The Bridesman

July 19, 2010
Schmitt's mostly pleasant collection of five stories (after The Most Beautiful Book in the World) observes uncommon relationships, from the intense to the fleeting, beginning with "The Dreamer from Ostend," in which the narrator, recovering from a breakup, lodges with the aging, wheelchair-bound Emma Van A. At first, the narrator believes Emma is trapped in her book-filled home and has lived a largely vicarious life—until Emma reveals an amazing, if possibly untrue, secret. In "Getting Better," Stéphanie, a young Parisian nurse, is captivated by a middle-aged patient after he pays her an unexpected compliment. The narrator of the title story notices an elderly woman who comes to the Zurich train station every day clutching a bouquet of flowers, as if waiting for someone. After speculating with his co-workers over her situation, Eric realizes they are imposing their own life stories onto the woman. Each of these stories hinges on human connection and does the required work of illuminating their protagonist's lives, though the uniformity in aesthetic—quiet, deliberate, mannered—sometimes feels uninspired.

October 16, 2023
A Los Angeles–based ghostwriter revisits his past in Israel in the elegant if uneventful latest from Liebrecht (Apples from the Desert). As a nine-year-old boy, Micha is the only member of his family to befriend Adella, 18, the arranged bride for his Uncle Moshe. The kindly Moshe is handsome but a bit of a nebbish, and the owlish, bespectacled young woman was far from the family’s first choice. To Micha’s surprise, Adella selects him to be her bridesman. He accepts, and his mother is outraged when she learns Adella tried on her wedding dress in front of him. Two years later, Micha moves to Los Angeles with his mother to join his father. In the second part, set 24 years after Micha left Israel, Adella invites Micha back. The reason isn’t clear, but he assumes it’s because she knows he’s a writer and wants him to help tell her life story. Micha’s bubble is burst, though, after Adella recounts her experiences since he left the country as well as her version of the time they spent together. With subtlety and grace, Liebrecht depicts how his characters fashion the narratives of their lives out of experiences they don’t understand. This wisp of a story somehow leaves readers with plenty to chew on.

October 15, 2023
An Israeli expatriate in Los Angeles reconnects with his aunt-by-marriage and returns to Israel, where secrets from the past resurface. In a strong translation by Kahn-Hoffmann, Liebrecht portrays the connection between a young Micha and Adella, whom he meets for the first time when he's 9 years old and she's 18 and engaged to his favorite uncle. Micha comes from a big, opinionated Iranian Jewish family that looks down on Adella but he befriends her, and when the wedding plans are made, he is chosen to be her bridesman. In fluid prose, Liebrecht describes how Micha gets to know Adella, becomes fascinated with her, and participates in her wedding. As a young teenager, he relocates to Los Angeles with his mother, and then the chronology jumps ahead; Micha is an adult, working as a ghostwriter in Los Angeles, and Adella has reached out after many years to ask him to come to Israel for an unknown reason. Does she want him to ghostwrite her memoir? And who is this new woman? Adella has become Adel, and there is no trace of the timid, marginalized girl he remembers from his childhood. What ensues is a revelation of long-hidden secrets. Micha is in the business of ghostwriting, of crafting narratives from what he is told is true. But Adel's revelations make Micha revise his own memories of her and of his childhood, thus reminding readers to reexamine the stories we tell. The prose is clean and smooth, and Micha's narration transitions seamlessly from the voice of a young boy to the voice of an adult. Quietly intelligent and carefully written and translated, the novel encourages us to consider the relationship between truth and stories. Unfortunately, the narrative drags a little, and the story is not very compelling until its final shocking twist--which almost, but not quite, makes the rest worthwhile. This slim novel invites us to question the narratives we know and has a rewarding payoff, but is slow-moving.

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November 1, 2023
Through meticulous characterization and astute reflections on writing itself, The Bridesman explores how others take hold of our stories, breathing awareness into hidden memories. Divided into two parts, the novel first recounts the narrator's childhood observations of his family's controlling hand, for better or worse, in his uncle's marriage to the young, orphaned Adella. The narrator's connection to stories is then destabilized when he returns to Israel from America decades later as a professional ghostwriter to reconnect with Adella, now a woman of status wishing to share her story of resilience--one with an unspeakable and terrifying secret. Liebrecht's contrasting of the old and new Adella is at once a testament to the human capacity for transformation and an investigation into the agency of writers. Readers looking for a story that shamelessly crosses boundaries, including sexual assault, while collapsing dichotomies--overlapping the public with the private and the powerless with the powerful--may be entranced by the complexities of Israeli author Leibrecht's characters and the precision of her writing.

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