DISCOVERIES

IN THE YUCATAN A Novel By Earl Shorris; W.W. Norton: 264 pp., $23.95 Testimony is a beautiful word. Capacious, it gives authority to the breadth of experience. It is big enough to enfold perception and fact, the politics of governments and individuals, the pain of bureaucrats and citizens, and it is big enough to call all that reality. Fiction, with its broad bays where wise men fish with wide nets, is a safe house for testimony. Earl Shorris uses fiction that way--an underground railroad for political testimony. “In the Yucatan” is the story of a Chicano lawyer from Los Angeles, John Mendoza, and a Maya union leader, Andres Chay, imprisoned together after a workers’ strike at a sisal factory in the Yucatan. These are two fine men, and Shorris makes them real very quickly: their humor, their fears, desires. Andres has his gods and rituals, his need to locate certain stars and orient himself in the cell. Mendoza, a giant of a man, clings to dignity, like a fighter who has played both the victim’s and the leader’s roles. Going to the bathroom, for example, in the same bucket he is supposed to drink from diminishes and humiliates him more than it does Andres. Mendoza begins a hunger strike, insisting on the release of the 21 workers from the sisal factory who were also imprisoned after striking (urged on by Mendoza) to maintain the mere 26 pesos a day the ex-governor-owner of the factory refused to pay them. Andres cares for him as best he can. The men joke about Mendoza’s hourly pay. Andres teaches Mendoza Mayan. A so-called journalist camps in a nearby cell and spies on the prisoners, but he is so far beneath them, he can barely understand their loyalties. They are both tortured and have to bribe the guard for herbal medicines. What is worth fighting for? What is worth living for? What are the basic human rights? What is the nature of power? There are answers to these questions in the testimony of these two men.

STRANGE FRUIT Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights By David Margolick; Running Press: 144 pp., $18.95

Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit,” the song about lynching in the South, in 1939 in a nightclub called Cafe Society, one of the only integrated nightclubs in New York. She was 24 and had just been discovered by record producer John Hammond. (Holiday died in 1959 at 44.) From 1889 to 1940, there were 3,833 lynchings in the United States, four-fifths of the victims black. The song, written by a white Jewish schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol, did not exist in the public consciousness until Holiday made it her own. David Margolick’s book is a brief testimony to the power of the song. Many of the quotes--from well-known figures like Ned Rorem and little-known jazz scholars and music critics--describe a reluctant Holiday, who took some time to embrace and then embody “Strange Fruit.” When she did, it became impossible to separate the two. There are many testimonies here from people whose lives were changed by hearing Holiday sing “Strange Fruit”: “It was a beautifully rendered thing,” cartoonist Al Hirschfeld said of Holiday’s performance, “like a great, dramatic moment in the theater.” “The short hair on the back of my neck tightens,” wrote New York Post columnist Samuel Grafton, “and I want to hit somebody. And I think I know who.” “Once Holiday added it to her repertoire,” Margolick writes, “some of its sadness seemed to cling to her.” Margolick writes simply, gently, guiding the reader like a needle through dense fabric, creating the portrait of a moment in history that, if only subconsciously, helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.

FALSE PAPERS by Andre Aciman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 198 pp., $25

Andre Aciman is the prince of nostalgia, though he says he’s not good at it. “Expatriation,” he writes, “like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities. . . . Nostalgia is one such metaphor.” Aciman is stuck in memories of the town he grew up in, Alexandria, Egypt; mired in memories of people, women and his parents. Sometimes it seems he cannot take a step on a city street without a memory assailing him. Some are real, some are the fictions of a writer. A nostalgic writer. He rues this state but does not want to leave it. It is the source of all his material, a constant hunger. Nostalgia has its victims: Cities cannot squirm under their captor’s grasp, but people can, and when they escape Aciman’s nostalgia, they lift off the page. “A Late Lunch,” in which Aciman’s eightysomething father asserts his independence from his hungering, attention-starved man-child, is one such essay. But it is, to Aciman’s credit, slightly unmoored. Aciman is homesick. He always will be.