Title: Past Imperfect
Author: Joshua Cohen
Publisher: Kasva Press
ISBN: 978-1-948403-35-1
Pages: 312
Genre: Mystery
Reviewed by: David Allen

Read Book Review

Above and behind the byzantine plot and the coterie of alternately fiendish and adorable Jewish players – with names like Mendel Kahn, Robert F. Oppenheimer, Yitzak Fried – is a novelistic tour de force. What looks to be a crime novel is in fact much more than that. Past Imperfect is an ingeniously plotted bon-bon that is at once a spellbinder, a perfect vacation read, and a daunting portrait of dubious characters living in a very dubious time.

Without giving too much away: Benjamin Gold is an attorney, who, like many of the characters and situations in this book, is profoundly ambivalent. Gold is ambivalent about his future, his love life, his career. So ambivalent that he occasionally changes things up by gumshoeing – he plays detective.

Gold’s Rabbi, also a close friend, needs help fast. One of his congregants has been identified as an alleged Nazi collaborator, a kapo. Gold dons his shamus hat, and the real fun begins.Mendel Kahn, the suspected bad guy, turns out to be a gift that keeps on giving: not only may he be a Nazi collaborator, but here, in 1950s Cleveland, Ohio, he is a slumlord. He has swapped identities in the service of conning the world and starting a new life. Additional evidence implicates Kahn as a cold-blooded murderer and thief as well.

The barebones outline supplied here does little justice to the subtle characterizations and plot twists that ensue. Cohen writes superbly, in the same arch manner as Dashiell Hammett. The dialogue – aided and abetted by the judicious but always hilarious use of detective patois, transplanted to a mid-twentieth century predominately Jewish context. Philip Marlowe would have been right at home pounding these dark precincts with Gold.

This remarkable book arises from an equally remarkable tradition. Past Imperfect retains loving traces of those who have been here, sensibility-wise, before: Harry Kemelman’s Saturday the Rabbi Slept Late is one of this book’s glorious antecedents.

Mendel Kahn, the ostensible bad guy here, is a fractal, a compressed and over-determined avatar of everyone’s worst idea of the Jew: a Nosferatu, a money-hungry wolf that will stop at nothing to achieve wealth, material success, power. Mendel Kahn the slumlord pig could also be Harvey Weinstein. In this portrayal – and in the ultimately ambivalent characterizations of the main characters (Gold, for example, spent months in a psychiatric hospital; he is convinced that during his concentration camp days, he inadvertently poisoned another inmate) – the author makes the strongest case possible for a morally dubious universe. Things are complicated. Simple explanations don’t always suit.

With Gold as witness, we are hovering dangerously near The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a manifesto widely circulated by anti-Semites during the Nazi incursions. Cohen’s Benjamin Gold rescues the situation despite himself. Like many Jews (this is yet another generalization, another label, yet here it seems to apply) Cohen’s Benjamin Gold finds himself thrust into a situation where ‘saving the world’ seems the only rational course.

The real fun of this book is weighing these moral uncertainties and alternatives as one reads, voraciously, what is also a thrilling page turner.  I, along with all readers, will be most eager to see Joshua Cohen’s next book as well.