Word: lonoff
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What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer...
Unfortunately, he is not the sole seeker of Lonoff's attention. Lonoff's wife Hope, frantic after years of keeping a quiet house for the artist, complains that she has to catch the toast before it pops. On her husband's preoccupation with work: "I got fondled more by strangers on the rush-hour subway during two months in 1935 than I have up here in the last twenty years...
Nathan's other competitor is Amy Bellette, a young researcher sent by Harvard to compile Lonoff's papers. She wants to take him to Italy for a life of truth and beauty. Nathan would like to go himself, because he is perversely excited by Amy's resemblance to Anne Frank. He imagines a lengthy scenario in which Anne survives Hitler's extermination camps to become Miss Bellette, who reasons that if she were known to be alive, her Diary would be read merely as a teen-age adventure story...