Novel; literary fiction
By: Elliott B. Oppenheim

E-mail: intellitek@aol.com

Length: 350 pp.: 100,000 wds: General adult demography; some sex; some profanity; PG-“lite-R”

KALEIDOSCOPE portrays Chaim Goldberg’s senior year in high school, 1963-64, in which he twists with evolving adolescent ethics in a tearing break-up from the woman he most loves: his mother. He is a genius who escapes a fractured family and triumphs and flourishes because of his indomitable will despite his paradoxical knack for making all the wrong decisions.

Nedda Boudreaux, twice his age, gives him a kaleidoscope as a gift, then seduces him. The next day he meets Stella O’Shannahan, his school classmate. He wants them, both, and his world spins like a kaleidoscope gone wild.

Chaim and his high school chums participate in the race riots in Levittown and watch his mother, Eva Goldberg, a diabolical social crusader and phenomenal hypocrite, quell a crazed crowd. Chaim and Stella retreat, beaten, to Manor Boudreaux where Chaim encounters Nedda’s ruthless husband, Harold.

Through his clandestine relationship with the older Nedda, he and Stella enter Johnny Calamari’s East Coast mob crime syndicate. Chaim likes “da’ money” and swagger, but, when it gets a “bit rough,” they find that they can’t “just quit.”

One of his few and truest comforts is his intimate relationship with his best friend, Steve Zubarsky. They share each others’ worlds. Friends since Joe, the father’s death, Anna, the mother, dies suddenly and Steve moves in with the Jewish family, becoming the brother Chaim never had.

Set in Levittown, Pennsylvania, Chaim separates from his tyrannical Jewish mother, Evalyn, and rabbity Bernard, his father. In the sooty WW-II aftermath for American Jewry, he encounters the forces of the evolving civil rights movement and feminism, and the East Coast’s deeply felt, overt, anti-Semitism. His hypocritical, controlling mother hates his girlfriend because she is Catholic.

Reactive sex propels him and his need to be loved, drives him into his relationship with Nedda and his girlfriend, Stella. Greed pits him into sick collaborations with East Coast crime boss, Johnny “The Squid” Calamari. Trapped in a sadistic marriage dungeon, Nedda coerces Chaim by threatening to withdraw sex unless he participates in her scheme to kill her thug husband, Harry the Bee.

He wants Nedda’s pleasures but she and her criminal miscreants corrupt and suck the young lovers into their syndicate. When the murder plot unravels and they experience the consequences of their decisions, “the kids” discover that they can’t “just quit.”

Chaim teeters on a knife-edge between boyish naiveté and manhood, yet, surmounting disappointments, he moves on, demoralized but not broken, and encounters, then conquers, the existentialist reality that, in this world, he is alone and can only rely upon himself for his own destiny and identity. Spinning in kaleidoscopic confusion, he examines his rugged transition to manhood through his eccentric family as he battles these fiendish sub-characters.

The final chapter features Chaim and Stella in an emotional goodbye at the Trenton train station. The couple have planned to reunite at Culley College in Los Angeles but, on the train, he opens a fateful letter. Stella, like her mother, will attend Vassar, leaving him alone in LA. He is deflated, losing both Nedda and Stella. Looking inward, he resolves his sorrow and evolves stronger.

Through it all, this sturdy sapling from America’s first post-war crop remains optimistic and closes out his adolescence. He relinquishes his family, his dear friend, Steve, and his lovers. As part of America’s 1960’s migration to LA, he steps into President Johnson’s Great Society.

The core of Kaleidoscope is Goldberg’s effort, told in the third-person, to individuate and become a moral human, being good to others while retaining his personal integrity, to do what is right. What challenges him in this pathway is, foremost, making some sense for himself from his distorted parental role models.