Bernice Rubens’s The Elected Member (1969)
The madness of families
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The scabs and scars were visible enough, what lay behind them, was the only privacy a man could hold on to.1
The intriguing The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens. It’s about one East End Jewish family, and all (unhappy) families: about lies, emotional blackmail and self-interest; about the way certain family members are ‘elected’, or scapegoated, to play particular roles and carry particular burdens; about children stunted by parents; about the damage of addiction, and the blurred lines between madness and genius.
The only other Rubens I’ve read is Madame Sousatzka (1962), which is a very odd novel, disconcertingly casual about how monstrous adults can be to children, though penetrating on exile, artistic and geographic – and ultimately, in one very poignant sequence, truthful on how unintentionally cruel children can be to adults.
(I see Madame Sousatzka as part of a tradition of twentieth-century novels with larger-than-life pedagogues who appear inspirational to children but are in fact self-interested and malign, including Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s.)
The Elected Member is just as odd, and would be depressing if it weren’t such a terrific black comedy. Beryl Bainbridge called Rubens’s plotting ‘immaculate’, and it really is: secret leading to secret, tragedy to tragedy (apparently, Rubens didn’t plan things in advance before she wrote, so ‘never knew from one page to another where the story was leading’).2
The novel’s twists are credible because Rubens knows so much about human nature, and about the power of secrets in the hands of troubled and clever people.
And her characterisations are so strong. I particularly loved the guilt-ridden father figure, Rabbi Zweck, and the colours of his London English as refracted through the prism of his Yiddish/Hebraic grammar – all the gorgeous appositions and inversions.
They talked. Abraham’s town, his family, their problems. It was a familiar story. They were all the same, the städtels in the East, and now in the West too, bred from the same root. The shopkeeper’s Yiddish was fluent, but it was punctuated by the occasional English word, which, by the gist of the general meaning, Abraham Zweck was able to understand. In his first years in England, this was the way he was to pick up the language, collecting all these odd English throw-outs, for which the speakers knew no Yiddish equivalent. Words like wardrobe, electric fire, conservative. Hundreds of single words that together gave Abraham Zweck a great vocabulary but little English. (p. 51)
Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969; repr. London: Abacus, 2013), p. 178.
Beryl Bainbridge, intro. to Rubens, When I Grow Up (London: Little, Brown, 2005; repr. London: Abacus, 2006), p. vii.