The New Jewish Novel
If you believe demography,
American Jewish life is disappearing: Fifty-two percent of American Jews marry
non-Jews. If you believe your own eyes, you'll conclude the opposite. Stroll
down the Upper West Side of Manhattan on a Saturday morning. The former world
headquarters of secular Judaism, Jewish humanism, even flat-out radicalism,
will be filled with Orthodox families wandering to and from shul, the women in
wigs and long dresses, the children otherworldly in clothes bare of sports
insignia.
Or go to a good bookstore
and check out the work of a group of young novelists busily turning the
conventional Jewish identity crisis on its head. For these writers--let's call
them the philo-traditionalists--the modern world that lured the Philip Roths
and Saul Bellows and Norman Mailers away from their childhood enclaves doesn't
glisten with its old come-hither. In the three decades since the heyday of the
Jewish-American novel, secularity has grown tarnished. It is now seen as
leading to self-absorbed self-destruction rather than to individual
fulfillment. What the new generation embraces is the past, a godly past hedged
in by community and ritual that will one day perhaps--or so they dream--be
restored.
Take a
lapsed Hasid such as Pearl Abraham. In her autobiographical first novel The
Romance Reader , she told the familiar (to Roth or Chaim Potok readers) tale
of being forced out of her sect by her own intellectual and sexual curiosity.
But in her second novel, Giving Up America , which comes out this month,
she all but rejects that rejection. The narrator is an unhappy ad copy writer
whose callow husband has fallen for a would-be Miss America contestant. She
must return to her family to reimmerse herself in the eternal Hasidic truths
before she can make something like peace with her life.
America, the country Europe's rabbis condemned as the
trayfe medina --the unholy land, the faithless land--is now producing a
literature of faith. But hasn't there always been a literature of Jewish faith?
What about Bernard Malamud, with his discombobulated folk Jews, and Isaac
Bashevis Singer, with his tortured Polish intellectuals and Lithuanian
rabbinical courts? The difference has everything to do with the passage of
time. The philo-traditionalists (the best of them, anyway) are bringing life
and imagination to a kind of writing all but given up for moribund, and
besides, they're producing a literature of American faith. No longer is
religious practice or a sense of Jewish continuity the prerogative of displaced
Europeans gazing with horror upon the vacuousness of their assimilated
children. Cynthia Ozick, the American-born doyenne of contemporary observant
Jewish writers, used to make her heroes and heroines refugees from the Nazis,
struggling to fortify their shredded piety against the American profanity. But
even she has gone native. In a brilliant novel published last year, The
Puttermesser Papers , her eponymous heroine, Ruth Puttermesser, becomes
mayor of New York City and embraces a Whitmanesque vision of urban
harmony--Jews and Christians and everyone together--before being undone by a
rapacious golem.
Then there are the children
themselves, who are much less vacuous than predicted and insist that they, too,
can have a connection to the past. The brutally funny Steve Stern ( Lazar
Malkin Enters Heaven , Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground , A
Plague of Dreamers ) does this by inventing a shtetl that out-Singers
Singer in its weirdness and filth and then putting it in pre-World War II
Memphis, Tenn. Thane Rosenbaum, in Elijah Visible , grants his
characters, who are the children of Holocaust survivors, the right to suffer
their own highly American litany of post-Holocaust disorders.
Oddly
enough, it was Singer who wrote the prototext of American post-assimilationism,
Shadows on the Hudson , which was only published, posthumously, earlier
this year (though it was written in the '50s and set even earlier). It is a
stunning, heartbreaking novel, the darkest and most modern of his works,
largely because it is the most bitter about modernity. Its anti-hero, Hertz
Grein, an erudite European refugee and serial deserter of women, turns his back
on a secular life gone hideously awry and migrates to Israel, joining the most
extreme sect of ultra-Orthodox he can find. This is a New World sort of move,
even if made by a refugee, and in Israel, not America. European Jewish émigrés,
whether cultured cosmopolitans or members of the pious bourgeoisie, don't
suddenly convert to fundamentalism; that's a specialty of godless
Americans.
Now there's Allegra Goodman, whose
enthusiastically reviewed first novel, Kaaterskill Falls , appears poised
to become the crossover Jewish novel of the year. The book takes place over
three summers in the late 1970s in and around a mitnaged (rationalist,
anti-mystical, non-Hasidic) ultra-Orthodox sect, the Kirschners, who followed
their rabbi from Frankfurt to Washington Heights just before World War II and
have taken to summering in a hamlet in the Eastern Catskills. Don't mistake
this for the Western Catskills--the Borscht Belt. The Eastern Catskills is a
not particularly Jewish and now largely forgotten resort region that was once
the height of chic, the Hamptons of the 19 th century, as well as
home to the Hudson River School of painters. The novel's title alludes to a
famous painting by Thomas Cole that hangs in a nearby museum.
In short, the grandeur of
the past--Jewish, American--is the theme here. The older generation, including
the rabbi, possesses the old European graces. They're erudite and sophisticated
and carry their rituals off with comparable ease. Ease, that is, compared with
the next generation, which is Goodman's real focus. The American-born
Kirschners are more rigid, less worldly than their parents. Even the rabbi
frets about them: "They are good people," he tells his son. "But they are very
simple . ... They are afraid of the Mind, and to read. They don't read
Schiller and the Shakespeare. How can I say it to you? They keep the one thing,
the religious, alive. It is the most important, but they have lost the other.
They have forgotten the poetry. There is not one of them who is what we used to
call an Educated Man."
Goodman
has two advantages over her characters. With an advanced degree in literature,
she has read Schiller and Shakespeare, and she is writing 20 years
later, when American Judaism has grown less awkward about itself. In fact, the
success of her novel lies in its casualness, the way it makes the extremes of
religious practice seem cozily normal. Neither Potok nor Abraham can immerse
the reader in the minutiae of Hasidic life the way Goodman does in the
particulars of separatist German ultra-Orthodoxy.
Another refreshing feature of Goodman's storytelling is
that, unlike other members of fundamentalist sects one might find in novels,
her characters don't chafe at their restrictions, or not too much. At the
beginning of the novel the heroine, Elizabeth Shulman, feels so at home in her
Jewish skin that "God and the scriptures, worship and ritual, are all simple,
practical things for her." Indeed, she's one of the few deeply observant
characters you're likely to encounter who "does not romanticize religion. ...
The sacred is not mysterious to her." Rather, she "romanticizes the secular.
Poetry, universities, and paintings fill her with awe." It's typical of
Goodman's blend of the sublime and the haimish (homey) that when
Elizabeth experiences an epiphany while looking at Cole's picture, it is the
revelation of a most unambitious ambition: She wants to open a kosher grocery
store. In an ultra-Orthodox setting, of course, that's not a simple step. It
requires, for example, permission from the rabbi and renting from an
anti-Semitic landlord. By the end of the book, Shulman has bumped up against
the edges of her life, but she doesn't yearn to escape it, exactly. She has
merely learned that her leaders are capable of stupid mistakes in their
dealings with her. She has no intention of leaving, first because her doubt is
not enough to sever her from her husband and children and second because that's
not the kind of story it is.
The novel has its flaws.
Goodman's explanations of Jewish ritual sometimes veer from the helpful to the
condescendingly overexplicit, as if she were writing for young adults. Shulman
aside, you could find one-line descriptions of Goodman's main characters in any
half-dozen American-Jewish novels: the rabbi with two sons, one brilliant and
prodigal, one duller but more loyal; the Holocaust survivor numbed by his past;
the daughters tempted by the twin heresies of feminism and Zionism (Israel is
viewed as a nation of faithless sinners by these ultra-Orthodox Jews); the
assimilationist Jew who comes to a bad end. But Goodman makes them believable,
at least, despite bits of soggy sentimentality; she makes you care. (The
exception is the cast of non-Jewish locals, who are almost all soap operaish
white trash.) And whatever one's quibbles, Goodman should be credited with
doing what Singer and Malamud and even Ozick were never really able to do:
making the most rigorous form of Judaism seem plausible as an American
life.
