Rainbow Rosenbloom, the protagonist of Ellen Galford's new novel "The Dyke and the Dybbuk," is the quintessential thirty-something London dyke. She's a feminist and a committed socialist, has legally changed her name from Rosalind to Rainbow, and decorates her flat with "posters of dead lesbian poets and even deader Minoan goddesses."
She's also a member of a quintessentially Jewish family, dominated by five aunts who pepper their speech with Yiddish and squabble constantly over who makes the best lokshen kugel and carrot tzimmes. Rainbow herself -- who decamps to her favorite Chinese restaurant after Passover to eat a decidedly non-kosher snack of prawns, pork spare ribs, and braised lobster -- believes that she has left this Jewish world far behind. But Galford deftly pins Rainbow to her Jewish heritage by perching a dybbuk -- a Jewish demon who takes possession of unlucky mortals -- on Rainbow's shoulder.
The dybbuk -- a female named Kokos -- comes to Rainbow via 18th century Poland and through a curse incurred by Gittel, Rainbow's ancestress nine generations back. With Gittel, Kokos behaved in the standard ways expected of a dybbuk -- she spoke gibberish through Gittel's mouth in a horrid raven's croak, slipped into Gittel's person and stared wildly out of her eyes, and caused beds, heavy tables, and the fire from the hearth to fling themselves across the room. But much to her surprise, Kokos finds that she likes and is even a bit smitten with Gittel-plus-nine, so that her demonic tormentings become more like acts of mischievous teasing. She makes the normally tone-deaf Rainbow, who was a Hebrew school dropout, sing a traditional Passover song in pitch-perfect Aramaic, and she transforms the text of one of Rainbow's film reviews into a Hebrew inscription that glows emerald, like the words written on the wall at Belshazzar's feast.
Kokos' most flippant piece of torture, however, comes in the area of match-making, as she causes Rainbow to develop a full-blown crush on Riva, a member of the ultra-orthodox Limnititzker clan. They are "as much alike as a coral snake and a canary," for while Rainbow wears a leather jacket and jeans, Riva favors full skirts, black stockings and a head scarf, and she counters Rainbow's passions for Chinese food with meals that are "black-belt kosher." Kokos sums it up neatly: "Our new acquaintance is four to five years younger than Rainbow, and two to three centuries older."
As the above quote suggests, Kokos is the narrator of the novel. I wondered about this as I read, since it is Rainbow whose biography seems so similar to author Galford's. Like Rainbow, Galford is Jewish and comes from a family filled with strong eastern European matriarchs. Although now living in Edinburgh, Scotland, Galford did, like Rainbow, live in London for many years, and Galford also shares with Rainbow the profession of critic and reviewer. But once I met Galford, I understood immediately why she chose to speak in the voice of the dybbuk. Galford's eyes dance with the same mischief that infuses Kokos, and Galford's authorial powers match Kokos' supernatural talents as she maneuvers her readers through the improbable complexities of Rainbow's love affair and through the intricate interweavings of the past as it fuses with the present. Much as Judith Katz does in her novel "Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound," Galford belies the stereotype of the humorless lesbian by providing a hilarious and highly recommended send-up of two centuries worth of Jewish dyke life.
