Courtesan

by Dora Levy Mossanen

      Courtesan is a spiritual sequel to Dora Levy Mossanen's novel Harem. Once again, Mossanen mixes a life-altering liaison with a Shah, three generations of women coming to terms with the choices of the previous and next generation, Muslim-Jewish religious conflict, and people in a bygone, elegant, and dangerous but exciting world affronting their destiny, to borrow a phrase Henry James once used to describe his heroine Isabel Archer. One can see echoes of Portrait of a Lady, with a less unhappy fate for the female protagonists. Mme Gabrielle D'Honore and her daughter Francoise are not in the least like Serena Merle, but rather more like the women in Colette's GIGI. Like Gigi, Simone, granddaughter of Gabrielle, believes in love. She rejects the family profession of courtesan in favor of Cyrus, a hunk of a Jewish jeweler whose mother-in-law hates Simone and gives better guilt trips than Barbra Streisand. She gives up a glittering chateau and the sensual trappings her grandmother employs with the help of her great-grandfather Rabbi Abramowicz, who despairs of what his daughter Mme. Gabrielle, nee Ester has become.