From Publishers Weekly
A German painter and an Israeli model connect in Rosner's heartfelt but melodramatic second novel. Danzig, a 58-year-old painter who was once an up-and-coming artist, has long since traded in his creativity for a habit of seducing his models at the San Francisco art school where he teaches. As the son of a Nazi officer who brutalized his family in the aftermath of the war and drove Danzig's older sister, Margot, to suicide, the painter harbors dark memories. He meets Merav, the beautiful granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, when she substitutes as a model in his life drawing class. Merav, like Danzig, has come to America to escape—not just the legacy of the Holocaust, but also the loss of her lover in a suicide bombing. When Danzig asks her to pose at his home studio, the project presents emotional risks for both of them. As in her previous novel (The Speed of Light), Rosner presents a simple but earnest belief in the power of art to heal and reconcile. That the story leads to redemption for both Danzig and Merav won't surprise anyone, but readers may find themselves affected anyway. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The Holocaust and its aftermath continue to influence Rosner's work, as she follows her lyrical debut, Speed of Light (2001), with a haunting portrait of individuals tormented by their past. Told from the point of view of three protagonists--siblings Danzig and Margot, children of a Nazi official, and Merav, an Israeli soldier and granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor--Rosner shifts from contemporary San Francisco to postwar Germany as she tantalizingly reveals each character's psychic wounds. Their physical worlds collide when Merav models for Danzig's art students. Once an acclaimed artist, Danzig hasn't produced a painting in years, his creativity unfulfilled as he relives the childhood horror of his sister's suicide. Yet there's something about Merav's ephemeral beauty and transcendental reticence that touches his soul, though Merav is reluctant to open herself to Danzig's tortured anxiety. In a restrained yet elegiacal voice, Rosner explores the power of memory and the providence of art to amplify and alleviate human suffering. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Advance praise for Blue Nude
“Blue Nude is a novel that spans time and continents, from postwar Germany to California to Israeli kibbutzim, a novel that explores the big questions of history, fate, art, and how we choose to live the lives we’re given. And yet it’s also wonderfully intimate in its exploration of the hearts of its individual characters. Elizabeth Rosner has written a thought-provoking, moving, and original book.”
–Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me
“What I like especially about Elizabeth Rosner’s Blue Nude is its patience and careful pace, both utterly appropriate to a story of troubled reconciliation. In its insistence that sweetness (honeyed, not saccharine) can come out of violence, Blue Nude resembles the astonishing Israeli film Walk on Water, which also takes on the contemporary legacy of German-Jewish relations. It helps that Ms. Rosner has a poet’s eye and an enviable ability to allow both her lapidary sentences and her deeply complex characters space to breathe.”
–Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair
“Rosner takes on complexity with a brilliant poet’s insistence that the body can never surrender cultural legacy. Blue Nude is easy to pick up and, in its suspense, hard to put down. Its sensitivity to detail acts as a love letter to the world.”
–Edie Meidav, author of Crawl Space
“Blue Nude is a novel that spans time and continents, from postwar Germany to California to Israeli kibbutzim, a novel that explores the big questions of history, fate, art, and how we choose to live the lives we’re given. And yet it’s also wonderfully intimate in its exploration of the hearts of its individual characters. Elizabeth Rosner has written a thought-provoking, moving, and original book.”
–Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me
“What I like especially about Elizabeth Rosner’s Blue Nude is its patience and careful pace, both utterly appropriate to a story of troubled reconciliation. In its insistence that sweetness (honeyed, not saccharine) can come out of violence, Blue Nude resembles the astonishing Israeli film Walk on Water, which also takes on the contemporary legacy of German-Jewish relations. It helps that Ms. Rosner has a poet’s eye and an enviable ability to allow both her lapidary sentences and her deeply complex characters space to breathe.”
–Jonathan Wilson, author of A Palestine Affair
“Rosner takes on complexity with a brilliant poet’s insistence that the body can never surrender cultural legacy. Blue Nude is easy to pick up and, in its suspense, hard to put down. Its sensitivity to detail acts as a love letter to the world.”
–Edie Meidav, author of Crawl Space
Book Description
In this sensual, intimate novel, prizewinning poet and bestselling author Elizabeth Rosner tells the engrossing and timely story of an artist and his model, and the moral and political implications of their relationship.
Born in the shadow of postwar Germany, Danzig is a once-prominent painter who now teaches at an art institute in San Francisco. But while Danzig shares wisdom and technique with students, his own canvases remain mysteriously empty. When a compelling new model named Merav poses for his class, Danzig, unsettled by her beauty, senses that she may be the muse he has been waiting for.
The Israeli-born granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Merav is a former art student who discovered her abilities as a model while studying in Tel Aviv. To escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, she moved to California, where she found work posing for artists around the Bay Area. Now challenged by Danzig’s German accent and the menace it suggests, Merav must decide how to overcome her fears. Before they can create anything new together, both artist and model are forced to examine the history they carry.
Like a paintbrush in motion, Blue Nude moves back and forth through time, recounting the events that have brought Danzig and Merav together: their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives. The novel ultimately unites them in the present and, through the transcendent power of artistic expression, moves them forward to the point of reconciliation, redemption, and revival.
Using words to paint the landscapes of body and soul, Elizabeth Rosner conveys the art of survival, the complexity of history, the form of exile, the shape of desire, and the color of intimacy. Blue Nude is the narrative equivalent of a masterpiece of fine art.
Born in the shadow of postwar Germany, Danzig is a once-prominent painter who now teaches at an art institute in San Francisco. But while Danzig shares wisdom and technique with students, his own canvases remain mysteriously empty. When a compelling new model named Merav poses for his class, Danzig, unsettled by her beauty, senses that she may be the muse he has been waiting for.
The Israeli-born granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Merav is a former art student who discovered her abilities as a model while studying in Tel Aviv. To escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, she moved to California, where she found work posing for artists around the Bay Area. Now challenged by Danzig’s German accent and the menace it suggests, Merav must decide how to overcome her fears. Before they can create anything new together, both artist and model are forced to examine the history they carry.
Like a paintbrush in motion, Blue Nude moves back and forth through time, recounting the events that have brought Danzig and Merav together: their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives. The novel ultimately unites them in the present and, through the transcendent power of artistic expression, moves them forward to the point of reconciliation, redemption, and revival.
Using words to paint the landscapes of body and soul, Elizabeth Rosner conveys the art of survival, the complexity of history, the form of exile, the shape of desire, and the color of intimacy. Blue Nude is the narrative equivalent of a masterpiece of fine art.
About the Author
Elizabeth Rosner’s first novel, The Speed of Light, was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Harold U. Ribalow Prize and the Prix France Bleu Gironde. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Begin anywhere, Danzig says. The shoulder, the rib cage, the thigh, the ankle. It won’t be an accident, even if it feels that way right now.
He stands in his classroom at the Art Institute, the students arranged on chairs and stools in a rough circle with their sketchpads and charcoal, all sixteen of them waiting for the model to take the first pose on her platform.
Find a place where your line wants to take a journey, he says. Some curve in any direction, a place where skin meets light, meets shadow. Let your hand tell you. Begin there.
It’s almost the last class of the semester, and he is deliberately talking about beginnings, not endings. He keeps promising himself he is never coming back, but he keeps coming back. For the third year in a row, he has made a vow not to return in the fall, but he’s finding it hard to take his own word seriously. Even when he is shouting at his students, feverish to convince them to care more, he feels his own intensity in doubt, wonders how much he still cares himself. He used to relish the moments when they jumped at the sound of his voice, but now he is no longer sure that anyone even flinches. Their anonymous, hopeful faces may not be enough to save him.
On the worst days, he feels that he must be getting old and used up. The youngest students who pass him in the hallways barely seem to acknowledge he is alive. To them he might as well have one foot in the grave.
But wait. At fifty-eight he can still attract plenty of attention when he wants to. It’s just a few of the women, girls really, who infuriate him with their disinterest.
He stands beside his faithful skeleton, the one that dangles like a marionette on its wooden stand, its bleached bones as familiar to him as an old friend. This is the invaluable prop he calls Doctor Memento, for memento mori, though Danzig is sure most of the students imagine he must be referring only to his own death and not theirs; they’re so young they are still convinced of their immortality.
He is not allowed to touch the models; that’s one of the rules of the Models Guild. And so instead Danzig will rest a hand on Doctor Memento’s shoulder blade, tap a fingertip on his collarbone. Today, he casually holds the good Doctor’s left hand as a form of mild entertainment or even consolation. Later, he will gesticulate with its digits for emphasis, always reminding the students to keep track of the bones.
Look closely, he tells the students. Deeper. This is the predictable architecture of the body. This is how you pay attention to the truth.
Twenty fresh faces arrive in his class each semester, young men and women with barely tolerable moods and attitudes, startling shades of dyed hair and ubiquitous piercings. Fifteen weeks ago there were twenty of them, and now there are sixteen. Though he used to be able to predict with surprising accuracy which of them would leave, this semester there are more stubborn ones than he had counted on, furiously scratching at their sketchpads.
It takes a few weeks or sometimes just a few hours before he knows whether or not anyone in the room has talent. In the first few meetings they are blurry and indistinguishable to him. Now, he sees that several are frowning or grimacing, already prepared to be dissatisfied with the first gestures on the page, already wanting to tear sheets away and throw them aside.
He admits with a private sigh that there is not a single student who engages him right now. For a long time, the opposite happened, and a student would get under his skin by being infuriatingly incompetent. There was one girl last year whose drawings were always filled with oversized, unmatched hands, lopsided mouths, heads shaped like eggs or apples, eyes too high or too low.
You’re just not looking, he had growled at her. Do you mean to tell me these hands belong to the same person? You’re not even trying.
He knew she probably hated him, his icicle heart, his mouth twisting and cruel. She thought he was a mean bastard, and she was right. He was. She left the class and never came back.
They seem younger than ever, these students, almost another species. He swears to himself he was never that young, never that naively arrogant. On certain days there might be one or two who remind him of those first Americans he met, all those years ago. The Occupiers, his father had called them. Soldiers. But he has mostly forgotten.
Begin again, he says.
Some young woman with peroxide hair about an inch long and a silver stud through her tongue (she is yawning, even now) seems to be glaring at him. More likely she is angry at the world, but Danzig takes it personally, so he is angry at her too. In the past he would have managed to seduce her after the first or second week of the semester, just to wipe the glare off her face. But this is what outrages him as much as anything: she doesn’t seem to register him in any way as a sexual being. She turns her back almost every time he passes near her.
He might have reassured himself with the certainty that she doesn’t like men at all, but in fact he’s seen her more than once with her pierced tongue in the mouth of a leather- encased, acne-scarred boyfriend, who drops her off and picks her up on his motorcycle.
So it’s just Danzig who doesn’t appeal to her. All that sexual heat and none of it for him.
He tells himself he doesn’t mind, not about her or about any of the rest of them. He has made no promises and told no lies. And he is about to forget each one of their names.
Today’s model is getting undressed behind a folding screen. So far he can only see the back of her head, noting very dark brown hair, cut in a kind of thick bob above her jawline, windblown and messy. There have been so many models—easily hundreds over the years, possibly as many as a thousand—so many whose names he cannot remember and probably never knew.
Just last week his model hadn’t shown up at all, and Danzig had posed for the class himself, stripped down to his jeans and bare feet, determined not to squander anyone’s time including his own. He is still vain enough to know that his muscle tone is reasonable, his back and shoulders powerful enough to be compelling anatomically.
The students could work with a piece of clothing for once; it wouldn’t kill them, he said. And here was a chance to practice contours half hidden under fabric, folds and creases and what they used to call drapery in the days when nude models were rare and for men only.
He used a long stick kept on hand for prying open and closing the high casement windows of the room. He held it like a staff of Moses, aimed it like a javelin, used it to prop his arms like a weary shepherd. He imagined himself through their eyes: his blond hair going gray at the temples and on his exposed chest, his charcoal-stained fingers. Rocking almost imperceptibly on the balls of his feet, he reminded himself to bend his knees, all of this giving him a renewed appreciation for the balanced stillness of his models.
All of the students seemed to work especially seriously that day, a little shy of him at first and then with increasing eagerness, obviously hopeful in the face of his silence that this might be a once-only chance to work without his correcting hand hovering nearby. For now Danzig’s hands were elsewhere, held in a foreign gesture that had nothing to do with their own hands, except that it had everything to do with getting his hands to look as real and as still as the ones they saw when they looked up from their easels.
There.
He was there for them to study all they wanted, a body twice their age at least, maybe three times, and suddenly a figure in space with a look that might have surprised them had any of them been curious enough to decipher it carefully. He felt vulnerable, subject to a persistent gaze that made him worry about what they thought of him, whether the young women saw him as old and unattractive, past his prime; whether the young men saw him as weaker than they’d ever allow themselves to be, a man without much of a future, a father figure who needed, basically, to step aside so that the youth and promise they held could stride ahead and take over the world.
Begin again, he says today, even before the model has stepped onto the platform.
It’s not just a beginning every time you see a new model, he continues, but every time you face a fresh page. It’s that necessary leap into the unknown. And even though you know you’re compressing the infinite possibilities that exist just before the first line is made, you still have to make a commitment. It’s a direction that can be changed even when it declares itself to be irrevocable.
They look at him, at least a handful of them still willing to hang on his every word. There are several, he knows, who stopped listening weeks ago. They draw and fail and draw the same thing all over again. They’re like dogs with bones, stubborn and single-minded.
It’s their loss, he thinks, but never mind. They’ll end up where they started, with or without me. If I’d really wanted to be one of those eternally patient fathers I would have stayed with Andrea and raised the child where I could have some say. Never mind.
Still holding up Doctor Memento’s left hand to point it at them, he looks at nothing for a few silent moments, feeling a low hum of expectation and anxiety in the air. Maybe a few of them really are afraid of him, as if he is the enemy, not the work itself.
The day he modeled for the clas...
Begin anywhere, Danzig says. The shoulder, the rib cage, the thigh, the ankle. It won’t be an accident, even if it feels that way right now.
He stands in his classroom at the Art Institute, the students arranged on chairs and stools in a rough circle with their sketchpads and charcoal, all sixteen of them waiting for the model to take the first pose on her platform.
Find a place where your line wants to take a journey, he says. Some curve in any direction, a place where skin meets light, meets shadow. Let your hand tell you. Begin there.
It’s almost the last class of the semester, and he is deliberately talking about beginnings, not endings. He keeps promising himself he is never coming back, but he keeps coming back. For the third year in a row, he has made a vow not to return in the fall, but he’s finding it hard to take his own word seriously. Even when he is shouting at his students, feverish to convince them to care more, he feels his own intensity in doubt, wonders how much he still cares himself. He used to relish the moments when they jumped at the sound of his voice, but now he is no longer sure that anyone even flinches. Their anonymous, hopeful faces may not be enough to save him.
On the worst days, he feels that he must be getting old and used up. The youngest students who pass him in the hallways barely seem to acknowledge he is alive. To them he might as well have one foot in the grave.
But wait. At fifty-eight he can still attract plenty of attention when he wants to. It’s just a few of the women, girls really, who infuriate him with their disinterest.
He stands beside his faithful skeleton, the one that dangles like a marionette on its wooden stand, its bleached bones as familiar to him as an old friend. This is the invaluable prop he calls Doctor Memento, for memento mori, though Danzig is sure most of the students imagine he must be referring only to his own death and not theirs; they’re so young they are still convinced of their immortality.
He is not allowed to touch the models; that’s one of the rules of the Models Guild. And so instead Danzig will rest a hand on Doctor Memento’s shoulder blade, tap a fingertip on his collarbone. Today, he casually holds the good Doctor’s left hand as a form of mild entertainment or even consolation. Later, he will gesticulate with its digits for emphasis, always reminding the students to keep track of the bones.
Look closely, he tells the students. Deeper. This is the predictable architecture of the body. This is how you pay attention to the truth.
Twenty fresh faces arrive in his class each semester, young men and women with barely tolerable moods and attitudes, startling shades of dyed hair and ubiquitous piercings. Fifteen weeks ago there were twenty of them, and now there are sixteen. Though he used to be able to predict with surprising accuracy which of them would leave, this semester there are more stubborn ones than he had counted on, furiously scratching at their sketchpads.
It takes a few weeks or sometimes just a few hours before he knows whether or not anyone in the room has talent. In the first few meetings they are blurry and indistinguishable to him. Now, he sees that several are frowning or grimacing, already prepared to be dissatisfied with the first gestures on the page, already wanting to tear sheets away and throw them aside.
He admits with a private sigh that there is not a single student who engages him right now. For a long time, the opposite happened, and a student would get under his skin by being infuriatingly incompetent. There was one girl last year whose drawings were always filled with oversized, unmatched hands, lopsided mouths, heads shaped like eggs or apples, eyes too high or too low.
You’re just not looking, he had growled at her. Do you mean to tell me these hands belong to the same person? You’re not even trying.
He knew she probably hated him, his icicle heart, his mouth twisting and cruel. She thought he was a mean bastard, and she was right. He was. She left the class and never came back.
They seem younger than ever, these students, almost another species. He swears to himself he was never that young, never that naively arrogant. On certain days there might be one or two who remind him of those first Americans he met, all those years ago. The Occupiers, his father had called them. Soldiers. But he has mostly forgotten.
Begin again, he says.
Some young woman with peroxide hair about an inch long and a silver stud through her tongue (she is yawning, even now) seems to be glaring at him. More likely she is angry at the world, but Danzig takes it personally, so he is angry at her too. In the past he would have managed to seduce her after the first or second week of the semester, just to wipe the glare off her face. But this is what outrages him as much as anything: she doesn’t seem to register him in any way as a sexual being. She turns her back almost every time he passes near her.
He might have reassured himself with the certainty that she doesn’t like men at all, but in fact he’s seen her more than once with her pierced tongue in the mouth of a leather- encased, acne-scarred boyfriend, who drops her off and picks her up on his motorcycle.
So it’s just Danzig who doesn’t appeal to her. All that sexual heat and none of it for him.
He tells himself he doesn’t mind, not about her or about any of the rest of them. He has made no promises and told no lies. And he is about to forget each one of their names.
Today’s model is getting undressed behind a folding screen. So far he can only see the back of her head, noting very dark brown hair, cut in a kind of thick bob above her jawline, windblown and messy. There have been so many models—easily hundreds over the years, possibly as many as a thousand—so many whose names he cannot remember and probably never knew.
Just last week his model hadn’t shown up at all, and Danzig had posed for the class himself, stripped down to his jeans and bare feet, determined not to squander anyone’s time including his own. He is still vain enough to know that his muscle tone is reasonable, his back and shoulders powerful enough to be compelling anatomically.
The students could work with a piece of clothing for once; it wouldn’t kill them, he said. And here was a chance to practice contours half hidden under fabric, folds and creases and what they used to call drapery in the days when nude models were rare and for men only.
He used a long stick kept on hand for prying open and closing the high casement windows of the room. He held it like a staff of Moses, aimed it like a javelin, used it to prop his arms like a weary shepherd. He imagined himself through their eyes: his blond hair going gray at the temples and on his exposed chest, his charcoal-stained fingers. Rocking almost imperceptibly on the balls of his feet, he reminded himself to bend his knees, all of this giving him a renewed appreciation for the balanced stillness of his models.
All of the students seemed to work especially seriously that day, a little shy of him at first and then with increasing eagerness, obviously hopeful in the face of his silence that this might be a once-only chance to work without his correcting hand hovering nearby. For now Danzig’s hands were elsewhere, held in a foreign gesture that had nothing to do with their own hands, except that it had everything to do with getting his hands to look as real and as still as the ones they saw when they looked up from their easels.
There.
He was there for them to study all they wanted, a body twice their age at least, maybe three times, and suddenly a figure in space with a look that might have surprised them had any of them been curious enough to decipher it carefully. He felt vulnerable, subject to a persistent gaze that made him worry about what they thought of him, whether the young women saw him as old and unattractive, past his prime; whether the young men saw him as weaker than they’d ever allow themselves to be, a man without much of a future, a father figure who needed, basically, to step aside so that the youth and promise they held could stride ahead and take over the world.
Begin again, he says today, even before the model has stepped onto the platform.
It’s not just a beginning every time you see a new model, he continues, but every time you face a fresh page. It’s that necessary leap into the unknown. And even though you know you’re compressing the infinite possibilities that exist just before the first line is made, you still have to make a commitment. It’s a direction that can be changed even when it declares itself to be irrevocable.
They look at him, at least a handful of them still willing to hang on his every word. There are several, he knows, who stopped listening weeks ago. They draw and fail and draw the same thing all over again. They’re like dogs with bones, stubborn and single-minded.
It’s their loss, he thinks, but never mind. They’ll end up where they started, with or without me. If I’d really wanted to be one of those eternally patient fathers I would have stayed with Andrea and raised the child where I could have some say. Never mind.
Still holding up Doctor Memento’s left hand to point it at them, he looks at nothing for a few silent moments, feeling a low hum of expectation and anxiety in the air. Maybe a few of them really are afraid of him, as if he is the enemy, not the work itself.
The day he modeled for the clas...
