By
– January 5, 2012
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. Stuffed with Talmudic references, Jewish traditions, and Hasidic characters, Simpson tells a modernized tale of Esther [Rosenbaum], a seven-foot-tall, fifteen-yearold girl who, like her namesake, grows into a woman of worth and “flourishes like a flower growing in a swamp.”
Set in pre-war Berlin, from 1915 to 1946, this is a story of exile; at the same time, it is a social commentary in which Simpson blends the conflicts between the secular and non-secular with the struggles of the Jewish people and the decadence and debauchery of the famous. Layered within are tales of personal struggles in an unyielding society at the end of one war and on the brink of another. With all that, it is also the story of Esther, an orphaned girl who believes that “everyone falls away from [her] eventually, like dead flower heads,” an ambitious girl who “desperately want[s] to walk in this world,” and a girl who is given to falling in love with unattainable men who represent father figures. But, it is Esther’s culinary talents that bring her fame, and before long she is recognized as the most prominent chef in one of Berlin’s finest restaurants. Foods, and the recipes she creates, are her voice, her vehicle to feed “imaginations as greedy as hollow stomachs. [She] is this story and nothing more.”
Malvina D. Engelberg, an independent scholar, has taught composition and literature at the university level for the past fifteen years. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Miami.
