![]() ![]() ![]() It is there at the Maple Court that Sophie ultimately tells Stingo about working (somewhat reluctantly) as part of the Polish resistance during World War II and then getting deported to a Nazi death camp. “The weather was generally fine that summer,” writes Styron, “but sometimes the evenings got hot and steamy, and when this happened Nathan and Sophie and I often went around the corner on Church Avenue to an air-conditioned ‘cocktail lounge’ called the Maple Court.” Sophie is engaged in a passionate sexual affair with Nathan, one of the other residents, and before long, Stingo gets roped into an exciting costume-wearing, picnic-having tricycle friendship with the couple. There are six other residents of Yetta’s boarding house - five Jews and a blonde Catholic Polish Holocaust survivor named Sophie. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose, I say, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s hypocrisy.” ![]() Understand, I’m running no brothel, but you wanna have a girl in your room once in a while, have a girl in your room…And the same thing goes for the young ladies in my house, if they want to entertain a boyfriend now and then. Like what I mean is, this place is for grownups. End of the rules! Everything else is Yetta’s Liberty Hall. Rule three: positively no smoking in bed, you get caught smoking in bed-out…Rule number four: full week’s payment due every Friday. Rule number two: you gotta turn off all the lights when you leave the room, I got no need to pay extra to Con Edison. ‘Rule number one: no playing the radio after eleven o’clock. ‘What I like to see is my tenants enjoy life…Not that I don’t gotta have rules.’ She lifted the pudgy nub of a forefinger and began to tick them off. ‘I call this Yetta’s Liberty Hall,’ she said, every now and then giving me a nudge. Zimmerman’s overview of her establishment, which she expounded as she led me around the premises. Becoming Yetta has long been my personal dream, so please forgive me for quoting the description of her Pink Palace at length: Before long he becomes disillusioned, quits, and moves from Manhattan to a boarding house in Flatbush run by a Jewish woman named Yetta Zimmerman that is painted entirely pink (Yetta’s ex-husband got a good deal on some pink army surplus paint). We follow Stingo through his days at a thankless publishing job where he has been tasked with writing a detailed summary of every unsolicited manuscript that comes across the desk of the second-rate publisher where he is employed. “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan,” reads the book’s opening line, “so I had to move to Brooklyn.” There is something about summer, it seems, that makes us want to confess. The central character of Sophie’s Choice is actually a 22-year-old man-boy from Virginia named Stingo who is “struggling to become some kind of writer.” The novel concerns “that summer” of 1947, told in an ominous first person retrospective point of view that promises essential self-revelation, a la Plath’s The Bell Jar or Julie Buntin’s Marlena (both of which, perhaps not coincidentally, also take place largely in summer). ![]() But it may surprise you to know that less than a third of the book’s hefty 562 pages concerns the Holocaust, and we don’t arrive at the death camps until page 235. Yes, the novel’s title has become a kind of catchphrase, culturally synonymous with an impossible choice between two terrible outcomes - and also with Jewish genocide. ![]()
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