Kolpan's "Magic Words" is a novel, Wild West take on American Jewish life

Magic Words The Tale of a Jewish Boy-Interpreter, the World's Most Estimable Magician, a Murderous Harlot, and America's Greatest Indian Chief By Gerald Kolpan Pegasus. 403 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Bill Kent

In 1909, Julius Meyer, a Prussian-born retailer of American Indian crafts, a former spokesman for several tribes, and an important member of the Jewish community in Omaha, Neb., was found dead in the city's Hanscom Park, with one bullet in his skull and another in his chest.

Though a gun was never found and Meyer, who never married, left no note, the coroner called the death a suicide. That an observant Jew, to whom suicide is a sin, could shoot himself twice is mysterious enough, but the question at the heart of Philadelphia writer Gerald Kolpan's new Wild West novel is even more intriguing, and has to do with one of the most famous court cases in American history.

That case occurred in 1879, when Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe sued the U.S. government for unlawful imprisonment. The government's position was that the chief was not a "person," and therefore, the Constitution's requirement of a writ of habeas corpus did not apply.

In one of many superb scenes in his novel, Kolpan quotes the chief's speech to the jury, told through an intepreter: "This hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you, too, feel pain. The blood that flows from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both."

The court found for the chief and Indians were deemed "persons" thereafter, able to use the U.S. legal system to seek redress of grievances.

If the chief's statement reminds you just a little bit of Shylock's "if you prick us, do we not bleed" speech in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, you might wonder if somebody Jewish had something to do with this. For Kolpan, that had to be Julius Meyer.

As he did in Etta: A Novel, Kolpan uses real and imagined historical personalities to offer an alternately wry and rueful version of the American West. While Etta recast Butch Cassidy's paramour as a Philadelphia-born feminist heroine toughing it out with the bad boys of the Wild Bunch, Magic Words is a complicated, breathlessly plotted fictional take on the American Jewish experience unlike anything we've seen from Philip Roth, Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow, or Bernard Malamud.

While much of the book's action occurs in the West, we also get backstage glimpses in London, New York, and Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, where a caustic rivalry develops between Compars and Alexander Herrmann, two brothers who were the most celebrated magicians of the 19th century and crafted many of the traditions and illusions of stage magic that persist to this day. Exactly which Herrmann is "the world's most estimable" is open to argument but, as Kolpan describes them, performing was the brothers' way of gaining fame, wealth, sex, and entry into the highest levels of the mostly anti-Semitic social classes of Europe and America.

The novel's most endearing moments belong to Julius, the "Jewish boy interpreter" whose talent for learning languages gives him the ability to sympathize with American Indians as dignified, sophisticated tribal people who, like Jews, were being persecuted and threatened with genocidal extinction. Such sympathy helps save his life when he is captured by the Ponca tribe. Like Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and Mattie Ross in Charles Portis' True Grit, Julius arrives in the Wild West as an innocent who is still fully formed: He knows what he's made of and won't give up when more corruptible types urge him to go along to get along.

Not only is Julius adopted into the tribe but his facility with languages makes him the mouthpiece for Chief Standing Bear, "America's greatest Indian chief" of the subtitle. We can argue whether, among so many tribal chiefs, Standing Bear is the greatest, but Kolpan portrays him with such dignity, reverence, and humility that he might as well be.

About that harlot: Julius finds her literally working her fingers to the bone as one of the Poncas' tribal slaves. A Ponca who had been kidnapped from the tribe as a child, Little Feather had spent most of her life in an Omaha bordello under the sobriquet of Lady Jane until she discovered that her pimp had cheated her out of her accumulated wages. Having burned down the bordello with her pimp inside, she is under the tribe's protection. Her fate as a slave may seem harsh, but Kolpan has Chief Standing Bear state that tribal sexual mores could be more fastidious, and less forgiving, than those of the white settlers. When Alexander Herrmann, who has split from his brother and taken his own magic act on the road, visits Omaha, Julius, who is Alexander's cousin, invites him to perform for the tribe. During that performance, Alexander notices that Lady Jane is just the right size to squirm into and out of a new illusion he is designing. She leaves with Alexander to be his scantily clad assistant, while Julius is forced to leave just before the Poncas depart on their "trail of tears" to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma.

Kolpan puts Julius at Chief Standing Bear's trial and, in the novel's best scene, helps the chief communicate to the courtroom, and the world, the universal dignity of all human beings.

The author is somewhat less successful with the brothers Herrmann, who, while outwardly civil, never stop scheming to outdo each other. Kolpan manuevers Julius Meyer backstage during a performance of a "bullet catch" illusion. How will our hero stop what could be a premature end to a brilliant career? And will his actions somehow lead to an unlikely explanation for his eventual death?

Far be it from me to reveal the many tricks up Kolpan's sleeve. To quote the great prestidigitator (and actor and director) Orson Welles: "What makes a good magician? He's the man who can get that rabbit out in time."

In Magic Words, Gerald Kolpan does precisely that.