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Berlin, 1915. It is Purim – the Jewish holiday to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews from the massacre planned for them by Haman, who was talked down by Queen Esther, ‘a Jewish Scheherezade, who used words alone to secure victory over her enemy’. The crumbling building in which the Purim celebrations are being held collapses and the eponymous Esther Rosenbaum, in contrast with her historical namesake, is held responsible for causing the disaster in which both her parents have died. She is fifteen years old, seven feet tall and utterly alone.
Penny Simpson’s captivating novel follows Esther’s stumbling path as she seeks her place in a hostile world. Berlin in the 1920s was no place in which to draw attention to yourself by your difference. But Esther Rosenbaum is a Jewish giantess and her friends are bohemians and radicals, writers and artists, people who break the rules of convention – like the world around them, catapulting towards the Second World War, ‘their lives fall apart, like the loose pages of a manuscript.’
This is magic realism at its political best, finely echoing the sense of unreality and disorientation that reigned as Hitler and the Nazis gradually gained power in a country still reeling in the aftermath of the Great War. True to the genre, Simpson uses plain language and an understated narrative voice to speak of extraordinary things. When I turned the last page, I found myself wanting to start the book all over again, to fathom the full depths of metaphorical meaning that I could not possibly grasp in a single reading.
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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Author Biography: Penny Simpson is Head of Press at Welsh National Opera, coming full circle after a series of cleaning and receptionist's jobs at Glyndebourne Opera House, which helped support her at art college (and subsidised a taste in designer shoes). She trained as a journalist, specialising in the arts, before winning Barclays/TMA Theatre Critic of the Year in 1991. Her assignments took her to a post-war Croatian island beach to review The Tempest, and to Nikko, Japan, where she hung out with yabusame horseback archers. She is the 2007 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition winner. A playwright and author of short fiction which has appeared in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Honno and Virago, her debut collection of short fiction DOGdays was published in 2003. This is her first novel. Further Information: “The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum is a feast of language, in some ways akin to the feasts depicted in the Biblical Book of Esther.
Simpson’s novel, though, is served on a platter embellished with similes and metaphors so strong that their aromas permeate the text
with every page.”
Jewish Book World (USA), Spring 2009
"Simpson takes full advantage of [the] possibilities [for lovers of the absurd and grotesque]... an intriguing first novel."
Marta Segal Block, www.booklistonline.com
“Moving and inspiring... very much recommended reading.”
The Midwest Book Review, Library Bookwatch
"Marks new ground for Welsh fiction in English. Not one mention of our tiny country. Instead a supremely entertaining, often moving, fantastic roll through European history." Peter Finch, Cambria
Using a burlesque brand of magic realism, Penny Simpson conjures fantastical elements to show how cookery can be an act of storytelling, and imagination itself an act of subversion and survival.
“[An] extravaganza where the real and the imagined take turn and turn about... sumptuously detailed and fantastical... [this novel is] at once full of disturbing delicacy, and at the same time [forceful]... [marked by its] humour, verve and hallucinatory strangeness.”
Clare Morgan, Times Literary Supplement, 25/7/08
"The 7ft plus heroine of Simpson's book The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum contrasts strikingly with familiar fact-or-fiction cabaret personalities like Sally Bowles or Marlene Dietrich ... Working for the most famous chefs and bakers of her day, [Esther] expresses both political and personal yearnings through her increasingly [fantastical] recipes, served to Jews and Gestapo alike ... Esther's survival depends partly on her brilliant culinary skills, but also on her ability to 'pass' as non-Jewish. It is not a natural ability; she adops a man's greatcot and top hat, beneath which she becomes increasingly emaciated. Simpson vividly conveys how the optimistic creator of 'Kiss-of-Hope biscuits' hides, denies, and finally regains her larger-than-life identity."
Amanda Hopkinson, Jewish Chronicle, 2/5/08
"Penny Simpson has a vivid imagination. At times it takes physical shape and goes down streets like a searchlight; scalpel following behind ... This allows her formidable talent to exercise itself on both the likely and the unlikely."
"A born storyteller ... a richly-imagined tale written with zest."
Nicholas Murray
"The fictional heroine of this remarkable novel is a seven-foot Jewish girl with a genius for cookery, and the resistible rise of Nazi thuggery is the backdrop for her recipes and menus. The fact that Esther is also anorexic adds a contemporary twist to its period setting. Comparisons with magic realism come immediately to mind and the author manages to balance the fantastical elements with the gritty realism of the descent into fascism ... the real and imaginary characters are equally magical, as are the incredible creations of this precursor of today's celebrity chefs."
Morning Star
"Rich description brings Esther's world to life for the reader, and it's worth savouring every word ... The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum is a feast of words, painting vivid pictures of people and places, and full of passionate characters that you can't help but care about. Well worth a read, if only for Simpson's beautiful prose - just make sure you give it the time it deserves ... A colourful tale of love and loss."
Big Issue Cymru
ALCEMI BRING OUT THIRD NOVEL
Alcemi is the small brand new publisher which hit the news with the shortlisting of their first novel, Gee Williams' Salvage by the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Now it is bringing out its third novel, also a debut for Cardiff author Penny Simpson. The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum. Penny herself was the winner of the 2007 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition, pocketing a handy £1000 for one short story.
The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum is set in 1920s Weimar Berlin and is a novel about exile, told by a Jewish chef who uses extraordinary recipes as a subversive form of storytelling. Poised on the eve of world war, it brings together the burlesque and the tragic, drawing on historical characters such as Greta Garbo and kabarett legend Klabund, in addition to the atmosphere and cultural innovations of 1920s Berlin. Esther Rosenbaum could give Nigella Lawson a run for her money: she is the creator of chocolate hearts stuffed with saffron pen nibs, jugged hares served in toy drums and an edible Cuckoo Clock, filled with marzipan birds that hide a terrible secret. All is served up at a very special banquet in an inflation-hungry city edging towards disaster.
Reviewing the novel in the Jewish Chronicle this month, Amanda Hopkinson states of Esther, "Working for the most famous chefs and bakers of her days, she expresses both political and personal yearnings through her increasingly preposterous recipes, served to Jews and Gestapo alike in Schorn's Restaurant... Simpson vividly conveys how the optimistic creator of 'Kiss-of-Hope biscuits' hides, denies and finally regains her larger-than-life identity."
At times, the novel's Berlin setting is more reminiscent of Nineties' Hoxton in London’s East End: a celebrity chef and her art collector patron winning headlines; a succession of artists misbehaving badly and a restaurant that becomes a mecca for the glittering circle attached to playwright-of-the-moment, Bertolt Brecht. But it also captures a city at a time of remarkable change, with poignant echoes of a lost world now found largely in a museum’s display case, or hidden away in private memories.
"My story lies buried in fragments, rather than in the city's more public spaces," Penny explains. "The past is captured in scents and tastes; by a storytelling chef who improvises with her recipes and her black market finds and in the survival of something as fragile as a challa cloth made for a Rabbi who believed in debate and progress. But it is food that is the constant presence; it's usually presented as a gift between people, a means of bonding when so much else is under threat. It's also symbolic, reflecting the contrast between denial and excess, the extremes between which all the characters live."
The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum
Esther Rosenbaum is fifteen years old and seven foot tall when her parents are killed in Berlin in 1915, when a decrepit building collapses during a Purim play. Shunned by most of her own Jewish community who consider the 'giantess' brings bad luck, Esther takes a job as housekeeper in Augsburg and her extraordinary talent for cooking is discovered.
Returning to Berlin, at the height of the Weimar republic, she becomes head chef at the Schoms restaurant, owned by the gay, black marketeer Leon Wolf. Here she perfects her style, the artistry of excess in her confections contrasting sharply with the abject poverty that lies behind the fashionable decadence of the city, that contrast embodied in the soup kitchen she sets up behind the restaurant.
As the Nazis begin to threaten and finally to destroy a culture and way of life symbolised by Esther's culinary confections and the fantastic clocks of her friend Herr Handke, Esther herself, unhappy in love, stops eating in a refusal of compromise.
Interwoven with her story are those of Bertolt Brecht and his (fictional) rival Tucholski with his partner, the glamorous cabaret artiste Kaya, where writing and performance as political acts become increasingly dangerous.
In her first, compelling first novel, Penny Simpson captures the spirit of 1920s Berlin, revealing her superb talent for storytelling and an almost Zola-esque delight in detailed and richly sensuous description of the material culture of both rich and poor.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange Prizes: Welsh Women to Watch in 2009, Mslexia magazine
Dewiswyd gan Gyfnewidfa Lên Cymru ar gyfer ei Silff Lyfrau 2008-09.
Chosen by Wales Literature Exchange for its 2008-09 Bookcase.
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