Rodinsky's Room

Rating:
Summary: The right story, the wrong storytellers
Review: Having lived in London, where I came to know the Spitalfields neighborhood where the book is set and heard much about the "urban legend" of David Rodinsky, I expected to enjoy this book. Reading Liechtenstein and Sinclair's evocative impressions of Spitalfields took me back, but otherwise "Rodinsky's Room" was a disappointment.

The perceptive reader senses the truth behind the mystery of David Rodinsky early on: Rodinsky was neither a genius nor a scholar, but a man of limited intelligence who lived most of his life with his protective, reclusive mother. After losing his mother, the sheltered Rodinsky couldn't make a life for himself in an unfamiliar world and was ultimately institutionalized. The authors find witnesses and documents who tell the truth about Rodinsky, but against all the evidence they dutifully record in the book the authors persist much too long in the belief that Rodinsky was some kind of inspired cabbalist mystic.

The Rodinsky story is an interesting one, but Liechtenstein and Sinclair are not the right authors to tell it. Sinclair veers between disjointed autobiographical ramblings (none of which bear any apparent relevance to Rodinsky) and repetitive efforts to psychoanalyze Liechtenstein, asking over and over, "Why is this woman so interested in David Rodinsky?" While she writes more coherently than Sinclair, Liechtenstein comes across as flighty, self-absorbed and ludicrously naive; the story of Liechtenstein's rediscovery of her Judaism, the real heart of the book, gets old very quickly. Also, one does not need to be a former Londoner to notice Liechtenstein's factual errors (many of which don't even involve London; for example, she places Massachusetts' Brandeis University in California), the large number of which led me to question the publisher's editorial competence.

Despite its many shortcomings, I can recommend "Rodinsky's Room" as a well-written memoir notwithstanding its content. However, readers looking to learn something about David Rodinsky's milieu - the disappearing Jewish East End - should look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: A misunderstood (and misread) classic
Review: I just finished teaching *Rodinsky's Room* and was amazed to see the variety of misreadings posted here as reviews. Among the many contemporary works of historical recovery or revision, *Rodinsky* stands out because of its alternating -- and often warring -- authors, each of whom has a different purpose in recovering Rodinsky's history, as well as a different form and style through which to accomplish this recovery.

Sinclair, the experimental London novelist and essayist, draws on a pastiche of languages and approaches: the short, grotesque sentences of crime novels; classic gothic imagery of the uncanny; filmic montage and surrealist juxtaposition; gossip and rumor and arcane whispers. As he follows Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky's history, Sinclair questions traditional ways of fixing history that overexpose, erase, or create a fictional simulacrum of the past. While he is quite aware that his early writings on Rodinsky were the stuff of romantic urban legend, he is also insistant that heritage trusts and yuppie preservationists are no better than the City developers who want to erase the multiple layers of time sedimented in Spitalfields. The latter erase history, while the former use urban myths to increase property values.

Lichtenstein's style, while more straight-forward than Sinclair's, is comparable to Paul Auster: a clean, seemingly transparent surface, with a plot built on unexplainable coicidences. If Sinclair is obsessed with the Room as a set for his own fictional musings, Lichtenstein wants to demystify the room, unfix energy from a fetishistic attachment to Rodinsky's objects and redirect it onto the human story of David Rodinsky.

And to those reviewers who see Rodinsky as ultimately an ordinary man or a mentally disturbed recluse, I can only ask: did we read the same book? Rodinsky apparently taught himself several ancient languages, was at work on a treatise on the origins of language itself, definitely studied Kabbalah, and maintained himself in near obscurity in the closely-knit Jewish community of Spitalfields. Lichtenstein also debunks the mental illness theory: the behaviors that seemed "crazy" in London would have been totally normal in the Polish community of his grandparents. The very complexity of Rodinsky's identity is used to evoke the heterogeneity and brilliance of a Jewish immigrant community the history of which is currently elided in the pursuit of parking garages, office blocks, and silk weaver garrets.

Ultimately, *Rodinsky's Room* is thematically similar to works like Sebald's *The Emigrants* or Amitav Ghosh's *In an Antique Land*, works that explore the porous boundaries between fiction, history, and myth, works that seek to protect history without romanticizing it or cutting it off, museum-like, from the plurality of possible fictions.

Rating:
Summary: Enchanting mystery, but inadequate and a bit parochial
Review: Lichenstein and Sinclair have taken a fascinating and perplexing mystery and have raised it to the status of urban legend. On many levels, their collaborative attempt succeeds admirably: Lichtenstein skillfully (with some elements of a suspenseful detective story) presents her search for David Rodinsky, whose room was rediscovered, virtually untouched, two decades after it had been abandoned, and Sinclair places the story in its many cultural contexts. Yet, in other ways, their narrative falls short: more questions are raised than answered by their book, and Sinclair's contributions occasionally suffer from a parochialism that makes his discussion difficult for the general reader. As Sinclair himself admits, "The more the mystery of Rodinsky was discussed and debated, the dimmer the outline of the human presence."

The book alternates between chapters by the two authors, and Lichtenstein's contributions are far more straightforward. She weaves her investigation into Rodinsky's identity with her own quest for her Jewish identity and ancestry, and I found her chapters to be far more compelling. Unfortunately, Lichtenstein seems a bit out of her depth when discussing Rodinsky's writings. She confesses she doesn't have the background necessary to understand or translate most of the scraps of papers and journals found in Rodinsky's rooms, yet both she (and Sinclair) repeatedly refer to Rodinsky as a talented linguist and scholar (or a cabbalist). This claim would have been greatly supported by reprinting or summarizing some of the texts left in the room, but we are given only four examples of Rodinsky's apparently prodigious output: two grammatically inept notes to his aunt (including one notable for its venom), the translation of a page of Chinese characters that turns out merely to say "I am David Rodinsky" over and over, and a journal entry on the study of the Assyrian language that could have been written (stylistic errors and all) by a college freshman. Was Rodinsky truly a scholar and a linguist, or was he just a reclusive dabbler? The evidence presented in the book is hardly convincing either way.

Sinclair's nonlinear meditations are also absorbing; he finds parallels to the mystery of Rodinksy in a broad range of literary themes and cultural myths, and he aptly illustrates the East End neighborhood where Rodinsky spent nearly all his life. Although he is a wonderful stylist, Sinclair seems to be writing for his fellow members of the East End literati (and for the critics) rather than for the general reader. Time and again, he mentions London-based semi-celebrities without any introduction whatsoever; I can't imagine many American--or even British--readers knowing most of the people and friends Sinclair mentions. If, before you begin this book, you can't identify Steven Berkoff, David Gascoyne, James Fox, George Melly, John Harle, and dozens of other similarly obscure artists and writers, you will know even less about them after you finish reading Sinclair's chapters. Even better-known writers like Kathy Acker and Arthur Morrison deserve some sort of identification.

Furthermore, Sinclair's chapter placing Rodinsky's story within the context of the mythology of the golem seems far-fetched; the parallels just aren't there. Indeed, most of those who knew Rodinsky clearly find this comparison odious ("There must be no talk of golems, cabbalists, interdimensional voyages, invisibility," says one. "Rodinsky was a man to be pitied, an inadequate [who] unfortunately attained nothing . . . due to his low IQ.") But such objections hardly keep Sinclair from attempting to substantiate this analogy for nearly 30 pages.

Nevertheless, in spite of my rather significant reservations, I found this book overall to be an affecting celebration of the life of a man who otherwise would be one of the many reclusive loners and social outcasts who disappear in the world on a daily basis.