which Mamie had been exposed as a young girl.  He takes notes, with Mamie's approval, and writes them up in coherent form after each talk.  His current interest is in being a screen writer.

Julian, a young man inclined to feel that his life has been filled with inconvenience and misfortune, begins to realize the differences between his grandmother's years as a twelve-year-old and the coddled childhood which he himself had experienced.

When he was twelve, he was scared to tell anyone he watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in case they thought he was babyish.  He was depressed by having to get his braces tightened and distraught when his face broke out.

At the same age, Mamie was realizing that most of her family and friends, left behind in Vienna, were doomed and would never be seen again.

But Mamie had been an optimistic child, delighted by California more than hurt by loss of Austria.  She meets a strange woman on the beach, and again at a party with her parents, who has a puppy delivered to her home by limousine.  Named after a dog in a child's book that had also emigrated to America, "Prince Jan Saint Bernard."  A copy of the child's book accompanied the puppy, autographed with the donor's initials, "G.G."  Greta Garbo.  

She didn't tell Julian the rest of the story.

Years later, apparently while in high school, Mamie had spent three weeks alone with Ms. Garbo on an isolated island in a lake in the Sierras.

A victim? Mamie thought with a smile.  I think not. ...

Mamie could still hear her heart pounding all these years later.  The blood still pumped and sounded in her ears.  Oh yes, now it would be sexual harassment or grooming or some such thing.  But then?  Oh, it was love.

Garbo gently told Mamie that it must end.  Mamie never saw or heard from her again.  She married Julian's grandfather not long afterwards.

Mamie's family was a musical family, but as a child, Mamie fought against learning piano.  She didn't understand why a piano allowed only certain notes to be played -- those on the white and black keys -- or why certain notes were said to harmonize and others not.  "Who said a scale had to have those notes?  And why?  Why, why, why?"  The book perhaps dives into too much musical theory for the average reader, but perhaps not.  

Her father introduced her to Arnold Schoenberg, who talked with her with tact and humor, discussing her aversion to the traditional musical scales.  At the time, she had no idea that Schoenberg was a pioneer in composing atonal music.  But instead of persuading her to study music, he taught her to play tennis.  And to play it exceedingly well.  To Schoenberg, music and tennis were related.  He taught: "Technique and tradition in order to transcend technique and tradition."

The game of tennis mattered to him not only as a test of skill or a competition (and he was famously competitive), but also as something complicated, elusive, and beautiful one could try to understand.  It was a lesson for life, she realized soon enough.

Mamie not only became an excellent tennis player, but eventually a violinist -- an instrument, unlike a piano, on which one could play an infinite number of notes, not just those sounded by a piano's white and black keys.

A year of quarantine passed.  A vaccine was developed, and Julian's parents came to visit Mamie and Julian.  They had sent him away, a sulky quasi-teenager.  A year later, he seemed a responsible and caring adult.  They will now welcome him back to New York, they tell him.  But he has become an Angeleno.  One with acquired tastes -- even a taste for atonal music!  He will gladly visit them, but for now, he will stay and help Mamie.

Künstlers in Paradise is obviously not a plot driven novel.  It is a picture of pre-war Vienna, from the retrospective viewpoint of highly educated Jews who fled to a new life in a New World.  It is a story of a bright but aimless boy -- young man -- of our own time who is finding himself by learning to empathize with the struggles and accomplishments of his own family members.  And it's a fascinating account of the community of Jewish intellectuals who had fled the Nazis in the 1930s and congregated in the Los Angeles area.