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On Wednesday, December 10, a group of us met in the Astor Judaica Library at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center. It was a free event featuring three local poets: Joy Heitzmann, Sally Scheinok, and Hal Wingard. Many others also read poetry during the open mike portion of the evening. I read one of mine.
The first two novels to attract my attention have similar titles, and, as it turns out, some other commonalities. When We Were Bad is the third novel by Charlotte Mendelson, an editor for a British publisher and an award-winning author. In this English-Jewish domestic farce, Mendelson wittily explores relationships between parents and their adult children. For all appearances, the Rubins are the quintessential perfect Jewish family - with beautiful, brainy and accomplished 55-year-old liberal rabbi Claudia Rubin as its matriarch. Claudia is about to publish the masterpiece of her career – a memoir that is a moral and ethical handbook on the importance of family life – and then her glamorous London family begins to crumble, character by character by character. First, the second most successful Rubin – her 34-year-old barrister son Leo – abandons his bride-to-be one minute before the ceremony - and runs off with the wife of the officiating rabbi. Then the sensible older sister Frances allows her postpartum depression to sabotage her marriage. Simeon, the spoiled brother, withdraws into a druggy haze in his bedroom. The “baby” sister Emily is dating a man who turns out to be a woman. And even Claudia’s husband Norman threatens her moment in the spotlight with an explosive writing project that has functioned as his mistress. Claudia immediately moves into damage-control mode and expects the rest of the family to cooperate in preserving the myth of the perfect family – including participating in the Seder to end all Sedarim, a Passover extravaganza of frantic preparation and grim hospitality. This literary comedy painfully and accurately depicts the complicated world of English Jewry functioning within British society, but is also a universal story of the guilt and shame, the loyalty and betrayal, the triumphs and trials, the anxieties and love – and the lies we tell ourselves about – our ramshackle family lives.
The other book with the “bad” theme in its title as well as in its text is Disobedience by Naomi Alderman. This first-time novelist draws on her upbringing and current life in the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon in London for this evocative tale that won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers and was chosen by the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism as their 2007 Jewish Book Month selection. The protagonist, 32-year-old Ronit Krushka, is a lapsed Orthodox Jew who long ago fled the confines of Orthodox Jewish life in Hendon for the secular freedom of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When her estranged father, Hendon’s revered Rabbi, passes away Ronit returns home to mourn her loss and retrieve her mother’s Shabbat candlesticks. But she also must confront her past, including her school girl friend and former lover Esti. Both Ronit and Esti are lesbians – but Ronit is having an affair with her married boss in New York, and Esti is married to Ronit’s cousin Dovid, the young rabbi slated to succeed her father as leader of the Hendon synagogue. Now Ronit must deal not only with the conflicts between the tradition-based way of life which honors the past and the frenetic nature of modern life always hurtling forward, but also the contrast between her alienated New York Judaism and the English version in which the Jewish fear of being noticed interacts with natural British reticence.
Victoria Redel is the child of Holocaust survivors. Like the main character in The Border of Truth, Redel’s father came to America as one of the 86 passengers on the Portuguese ship Quanza; however, unlike the fictional Richard Leader, Mr. Redel was his daughter’s deepest research source. In 1940, Leader arrives in America as Itzak Lejdel, only to have his ship turned away in New York and Mexico. He will presumably be repatriated into Nazi hands, but he is not easily discouraged. Instead, he takes pen to paper and writes a series of emotional appeals to Eleanor Roosevelt, asking her to intervene (as she did in real life) and save the captive Jews. His letters are filled with colorful rumors about fellow passengers, sweet details about his adolescent crushes and movie fantasies, and harrowing tales about his family’s flight from the Nazis. This correspondence alternates with the current-day story of his daughter Sara Leader, a 41-year-old single professor who is in the process of adopting a war-refugee child while also working on translating the work of Walter Benjamin. These two activities, along with a chance encounter with a woman who knows more about Sara’s father than Sara herself, lead Sara to look into her family’s hidden past. This father-daughter story portrays the influence of refugees’ trauma on future generations, is a powerful essay on the instincts to both keep and to reveal secrets, and is, according to the LA Times “such a good novel that it could also be any American’s story.” Like most of you, I know that many ships were refused entry and returned to Nazi-occupied Europe, but this particular story fascinates me in its multiple dimensions – adoption, father-daughter, family secrets, etc.
The Kommandant’s Girl is the first novel written by Pam Jenoff, an attorney, a former Pentagon assistant, a former consulate officer for the US in Krakow, and a published expert of Poland and the Holocaust. I suspect that her scholarly background and personal experience make this novel ring as true as the events upon which it is based. Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau grew up in the sheltered Orthodox community of Krakow, but is swept off her feet by Jacob whom she encounters in her job as a university librarian. Three weeks after their marriage, their lives are shattered by the thunder of Nazi tanks invading their country. Jacob leaves to join the Jewish underground and Emma is imprisoned in the decrepit ghetto, but Jacob returns to smuggle her out, on false papers, to his Catholic cousin. As the gentile Anna Lipowski, Emma meets and is hired to work for high-ranking Kommandant Georg Richwalder. Jacob encourages her to use her position to obtain information to help the Resistance, but as her relationship with Richwalder intensifies, she must compromise her safety, her marriage vows, and the lives of those she loves – in a world where no one can be trusted. In portraying Emma’s efforts to defy the enemy and struggle for hope against overwhelming odds, Jenoff humanizes the unfathomable as well as the heroic, and gives us insight into how people function when forced into an untenable situation. I recall seeing more than one Jewish Film Festival movie portraying this same dilemma – Jewish women passing as gentiles and working for Nazi officers – but this one truly focuses on the danger of emotional involvement when playing a role.
In Charity Girl, Michael Lowenthal takes an obscure historical atrocity and brings it to light as a novel. In Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, she likens a proposal to quarantine AIDS patients to the detention of women with venereal disease during WWI. Reading about the WWI situation for the first time, Lowenthal had two thoughts – how horrible this was, and what a great basis it would be for a novel. He dove into the subject – but limited himself to 365 days of research so that his book would not become a mere fictional vehicle for an historic fact. Frieda Mintz, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, flees her Orthodox home in Boston’s West End to escape a coerced marriage to a man twice her age and becomes a package wrapper at the department store, Jordan Marsh. Naïve and lonely, she spends an impulsive night with a “menschy” army private ready to fight “Over There.” He leaves her with not only memories, but also with an infection that causes her to be fired from her job and locked up in a detention center by the Committee on Prevention of Social Evil Surrounding Military Camps. During WWI, 30,000 American women (many of them merely “charity girls” who went to dance halls to meet and entertain soldiers) were rounded up and half were detained at forty-three US sites where they were subjected to hard labor, forced medical treatment, humiliation, and even rape. Frieda is condemned by the Fitchburg staff for several shameful conditions: venereal disease, self-abuse, intercourse and Jewishness, but she forms a strong bond with her fellow detainees and together they develop confidence and independence. It is nothing short of a gift that Lowenthal has revealed this ugly chapter in American history, and he forces us to look at how we might balance individual freedom with the public good.
Joanna Hershon’s third novel, The German Bride, is both an immigrant tale and a Western – but has neither cowboys nor the Lower East Side. One reviewer likened it to Willa Cather’s work and dubbed it “Oy, Pioneers.” In 1865, German Jewish sisters Eva and Henrietta Frank sit for a portrait with a well-known painter. After he seduces Eva, she is forced to leave the refinement of Berlin for the wilds of Santa Fe, New Mexico with an American dry goods merchant who comes “home” to Germany to find a wife. The trip to the American Southwest is an ordeal in itself, but once there, all that Abraham promised Eva fails to materialize. Living together in a “low mud-cake hovel,” they try to love each other – but Eva wants a proper house and Abraham wants a child. Eva suffers several miscarriages and Abraham becomes an abusive philanderer with a gambling addiction. While Eva’s story of travel and dislocation beautifully portrays the shock and loss of immigration and frontier living, it is also a testament to human adaptability and survival. Haunted by the memories from her former life and threatened by the realities of the current one, Eva learns how far one must travel to make piece with the past. I’ve read Rachel Calof’s Story and I grew up on Little House on the Prairie, but Eva’s efforts to make her life work despite their inauspicious beginnings inspire me to appreciate all the good in my own life.
Finally, we have The Jewel Trader of Pegu by Jeffrey Hantover. Ironically, the day after I picked up this volume, one of my book groups selected it for the upcoming year’s calendar. Hantover discovered the beauty and the challenges of Asian culture when he moved from New York to Hong Kong with his wife, an auction house manager, and their four-year-old daughter. As an unemployed writer, Hantover thought he’d be lost and useless in this alien environment, but he soon discovered the theme of a debut novel he was eager to write. The main character Abraham, a gem trader in 1598 Venice, becomes widowed when his wife dies in childbirth. Devastated by his loss, he flees his familiar surroundings and seeks his fortune in the lush and exotic Burmese kingdom of Pegu. There, he is grateful that he has none of the restrictions of the Venetian Jewish ghetto – no curfew, no yellow hat, and the freedom to go wherever he wants – and he flourishes with his new-found autonomy, religiously observing the spiritual practices of his faith, with the Torah and prayerbook he values more than jewels. Soon, however, he learns that he is expected to fulfill Pegu’s societal duty required of all foreigners – the initiation of a young bride-to-be – a duty that goes against all of his religious beliefs. He becomes overwhelmed with dread and despair – until Mya, a beautiful young woman, arrives to briefly share his bed. When tragedy destroys her planned future, Abraham offers her protection in his home – and ultimately and surprisingly, his deep love for her. Then, great political and social upheaval threatens to transform both the Eden-like environment, and the paradise that enveloped Mya and Abraham. This graceful, thoughtful but slow-moving novel raised questions of identity and ethics. When in Rome, do we act as the Romans do, or do the core values of our native culture dominate? For a great story of self-examination and ideas, you can’t go wrong with Hantover’s tale.
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