Which One Will It Be?: On Curt Leviant’s “Me, Mo, Mu, Ma, & Mod”

David Begelman romps through Curt Leviant’s latest novel, “Me, Mo, Mu, Ma, & Mod.”

By David BegelmanJanuary 30, 2022

Curt Leviant’s books have been published in eight European countries, South America, and Israel. Praised by two Nobel Prize recipients, Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel, Leviant has been described ironically as “the best unknown novelist in America.” A Yiddish scholar of repute, he discovered a long-forgotten 1903 manuscript titled Moshkeleh Ganev, missing from the standard 28-volume collection of Sholom Aleichem’s works.  The work is a literary gem Sholom Aleichem himself confessed made him feel like he was “born anew,” signaling that he “had really begun to write.” Leviant’s beautiful English translation appeared in 2021.

That same year Leviant released a novel of his own, Me, Mo, Mu, Ma, & Mod, about the adventures (or misadventures) of a writer who is invited by a publishing house to travel to Venice and create a work inspired by its Jewish quarter. The perks are too attractive to resist: a one-month writing fellowship, round trip air fare, and a capacious apartment off Piazza San Marco. So off he goes.

At the outset, the narrator’s Venice does not seem to be the setting for brooding themes like those lurking in Shakespeare (Othello, The Merchant of Venice) or the illness and erotic obsession of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. But the man is in for more surprises than a writer steeped in Judaic history and folklore can reasonably anticipate. And, if only to remind the reader that his narrative eventually strains believability, Leviant subtitles his book “a true fiction,” or a tale in which plausible stretches of experience alternate with clearly improbable, and, what’s more, paranormal events. But it’s quite late in the game before the reader learns he’s in the realm of magic realism.

The narrator (we are left in the dark about whether he is part Leviant himself or a completely fictional character; his letters to his editor are signed “CL”), has a thing for women. He justified his bumbling efforts to hit on two of them — at times simultaneously — with references to Jewish precedent, going back to the patriarch Abraham. The latter had two wives before the death of Sarah, whereupon he took on a third. At one point, as if to supply a reason for a dalliance, Leviant’s narrator remarks that “religion and sex were intersected in the very makeup of our bodies.” It’s philandering, but on less than a grand scale, and with a scholarly patina to boot.

The first woman the narrator approaches is Gila (or Mu), an aloof individual with two differently colored eyes. She is a mute, communicating with him by tracing letters on the palm of his left hand. Her first abbreviated missive is the word Shabbat, and the narrator leaves us wondering how finger tracings that leave decipherable red marks on a hand are accomplished without pain, scarring, or, more plausibly, a sharpie. It’s anybody’s guess. Mu continues to mystify. Suffice it to say, the world she inhabits, revealed later on in the book, will be familiar to those conversant with Judaic folklore.

The second woman the narrator encounters is Mazal (or Ma), a Parisian whose erotic appeal and intensity clashes with her pious (or so it seems at first) quest to obtain consolation at the gravesite of a departed rabbi. The narrator berates her for her flirtation with necromancy, a practice he wails was denounced by such authorities as Maimonides. But his religious zeal gives way in the end, and he winds up in bed with her.

The reader might regard the narrator’s experiences with these two women as a parable of sacred and profane love, but there is just too much quirky fun and complexity in Leviant’s prose to reduce it to that. It’s one hell of a rousing trip to a city sinking into an unforgiving sea.

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David Begelman is a writer and psychologist based in Connecticut.