LOLA FLORES

In this historical novel, Perlstein chronicles the rise of a transgender performer from Havana to Hollywood.

Anshel Sobel is born in Warsaw around 1910 and raised in New York City from the age of 2 under the American name Albert. In 1929, she fakes her own death, leaves her family behind, and heads for Havana under a new name: Lola Torres. She’s a talented pianist and singer, and she finds a place to stay with the sister of the Sobels’ housekeeper. Cuba seems like a land of opportunity for Lola, but it’s also a land of danger where her transgender status, Judaism, and Communist sympathies can lead to serious trouble. She’s soon performing in some of Havana’s hottest clubs under an even newer name: Lola Flores. She can’t keep her past completely hidden, however; an empathetic costumer, Fernando Fallon, who’s also transgender, tells her upon their first meeting, “You are not the first woman I have met who was born what seemed a man. Or a man born a woman.” Fernando becomes Lola’s secret-keeper and adviser, and together they embark on an impressive career, finding stardom not just in nightclubs, but on the Broadway stage, on radio and records, and even in films. Her celebrity brings her into the orbit of mobsters such as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky and to the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It turns out that America is Lola’s land of opportunity after all, especially now that she’s there on her own terms. But as Lola’s star rises, the fear that her secret will be revealed lingers in the background.

Perlstein’s prose rolls out like a reel of film, convincingly illuminating early-1930s Cuba, late ’30s New York, and ’40s Los Angeles. At one point, for instance, Lola gets support from some familiar folks following her performance in the Ziegfeld Follies: “A hand patted Lola’s behind as the final curtain descended. ‘You were aces, kid,’ said Bob Hope, who’d had a previous Broadway hit. In the wings, Fanny Brice gave Lola a knip, pinching the flesh of Lola’s left cheek between her thumb and index finger. ‘Oy! A Cuban me, only prettier!’ ” Over the course of the novel, the author manages to get plenty of mileage out of Lola’s nesting-doll identities and aliases, which she uses to achieve a variety of goals. It’s a somewhat lengthy novel at nearly 450 pages, and, at times, it feels as if Perlstein is simply moving Lola through history for little reason other than the joy of encountering real-life celebrities and various world events. The book ultimately—and unexpectedly—has more to say about the American Jewish experience than about the transgender one, which readers may find intriguing or disappointing depending on their interests. Overall, this is a work that’s not quite a picaresque but not entirely serious in tone, either, and the book gets by, much like its protagonist, on the sheer bravado of its vision.

An intriguing, if overlong, reimaging of old-time entertainment history.