"The Oppenheimer triplets—who were thought of by not a single person who knew them as “the Oppenheimer triplets”—had been in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish."
Unusual for a work of fiction, this novel commences with a foreword. This short introductory passage introduces three of the story’s central characters by name, but it is the other information that is more significant. In addition to not many novels including a foreword, not many novels kick off the story by focusing on the means by which the main characters were conceived. Even more so, not many of those conceptions are of the “test tube babies” variety. The multiple breaks with tradition in this introduction also extend to the subversion of the usual formulation of multiple births in which siblings arriving at the same time usually form not just a closer bond than other siblings, but sometimes a strangely special bond. Everything about the foreword defies convention or expectation, starting with the irony of introducing these three characters quite specifically as a collective unit using a term that is not commonly used. After nearly 300 words of third-person narrative descriptive, this opening section finally draws to a close with another unexpected revelation in the final line which reveals itself as first-person narration by a member of the Oppenheimer family.
"In which Lewyn considers the grave responsibilities of guardianship, and the seat beside the toilet turns out to be the best one on the bus"
Each of the chapters is constructed following this unusual template. “Chapter One. The Horror of It All. In which Salo Oppenheimer meets a rock in the road” is the introduction to what will come to seem essential to the reader not long after. This narrative device comes to be understood as containing important information which the chapter subtitles foreshadow in an oblique way. The seemingly insignificant rock in the road turns mentioned in the first chapter’s subtitle, for instance, turn out to be the catalyst for a horrific automobile accident that happened in the youth of the Oppenheimer patriarch, and which creates traumatic scars which never quite heal. In the case of this particular example, the revelation of why the seat next to the toilet turns out to be the best one fulfills absolutely no expectations one likely brings to the subject of bathroom proximity. The rationale for this assertion of bus seat strategy will turn out to be quite idiosyncratic. It is dependent upon staggeringly improbable statistical odds that should not be considered universally applicable to bus seat strategy in general.
“His name was Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, but he was also known as Jud Süss. He was the court Jew for this duke named Karl Alexander, and helped make life better for the Jews in the city, but he also made a lot of money himself. But then the duke died suddenly, and they arrested Oppenheimer and accused him of murder. Also a bunch of other stuff: lying, stealing, sex with Christian women. So they executed him. Actually, they tried to get him to convert to Christianity, but he wouldn’t. Goebbels made a film about it.”
The film to which Lewyn alludes here is Jud Süss. Not only is it an actual film, but it is also one of the most notorious anti-Semitic films ever made. And its story is about the real-life figure of Joseph Oppenheimer. Lewyn is explaining the story of Joseph because the premise of the novel is that the Oppenheimer triplets and their latecomer sister are direct descendants of Joseph. In fact, the very first mention of Joseph Oppenheimer traces back to that rock in the road in the first chapter. That car accident results from Lewyn’s father, Salo, making the ill-fated decision to purchase a Jeep. That decision was made in part because even though he had the means to buy a Mercedes, such a purchase was unthinkable. With the Holocaust a mere three decades in the past, it was still considered a monumental disgrace for any Jewish person to drive a car made by a company so integrally connected with Nazi atrocities. The story of Joseph Oppenheimer is touched upon in that opening chapter, but the full details do not arrive until Lewyn’s delineation much later. The through-line here connecting the story of Joseph who lived in the 1700s to the lie-filled propaganda film about him made in the 1940s Salo’s Jeep accident in the 1970s Lewyn’s 21st-century conversation establishes the thematic significance of family lineage against which the unusual circumstances of the conception of the triplets and the late arrival of their sister is juxtaposed.
