All families have their stories — the kind that take hold of one’s imagination and won’t let go. For novelist T Cooper, that story involves the great-uncle she never knew.
When her grandmother’s family immigrated to the United States around 1900, they came through Ellis Island, and one of her grandmother’s brothers, who was maybe 5 years old at the time, got lost in the commotion. They never found him.
“No one really knows what happened,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in New York. “It’s funny in the sense that people don’t have any information about it, and they just went on with their lives.”
That story really did happen, and Cooper used that idea as a springboard for her new novel, “Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes.”
Cooper will read from her novel 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28 at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, 601 Van Ness Ave., S.F.
In the book, a couple named Esther and Hersch Lipshitz leave the pogroms of Russia, only to lose their young son at Ellis Island. They spend a year in New York in the hopes that he will be found, but he never is, and they finally relocate to the Texas panhandle.
Cooper has a fascination with pop culture, and the closest thing to a pop icon of that time was aviator Charles Lindbergh.
“He practically couldn’t go to the bathroom without it being on every front page,” she said, noting that his marriage to Anne Morrow was one of the most newsworthy events of its time. “He was one of the first worldwide handsome figures and he resented the hell out of it.”
In the novel, Esther Lipshitz, who is still obsessed with her son, sees a resemblance between her missing boy and Lindbergh and starts writing regularly to the family.
Her fixation on Lindbergh mirrors that of many others at that time; however, Lipshitz takes it a step further when she becomes convinced that he could be her missing son.
The novel only gets more surreal when it jumps ahead several generations to narrator T Cooper, a descendant of the Lipshitz family who is making his living working as an Eminem impersonator at bar mitzvahs in New York City.
Thus, the “Two Angry Blondes” from the title are Lindbergh and Eminem.
To Cooper, the angry rapper is the “modern 20th century manifestation of that kind of iconic misunderstood rebel,” she said. “Both had these really weird relationships with the media. They were adversarial with it, but also needed the press.”
According to the author, Lindbergh felt the media attention caused the kidnapping of his child, while Eminem both disdains the press, but at the same time, needs the publicity.
Additionally, there was always a question whether Lindbergh was gay, and those rumors have plagued Eminem as well. Basically, Cooper said, “they are both these volatile creatures who are very good at one thing that propels them into the public eye, and people put all these things onto them, whether they’re true or not. Esther does it with Lindbergh and T Cooper does it later with Eminem.”
When asked why T Cooper, the female author, chose to make T Cooper the narrator male, she said it “added another layer of mixing fact and fiction.”
She continued that the book has “passing” as a central theme, in that once the family is in America, Esther passes her son’s identity onto another.
“To me, gender passing is very similar and related,” she said.
“Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes” by T Cooper (434 pages, Dutton, $24.95).