The Illuminated Soul
By Aryeh Lev Stollman
Riverhead, $24.95
ISBN 1573222011

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Memories of an illusive visitor

"In the end, neither knowledge nor beauty makes a person good." This is one of the many unforgettable things uttered by the character Eva Higashi, who haunts every page of Aryeh Lev Stollman's second novel. The word "haunts" is all the more apt when Eva is an actual, physical presence in the room: her beauty is so unlikely, her knowledge so astonishingly rich, that she feels to the others in the book -- and to the reader -- more like a ghost or an angel than a real woman.

Stollman tells the story through the voice of Joseph, the son of the Jewish widow who gives Eva room and board when she arrives mysteriously in Windsor, Ontario, soon after World War II. In her short time there, Eva changes forever the lives of Joseph, his mother and his little brother Asa. Through the boy's wondering ears and eyes, we listen to Eva's magical tales and watch her every movement. Her old-world grace (she is a refugee from Prague, thereafter the wartime bride of a Japanese scientist) and her vast stores of luminous information (she is the daughter of a great Jewish scholar) come as so many shocks to this provincial Canadian family.

"In the end, neither knowledge nor beauty makes a person good." Eva's wise remark leaves open the disconcerting riddle of whether she herself, with all her beauty and knowledge, is a good person. At the heart of the puzzle lies a priceless illuminated Hebrew book, The Augsburg Miscellany, which Eva rescued from her father's collection in Prague. It is an object even more gorgeous and mysterious than Eva herself, and the combination of her own beauty and the book's fathomless perfection is almost too much for Joseph to bear.

We know the terrible weight of these experiences on Joseph because he narrates them from the haunted perspective of 50 years later. Like Stollman himself, Joseph has made a distinguished career in neurology. But his brief encounter with Eva Higashi has permanently affected his nervous system and has illuminated his soul with a light that erases the distance between past and present, beauty and unease, good intention and woeful consequence.

Michael Alec Rose teaches at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music.