CLARA MONDSCHEIN'S MELANCHOLIA

Two generations of Holocaust survivors tell their grim, affecting tales in alternating chapters in this somber, slow-going first novel by short story author Raeff. The more interesting is the first person account of 85-year-old matriarch Ruth Mondschein, as told to a dying young man in the Christopher Street AIDS Hospice, to which Ruth treks most days from her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ruth hails from an upper-middle-class Jewish household in Vienna, where at a young age she falls into a disastrous affair with a wealthy gentile, then a stable marriage to the gay doctor who treats her father. The couple are eventually taken from a hospital where they are working in the Austrian Alps and deported to a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia (called, fictitiously, Pribor), where Ruth's baby, Clara, is miraculously and safely delivered. Alternately, teenaged Deborah Gelb tells of growing up in Englewood, N.J., around a mother (Clara) who suffers severe fits of debilitating depression, probably stemming from her traumatic camp birth. Deborah's voice is chatty and naïve, and her narrative is full of schoolgirl details. She tries to please her mother, but tends to awaken painful memories instead, as when mother and daughter flirt with the same lesbian painter, Marisol, on a trip to Madrid. In the end, Clara's so-called melancholia, depicted second-hand, remains incomprehensible to the family and to the reader. Ruth's tale, in contrast, is harrowing, and her voice luminously straightforward. Although its outcome is known from the start—allowing for little suspense—the novel is rich in detail and insight. (Sept.)