Ice Fire Water A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail Author:Leslie Epstein A hilarious and heartbreaking work of eroticism and longing from one of our great tragicomic writers. Leib Goldkorn, now aged ninety-seven, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet, which Geoffrey Wolff called "a novella of genius." In Ice Fire Water, Leib moves beyond--or below--his great love of music toward t... more »he source of his passion: a series of love affairs in the past with three of the world's most glamorous women. In Ice, Goldkorn rescues Sonja Henie from the clutches of Hitler and then directs her in a feature for 20th-Century Fox. In Fire he finds himself immersed in a shipboard romance with Carmen Miranda while on his way to Rio. And in Water he engages in a South Sea island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s, whom he saves from the boiling pot of hungry cannibals. In the thrall of these memories, Leib also reflects on three women in his present life: his sickly wife, Clara; a woman named Michiko Kakutani, whom he is convinced is a vivacious Finn and devotee of the composer Sibelius; and above all a porn queen named Miss Crystal Knight. Despite its antic humor and knowing satire, Ice Fire Water is above all a work of deep moral focus, inextricably bound up in the fate of the Jews and the rigors of senescence and death--all of which find their match in Leib's inexhaustible passion.« less