SOURCE: "25-Year Journey to Find Otto's 'Voice'," in The New York Times, July 10, 1994, sec. 13, p. 14.

[In the following article, Cummings discusses Isler's background and his writing of The Prince of West End Avenue.]

In Alan Isler's first novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, it is the arrival of the luscious Mandy Dattner at the Emma Lazarus retirement home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that throws Otto Korner into a state of emotional turmoil and prompts him to start keeping a journal.

A physical therapist from Cleveland, the "unbearably beautiful" Ms. Dattner, is a dead ringer for the passion of Otto's youth, Magda Damrosch, the toast of Zurich's Cafe Voltaire in 1916 and the darling of the Dadaists, who made it their headquarters.

Ms. Dattner's appearance at the home for the aged, where Otto is a resident some 60 years later, sets off for him a flood of long-repressed memories. Otto is an Auschwitz survivor, and his flashbacks provide a counterpoint to his account of the comic opera that is life at the Emma Lazarus.

Mr. Isler's inspiration for writing the novel ostensibly written by Otto in the form of a journal was a much slower process. The seed for the idea was planted 25 years ago, the writer said in a telephone interview.

A professor of English literature at Queens College who usually divides his time between New York and Sag Harbor, Mr. Isler is spending most of a leave in his native London.

Twenty-five years ago Mr. Isler read a newspaper article about a home for the aged in Brooklyn whose residents were preparing a production of Macbeth. "They had gotten the essence of the play," he said, "but had otherwise rewritten it."

Mr. Isler said he felt that "something had to be done with the idea," but he was writing for scholarly journals and the "voice" that ultimately dictated the book, Otto's voice, was not nearly as insistent as it became later.

Until there was a voice there was no story, Mr. Isler said. But once the voice grew distinct and persistent, he said, the story, which had been in gestation for more than 20 years, spilled out in "no more than 15 months."

For a time, Mr. Isler recalled, Otto Korner seemed to whisper in his ear every night. "It was almost as if I woke the next day and it was there in my head, just waiting to be transcribed," he said. "It was a marvelous experience, very exciting, the happiest time of my life."

In the novel it is Hamlet that the denizens of the Emma Lazarus are rehearsing, squabbling over and tampering with as Otto, who has been cast as the Ghost, begins his journal.

The bonds of old age and Judaism notwithstanding—the "open-door policy" at the home is interpreted to mean that "all Jews are welcome"—the residents are anything but homogeneous. They feud over sexual rivalries, jockey for position and power on stage and off, nurse oversize egos and cultivate petty resentments.

Tosca Davidowicz, orthodox and exquisitely sensitive to anything that might make her appear otherwise, is prepared to go to the mats over Shakespeare's reference to a Christian burial for Ophelia. Unless the offending line is eliminated and replaced with, "Is she to be buried in Mineola?" La Davidowicz, as Otto invariably refers to her, will not play the part.

An erstwhile poet and intellectual, Otto is horrified at the idea of altering Shakespeare. His closest friend, Benno Hamburger, is mutinous. The "Red Dwarf," resident anarchist and trouble maker, is gleeful. "That's it," he says. "Don't knuckle under to the fascists."

The crisis is another in an apparently endless series of contretemps that threatens to delay the production permanently. Death, the ultimate contretemps and an impatient presence at the Emma Lazarus, has already claimed Hamlet's original director, who is buried in Mineola and could strike again at any moment.

Mr. Isler said he chose Mineola as the permanent resting place for his characters, and the favored substitute for Shakespeare's offending reference, not for any logical reason but because he liked the sound of the name. "I have no idea if there is a cemetery there," he said. "But I do know that Long Island is replete with them."

His characters, by contrast, were created from more personal material. With roots in the emigre culture of New York and England, they are based, albeit rather broadly at times, on real people whom the writer has known.

"They are a composite of many, many people whom I met over the years," Mr. Isler said, "people who could claim backgrounds similar to Otto and Benno, particularly the German-Austrian émigrés."

This was the circle in which his parents and their friends moved in London in Mr. Isler's earliest childhood, he said, "people who managed to flee Austria in 1938."

Later, in the 50's, after Mr. Isler had left England to come here at the age of 18, he found an émigré community molded by the same forces on the Upper West Side. He remembers sitting as a young guest at dinner tables "awed by their cynical worldliness and cultural savoir-faire, their casual references to the genuine articles and the big names, many of whom they actually knew."

Drawn into the past by the shock of seeing Magda in the person of Mandy, Otto moves back and forth in his journal between past and present. Painful memories surface—of his failure as a poet, of cruelties born of bitterness and frustration and inflicted on people he loved, of a terrible arrogance and pride that had the most terrible consequences for his family.

He gives himself little quarter and can find no "grand purpose" in the seemingly random, often ugly events of his life. What has kept the blackness from engulfing him has been his ability to live in the moment. "For the last 30 years I have existed in the present," he writes, "disposing of my life a day at a time."

The shifting focus from tragic past to comic present also keeps blackness from engulfing Mr. Isler's readers. The examined life goes on, after all.

At the Emma Lazarus, despite the byzantine plotting and scheming, life is filled with the unexpected and fraught with ambiguities. It does not surprise him, Mr. Isler said, that the word "gentle" has appeared in early reviews of his book.

True, he has spared his characters few of old age's unbecoming infirmities, but he also said he believed that he had created in them "a much livelier group of people than you would actually find in such a place."

"This is the world in which we live," Mr. Isler said. "There are certain absolute truths."

Given those unavoidable truths, what he admires most, he said, is a certain combination of awareness with an appreciation for the uncertainties that finds expression in amusement and laughter.

Certainly Otto, with his unvarnished view of his own behavior and unsentimental attitude toward the foolishness of his friends, possesses it. Nor does it seem likely that Otto will ever rid himself of a certain deep-rooted ambivalence that colors his outlook, try as he might. And in that, Mr. Isler said, he resembles his creator.

"There is a lot of Korner in me," he said. "Like him, I love the old verities. On the other hand I also admire the youthful Dadaists and their impudent disturbing of the status quo."

Not surprisingly, the voice that waited so long before it was ready is now refusing to be silenced. The book, which found a publisher "serendipitously" though East End connections who recommended to Bridge Works in Bridgehampton, has been completed for a couple of years now, Mr. Isler said.

And yet, he added: "The voice is still very much alive in me. I have to fight against it, because I don't want it in my next work of fiction."

The new book, now in "the revisions stage," according to Mr. Isler, is something that he prefers not to talk about at the moment, except to say, "It grows more obviously out of my experience than the first one."…