Steven G. Kellman
In a cartoon that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, Bill Mauldin shows two men at hard labor in a Soviet gulag. “I won the Nobel Prize for literature,” one tells the other. “What was your crime?” In 1958, when the cartoon was published, it was obvious that the hapless Nobel laureate was supposed to be Boris Pasternak, whose literary achievements earned him expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and harassment so unnerving it pushed him to the verge of suicide. “It is not seemly to be famous,” a poem by Pasternak begins. “Celebrity does not exalt.” Yet after the The sixty-year interval between Henry Roth’s first novel, Call It Sleep (1934), and his second, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park (1994), constitutes the longest intermission in any significant American literary career. In the final decade of his life, Roth overcame severe depression and agonizing rheumatoid arthritis to produce a veritable Niagara of prose—about five thousand manuscript pages. Roth’s assistant, Felicia Steele, and editor, Robert Weil, sculpted three thousand of those into the tetralogy Mercy of a Rude Stream, which was published sequentially starting in 1994. Roth died in 1995, at eighty-nine, before seeing the final two volumes, From In Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character named Jonathan Safran Foer flabbergasts his Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov. “I’m a vegetarian,” the visiting American declares. “I do not understand,” Alex replies. A dialogue of mutual incomprehension ensues: “’I don’t eat meat.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I just don’t.’ ‘How can you not eat meat?’ . . . ‘I just don’t. No meat.’ ‘Pork?’ ‘No.’ ‘Meat?’ ‘No meat.’ ‘Steak?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Chickens?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you eat veal?’ ‘Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.’ ‘What about sausage?’ ‘No sausage either.’” The starving traveler is forced to feast on two potatoes. 
It is unlikely that Aaliya Saleh, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s 2014 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, and Jacob, the protagonist of his latest, The Angel of History, would pass each other in the street, but if they did they would probably not speak. Aaliya is a misanthropic seventy-two-year-old recluse who, despite the violence raging outside her Beirut apartment during the decades, has devoted herself to the useless task of translating notable novels into Arabic. What makes her work useless (or “unnecessary”) is that these are secondary translations, based on prior renditions. Her version of Crime and Punishment, for example, is