MICHAEL GALVIS
Staff Writer
T Cooper’s “Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes” tells the tale of a Jewish family immigrating to the states during the Galveston Movement. The movement operated between 1907 and 1914. It diverted 10,000 Jewish immigrants fleeing Russia and eastern Europe from crowded East Coast cities and passed them through Texas.
The story begins in 1907 as Esther Lipshitz and her husband Hersh and their family arrive at Ellis Island. Esther, taking count of her children quickly, realizes that along the way, they have lost one of their sons.
The story unfolds with Esther becoming obsessed with finding her son. Even after years of failed attempts, her son remains missing. Yet, in her futile search, Esther becomes convinced that the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, is her lost son. obsession with Lindbergh becomes tumultuous and causes wild results that leaves long-standing effects on the Lipshitz family.
Then through an awkward transition from an emotional-packed ending in the early 1900s, author Cooper suddenly makes a leap into the modern day. The novel then concentrates on Cooper as he returns to his old home in Texas and explores his past. He gives his take on the family’s intense history and identifies to the reader what is fictional and what is non-fictional.
In these final 100 pages Cooper creates a comical atmosphere through a first-person persona much like that in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” Many of his comments are outlandish, uncalled and generate bitterness in the reader.
Nevertheless, Cooper has written a modern novel that creates an unfamiliar twist on Jewish heritage, sexual identity and white rappers.
The novel follows the Lipshitz family through painful realizations, frustrating assumptions and cheerful turnarounds in each Lipshitz’s lives. From mother of four, Esther Lipshitz, to her fast-growing children to future generations, Cooper weaves a novel with boundless themes veering from past times to the modern day.
It is a work that largely fails to manifest intense emotions except in Esther’s pathetic pursuit of her lost son. However, it avoids melodramatic scenes that are persistent in amateur writers. Cooper is anything but an amateur and it is apparent in his straight-forward, but detailed writing and complex plot twists. He also drops gentle hints about homosexuality. Such technique he does this in a way that urges curiosity from readers and creates an atmosphere of a history weaving further back than the novel. Such contextual evidence is mild but impressively written, even as Cooper draws onto the life of Esther’s gay son.
Cooper has also written “Some of the Parts” (Akashic Books, 2002) and was co-editor for an anthology of original stories entitled “A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing” (Akashic, 2006). He was awarded a 2007 Ledig House International Writers Residency, which is an art center that houses visual artists, writers, musicians and dancers. He has also twice been a fellow of The MacDowell Colony, a center for the arts much like the Ledig House.
Cooper was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He taught high school English in New Orleans before moving to New York City in 1996. Cooper earned an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from Columbia University in 2001 and has written for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.
In his work, Cooper travels immeasurable distances, from the Russian earth that bore the Lipshitz family to Ellis Island and New York to Texas and Oklahoma City.
Cooper has created a real page-turner with his suspense, dense characters and vivid detail. His writing is simple but effective. He has stirred what is known of his family’s past with a fictional world and created a magnificent blend of writing that is neither entirely fictional nor non-fictional. “Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes” is in a genre of its own.
For more information visit www.t-cooper.com.
04-23-2007
