“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 7, 2014)

In The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris discloses the secrets of a Chasidic community in Golders Green, London, focusing on the tribulations of three families: the Kaufmans, Levys, and Zilbermans. The Kaufmans have eight daughters, one of whom, nineteen-year-old Chani, is seeking an intelligent, animated, and good-natured husband. The Levys, a well-to-do couple, want only the best for their son, Baruch, and plan to settle for nothing less. The Zilbermans are facing a major crisis. Rabbi Zilberman’s wife, Rivka, is no longer a contented spouse, mother, and homemaker; she is restless, edgy, and depressed. Adding to the tension is the fact that one of her sons, Avromi, a university student, is acting strangely. He is secretive, stays out late, and avoids telling his family where he has been.

Harris goes back and forth in time, creating a well-rounded portrait of a community whose members prize tradition, virtue, and spirituality. If anyone deviates from prescribed standards of behavior–by dressing immodestly, showing too much interest in secular matters, or flouting religious law–he or she risks censure or, in some cases, ostracism. However, the author indicates that many Chasidim have a great deal to be grateful for: particularly the support of relatives, friends, and neighbors and the peace of mind that comes from knowing one’s place in the world.

The cast includes the young and not-so-young, the experienced and naïve, the affluent and those struggling to get by. We observe Chani Kaufman navigating the dating scene with anticipation as well as trepidation. We also meet Baruch Levy, a twenty-year-old who fears that he is not ready to shoulder the responsibilities that marriage entails. Manipulating the matchmaking strings is the smug and calculating Mrs. Gelbmann, a shadchan who relishes the inordinate amount of power that she wields. Readers’ hearts go out to Chani’s mother, a long-suffering matriarch who, at forty-five, has already borne eight daughters and is thoroughly burned out.

Ms. Harris is knowledgeable about the Hasidic lifestyle, and portrays her flawed and troubled characters with understanding, insight, and compassion. Her decision to relate events out of chronological order is initially bewildering. However, it allows us to stand back and consider complex situations from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The author presents the limited options available to young people like Chanie and Baruch. Should they adhere to the accepted laws and customs handed down by their parents or follow a different path that might be more to their liking? Chani wonders, “What was it like to roam freely in the world and not have to think about your every action and its spiritual consequence?” For men and women who find the constraints of a sheltered and choreographed existence limiting, the choice to remain strictly observant is a difficult one. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a provocative, enlightening, and engrossing book, written with skill and flair, in which the author explores universal themes that will resonate with anyone who has clashed with loved ones, suffered unbearable losses, and has had to make difficult, life-changing decisions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eve Harris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and an interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin

Bibliography:

• The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013; April 2014 in US)

“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“Samuel knew that he was living through dangerous times – this was not the moment to simply sniffle and weep. He had left Hamburg just in the knick of time – Kristallnacht had happened just nine months earlier – the “party” in Europe […] had already begun. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederick Knabe  (SEP 29, 2011)

Samuel Berkow, at thirty-eight, stands at the crossroads: In 1938, life in Germany is fast becoming dangerous for Jews. At the urging of his concerned uncle, he agrees to leave Hamburg and emigrate to Guatemala, where his cousin is expected to help him settle. In The Price of Escape, David Unger explores his hero’s self-conscious and stumbling efforts to put his German existence out of his mind as he prepares for a new one that carries promise but is also full of uncertainty.

The narrative quickly moves on to Samuel’s travel on the ship en route to the port town of Puerto Barrios and then focuses on his first three days on land. Guatemalan-American Unger, recognized as one of Guatemala’s prominent writers today, convincingly portrays his hero’s sense of utter confusion and helplessness as he enters, totally unprepared, a foreign world that bears no resemblance to his own. He contrasts Samuel’s former lifestyle, his self-confidence, based mostly on physical appearance and family wealth, with the poverty-ridden, appalling and at times dangerous conditions in Puerto Barrios. Thus, Unger not only builds an affecting portrait of one refugee’s complete dislocation in an unfamiliar environment and his awareness that he must cope somehow, he paints at the same time a colourful, vivid picture of a community in decline, abandoned by a corrupt political system that allows private company interests to control people’s lives and basis for existence.

As the novel unfolds, Samuel encounters a wide range of odd characters, starting with American Alfred Lewis, the dubious captain of the “tramp steamer” that brings Samuel into port. He turns out to be one of the manipulating representatives of the sinister United Fruit Company, the big corporation that has made of Puerto Barrios a “company town” but recently downgraded it to a mere reloading point for banana shipments. While Lewis warns Samuel not to linger in town and to get on the train to Guatemala City as soon as possible, he does everything to add to Samuel’s bewilderment and delay. Every time Samuel is set to make a move to leave, something or somebody interferes: the dwarf, Mr. Price, who offers himself as a guide to the one and only “International Hotel,” his bare room there, or George, the hotel clerk/manager who appears to be one of the more helpful people. Others are added to the colourful mix: a defrocked priest, the station master, an old prostitute, or various odd assemblies of people in the streets or cafes/bars… None of these may in fact behave in any way threatening, however, in his mind, Samuel cannot extricate himself from their influence so that he can get to the train station in time.

Unger creates an atmosphere of suspicion, of hidden and open threats that intermingle in Samuel’s mind with images from his past life, thereby escalating not only his uneasiness but also resulting in his own increasingly strange behaviour towards the people he meets. Personal memories from his past life, especially his short-lived disastrous marriage, still haunt him, more so than any of the recent dangerous political changes in Germany. People come at him with either sugary, even creepy, friendliness or with sarcastic comments and aggressive, even violent, behaviour, one can turn into the other without warning. Samuel appears to be caught in a vicious circle. With only basic Spanish, his communication is fraught with misunderstandings. Who is there to talk to openly and, above all, whose advice can he trust?

Unger illustrates Samuel’s increasing disorientation with scenarios and encounters that recall in some ways Kafkaesque hopeless labyrinthine struggles. Yet, here, the protagonist is responsible for much of the precarious situations he finds himself in: His fashion-conscious clothing make him a laughing stock among the locals; his inability to extricate himself safely and in time from several brewing conflicts puts him into physical danger. His reluctance to eat the local food and even drink the water results in stages of temporary mental confusion, even delirium, that make him act totally irrationally. Afterwards, he has no memory of what he said or did or why, for example, he ends up in the muddy water near the harbour, totally wet and soiled, crawling on all fours, searching for his passport…

Will Samuel manage to escape or will he be completely taken over by the locality? What is “the price” of escape – both from Germany and from Puerto Barrios? The novel’s conclusion answers these questions aptly, coincidences not withstanding. Over the course of the three-day story, Unger creates a continuous narrative tension that keeps us as readers engaged. We never quite know, what accident or confrontation awaits the protagonist next. Despite his sympathetic and expansive characterization of Samuel Berkow, I found him less than a likeable protagonist, at times arbitrarily overdrawn and his behaviour somewhat exaggerated. Readers who anticipate – given various publicity materials – that considerable attention in the novel is given to the historical situation in Germany in the nineteen thirties, will be disappointed. Unger’s primary concern is Guatemala.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Unger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fame: A Novel In Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann Banana by Daniel Koppel

Bibliography (English only):

• Life in the Damn Tropics (2004)
• The Price of Escape (April 2011)

“He wanted to work when other people worked, go out to dinner at restaurants that proclaimed their names in fancy gold script above the entrance and used starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware; he wanted to go to the theater and he wanted to ride in cabs as a passenger.   Most of all he wanted to go to bed when it was actually dark outside, and make love to a beautiful woman, more than one even, who wouldn’t put up with a man that arrived at seven in the morning and slept until one.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 14, 2011)

Family sagas have long been a staple among American best-sellers; the examples are wide and vast. The very predictability of the family saga genre promises an absorbing yet familiar reading experience: the once-poor yet highly attractive and charismatic main character who overcomes all kinds of adversities, goes through heartbreak and scandal, and then emerges older, wiser, and in most cases, wealthier than before (or at the very least, with enough knowledge to become wealthier).

Sharon Pomerantz mines this territory once more with Rich Boy, a novel infused with a heavy dose of melodrama combined with the realism of growing up American and Jewish in the pivotal years of the 60s through the 80s.

Robert Vishniak is a character on the rise. We meet him when he is a pre-teen, pickpocketing his rich relative’s wallet so that his father will not have to experience the shame of losing at a card game. The stage is set: we know he is resourceful and will do whatever it takes to succeed.

In the years ahead, Robert will show his resourcefulness in many ways: with his well-heeled college roommate who harbors a “shameful” (in some eyes) secret, with his unprecedented rise in his chosen law firm, with his choice of stunning women (all of whom are inevitably drop-dead gorgeous, sexually aggressive, and somewhat manipulative). He will also experience adversity with his first true love – Gwendolyn, an extremely fragile, socially conscious, vulnerable, and yes, gorgeous and doomed young woman.

Sharon Pomerantz is at her best when she delves into an exploration of Jewish-American life in the 1960s-1980s: the one-time outsiders assimilating and taking their deserved place within the social hierarchy. The clash between the impoverished and frugal world that Robert shares with his birth family and the opportunities that are opening themselves for him is crisply done. Here is Robert, reflecting on the privileged life he shares with his moneyed wife and their young daughter:

“Why now, when his daughter never needed to step inside a subway, and every major possession they owned came with insurance and an alarm, why now did he feel so nervous, as if he had woken up in the wrong life – a life lived from car windows and behind locked doors?”

The paranoia of the Nixon and Vietnam years, the real estate and commodities boom and bust, the drug culture and over-the-top parties of the affluent, the wheeling-dealing of law firms – all this is handled with aplomb. Less successfully done is the focus on his Robert’s many relationships. The women are mostly caricatures: the self-destructive and forever-remembered first love, the cold and moneyed wife, the young-and-genuine actress on the cusp of discovery…as readers, we’ve met these women before.

Still, this is a particularly American story – a Jewish-American story – of the class divides between rich and poor, rich and obscenely rich. It’s a story of  “a family built for the 1970s.” Those who like straightforward, old-fashioned, rags-to-riches sagas will likely enjoy Rich Boy a great deal.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve (July 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sharon Pomerantz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• Rich Boy (August 2010)

“After they put the room into some semblance of order, Samuil reluctantly followed Emma up the steps to see Karl and the grandchildren. In their former life, Alec had never seen his father do anything reluctantly. He did what he wanted or he did nothing at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (MAY 13, 2011)

Bezmozgis, born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, centers this darkly humorous novel on the close-knit, irascible Krasnansky family as they emigrate from Soviet Latvia in 1978, joining the flood of Russian Jews seeking a better life elsewhere. Their way-station on this way to peace and plenty in Canada, America, Australia, Israel – somewhere – is Rome.

There are six adult Krasnanskys and two children. Battle-scarred Samuil, revolutionary and staunch communist, is the literal founder of the Krasnansky dynasty, having shed the family name – Eisner – and taken Krasnansky for “its evocation of the Communist color.”

But the patriarch’s power has dimmed with age. “There had been a point – once it became obvious that his sons would leave Riga, that no manner of threats or appeals would deter them, and that his family and his reputation would be destroyed – when Samuil had, for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide.” But suicide seems like capitulation: “after a lifetime spent eluding death, the habit of survival was deeply ingrained.”

Samuil, cantankerous, bitter, bullying, is the book’s most complex character, because of his age and experience, and is as sympathetic as he is exasperating. The battles and terrible losses he’s suffered – his father and grandfather murdered before his 5-year-old eyes by anti-communists, his brother killed in WWII, his cousin vanished into the maw of Soviet triumph – have hammered him into the principled communist he’s proud to be.

But his two sons have no respect for his legacy. Alec, a bright, charming womanizer in his mid-20s, seems to chart the easiest course through life, while Karl, a couple years older, possesses Samuil’s autocratic character but wields it in unswerving pursuit of money and material security for his family.

While Bezmozgis paints vivid portraits of each family member – even the little boys are occasional vivid blurs of color as they race across the page – he concentrates point of view on three people: Samuil, Alec, and Alec’s non-Jewish wife Polina, with Samuil’s meek wife Emma stepping into the foreground as Samuil fades into the past.

Alec and Polina’s characters are still being formed. Even their marriage — only a year old — is a tenuous thing. Polina has drifted along in life, carried on a river of others’ making. She had never loved her stolid, conventional first husband and married him only because he loved her and it seemed the logical next step, as did falling into an affair with Alec.

Alec, though loyal to her as a wife, feels it’s his prerogative to take after his father in this one thing and indulge his roving eye.

But Polina is beginning to exert herself in her own life and Alec, though it’s a lesson he will have to learn repeatedly has “discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.”

Alec and Polina provide the story’s forward momentum as they work, navigate the city, and make temporary lives semi-independent of family and each other. At the center of this makeshift life is the émigré community, which includes a large proportion of unscrupulous, even violent characters, newly freed from Soviet jails during this window of time in which the USSR was pleased to get rid of its Jews.

But in this temporary stopover in an alien land (none of them speaks Italian), the future is an undefined goal, while the past is real.

As the younger generation hustles to prepare for a new life, Samuil (whose infirmities are blocking their acceptance to Canada) takes refuge in the past. He decides to write his memoirs, which will have “corrective and instructive value.”

“For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

“To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Bezmozgis, author of the story collection Natasha and Other Stories, has an incisive, dryly humorous prose style, which nurtures affection for his flawed, disputatious characters, even when they are behaving badly, and captures family dynamics in all its sniping and essential loyalty.

He joins a very specific time and place, ethnic culture and political climate with the stark, commonplace irony of history’s extremely fleeting lessons. Samuil’s sons not only disregard his past and his political battle scars, they cannot even share their father’s most precious possession, his dead brother’s letters, for they are unable to read the language.

Delightful, sad, wise and wry, this well-told tale should appeal to readers of such greats as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Bezmozgis
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of other books from this publisher: The Nude Walker by Bathsheba Monk Ghost Light by Joseph Connor

Bibliography:

• Natasha and Other Stories (June 2009)
• The Free World (March 2011)

“When Cass, in all the safety of his obscurity, set about writing a book that would explain how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience — so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost — and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, […] he’d had no idea of the massive response his efforts would provoke.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 20, 2011)

With a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Guggenheim and MacArthur (genius) awards, several novels, and non-fiction studies of Gödel and Spinoza under her belt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is nobody’s fool. But I can’t decide whether her decision to populate her latest novel exclusively with people like herself is good or bad. Set in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly at Harvard but mainly at another elite university which might be a fictionalized Brandeis, the entire cast of characters seems to consist of academic philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, or theologians, all determined to prove that they are smarter than anybody else. Readers who enjoyed the intellectual name-dropping of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of a Hedgehog might well like this, but it can be hard going. I soon began to wish for at least one character who did not know the Wittgenstein Paradox or Heideggerian Hermeneutics inside out. After about 80 pages, however, I found myself drawn into the strange world of the book, for three main reasons. I list them in increasing order of importance.

1. Goldstein can be very funny. There is splendid scene when the great professor Jonas Elijah Klapper (think Harold Bloom) makes a state visit to the Valdener Rebbe, head of a Hasidic sect headquartered in a building described as “A Costco that had found God.” In the ensuing dialogue, the professor tries hard to impress with obscure references to early Jewish mystics, while the Rebbe merely wants to discuss how best to secure federal matching funds. Nevertheless Klapper treats this as deep rabbinical wisdom expressed in parables, silencing a doubter with the words: “You are the sort who, should she witness the Messiah walking on water, would be impressed that his socks had not shrunk.”

2. The chief character, Cass Selzer, is the least pretentious of the lot and really very likeable. A psychologist, he has recently published VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS ILLUSION, vaulting him to the New York Times bestseller list and a Time Magazine feature as “The atheist with a soul.” The 36 Arguments of the book’s title form the appendix to Selzer’s book, reprinted as a 50-page appendix to the novel. Each argument is laid out in clear syllogistic form only to be dismissed by equally clear analysis of its flaws. But for the most part, Cass leaves the logical legerdemain to the appendix. As a character in the story, he speaks normal conversational English, and is really quite sympathetic as he moves from hero-worship to rejection of the monstrous Klapper, and tries to find a life partner among a sequence of dauntingly brilliant women.

3. The book does indeed have a soul. The visit to the Valdener Rebbe (a distant relative of Cass) is more than a comic tour-de-force. Cass also meets the Rebbe’s son, Azarya, clearly a mathematical genius and as lovable for his personality as amazing in his desire for knowledge. At the age of only six, he explains discoveries in number theory that he has made by himself, describing the various classes of primes as orders of angels as real to him as Cherubim and Seraphim. Uniquely, he unites religion and science, not as opposites, but in a single world view. There is a great set-piece which is an ecstatic description of a “shabbes tish” or ceremonial meal, which draws me further into the spirit of Hasidic life than anything I have read before, including Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Towards the end of the book, Cass argues against the existence of God in a public debate at Harvard. But the last chapter is not left to the arguments of philosophers but to another celebration at the Valdener shul, a glowing scene that somehow makes the entire debate almost irrelevant.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 70 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Goldstein
EXTRAS:	36 Arguments website with excerpts and reading guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on the subject of God: God is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr. And, our review of: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Bibliography:

• The Mind-Body Problem (1983)
• The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989)
• The Dark Sister (1993)
• Strange Attractors: Stories (1993)
• Mazel (1995)
• Properties of Light (2000)
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (January 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005)
• Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006)

“Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior — to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own antimyth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme — and, at the outset, as implausible — as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to. In the early days of the state the idea appealed to almost everyone except the Arabs. All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once universally so popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 07, 2011)

Long though it is, this quotation sums up just about everything about Roth’s magnificent novel of 1976: its strange title, its grand theme, its somewhat simplistic view of history, and its humor that jumps cheerfully into offensive self-mockery. A long section of the novel takes place in Israel shortly after the Yom Kippur War, when the stereotypes were indeed being turned on their heads, and conversely significant criticism of the state was beginning to be heard from the West. But Roth’s principal subject is not the engaged Jews who assert their selfhood either through Zionism or religion, but the countless secular Jews like himself, living securely in a distant country; how do they establish their identity, especially in mid-life when the question of “Is this really all I am?” typically arises. And of course, being Roth, he handles this quest for the total makeover — the counterlife — also at a much baser level, in terms of the male need for female conquest as the final proof of potency.

I am writing this review also as a follow-up to my recent piece on Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, the most recent Man Booker winner. By coincidence, a friend gave me her copy of the Roth on the same day that I bought the Jacobson; neither of us connected the two. But now, having enjoyed both books immensely, I am amazed at how closely Roth anticipates Jacobson 34 years earlier. Both authors treat the same subjects (male libido and Jewish identity), in the same context (Roth’s book is set partly in England, Jacobson’s entirely so), and with the same sardonic humor (except that Jacobson would spell it “humour”). As far as contemporary events go, the three-and-a-half-decade time gap seems as nothing: Roth alludes to Western condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Yom Kippur War; Jacobson’s characters agonize similarly over Gaza. Both writers invade the no-man’s land between antisemitism and paranoia; Roth is the more neurotic of the two, but he has more bite to his satire, and is to my mind the greater author.

Roth has had two abiding subjects in his oeuvre: Judaism and sex. The Counterlife explores both, though from an oblique perspective, in that his principal characters are neither committed Jews nor always sexually potent. The book opens with Henry Zuckerman, a successful Newark dentist, not yet forty, suffering from impotence caused as the side-effect of his heart medication; sex is what he used to enjoy (with both a mistress and a wife) but can now no longer have. He takes the extreme step of having a risky bypass operation, in order to make a radical change in his life. In the next section, Roth offers a different outcome to Henry’s story, in which he abandons his comfortable American secularism and moves to Israel as a fervent Zionist, living in a militant West Bank settlement and studying Hebrew and Torah. In each of these scenarios, Henry is visited by his elder brother, the successful novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several other Roth novels and is clearly the author’s alter ego. Roth (or Nathan) has several other variants in store, but each involves an attempt at radical life change, moving into the heart of an issue from its fringes — the Counterlife of the title.

Writing through an alter ego who is one of the characters in the book enables the author to play narrative tricks that used to be called Pirandellian but are now labeled post-modern. One, as I mentioned, is the ability to change the story at will. The five sections of the book — labeled respectively Basel, Judea, Aloft, Gloucestershire, and Christendom, although these are not in every case their settings — contradict one another in several significant ways, as though emphasizing the author’s ability to manipulate a story at will. The Gloucestershire section (a skeleton key to the whole) even changes tack three times in eighty pages; it begins with the author describing his own funeral and ends with a preview of the final Christendom section, discussed by two of the characters who are to appear in it! While more literal readers may find this confusing, I found it remarkably easy to buy into the parameters of each section, as the only realities at the time. These switches not only added intellectual excitement, they also deepened the perspective and the seriousness of the issues being addressed, albeit in Roth’s characteristically flippant voice.

While Judaism and sex continue to battle for the spotlight, the sexual aspects will in the end be secondary. The answer to the question “Is this really all I am?” may be sought in adultery or divorce, but conversely by the former playboy settling down and starting a family; both are found in this novel. What makes the book so much more than soap opera is that Roth also poses the who-am-I question as a matter of ethnic and religious identity: What does it mean to be a secular Jew in a largely assimilated society? Is it the role of Israel to serve as what he calls the American-Jewish Australia, taking misfits attempting to find themselves as a people? His Judea section is brilliant in its portrayal of many different views of that extraordinary society, many of them extreme, few of them compatible, but all in essence true. He has one striking passage (a single sentence) describing a Sabbath meal in the settlement that, though probably intended with slight condescension, also brings a light to Zuckerman’s eyes: “Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation — a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.”

But Ronit is a minor character; all the principal women in the novel are Gentile. Roth’s men need non-Jewish wives for camouflage and, as it becomes clear, as opposites against whom to define themselves. Nathan returns from Israel to the suave dining-rooms of Mayfair and meadows of Gloucestershire. In turning these also into ethnic battlegrounds, he exaggerates hugely (though with a germ of truth). Yet he speaks strongly to the need of so many of us, Gentile as well as Jewish, to validate ourselves in opposition to the world around us, rather than settling for the quiet beauty of the ordinary.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (August 6, 1996)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Philip Roth Society Wikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS:	The New York Times review of The Counterlife (1987)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nemesis The Plot Against America Indignation Exit Ghost Everyman

Bibliography:

• Goodbye, Columbus: Novella and five stories (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• Deception (1986)
• The Conversion of the Jews (1993)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)**
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The Plot Against America (September 2004) **
• Everyman (April 2006)
• Indignation (September 2008)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

• The Ghostwriter (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Ogry (1985)
• The Counterlife (1985)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (October 2007)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

David Kapesh Novels:

• The Breast (1973)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Reading Myself and Others (1975)
• The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1990)
• Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for Goodbye, Columbus (2002)
• Study Guide for The Conversion of the Jews (2003)

Movies from books:

• Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (VHS only) (1972)
• The Human Stain (July 2004)

“Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn’t your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It’s a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It’s more than a nonsense, it’s a wickedness.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 23, 2010)

Nevertheless, Howard Jacobson does talk about it, together with gentile anti-Semitism and that philo-Semitism that may well be anti-Semitism in disguise. This brilliant novel, at once comedic and penetrating, is nothing less than a study of Jewish identity, at least as reflected by a group of middle-class Jews in contemporary London. This is satire, but equal-opportunity satire; there is nobody who may not be offended by it at one point or another, yet nobody who will not recognize the wisdom of Jacobson’s insights, as loving and humane as they are witty.

Libor Sevcik is an aging Czech emigré, a cosmopolitan Jew of the old school. After achieving fame as a Hollywood gossip columnist, he finds himself teaching in a London grammar school, where two of his pupils are Sam Finkler and Julian Treslove, a connection that he has maintained even as the younger men are nearing fifty. Finkler studied philosophy at Oxford, and has parlayed this into a career in print and television, processing the great philosophers in the cause of self-improvement, publishing best-sellers such as “Descartes and Dating” and “The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.” Treslove, however, had been “a modular, bits-and-pieces man at university, not studying anything recognizable as a subject, but fitting components of different art related disciplines, not to say indisciplines, together like Lego pieces. Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design, the Russian Short Story, Politics and Gender.” He now hires himself out as a handsome near-lookalike to any one of a number of famous figures.

Perhaps as a product of their schoolday rivalry, Treslove, who is a gentile, is fascinated by the mystery of Jews (whom he thinks of collectively as Finklers), members of an exclusive club that he can never join. But a random mugging near the start of the book (which he takes to be a misdirected hate crime) sets him on the path to becoming a Jew himself. After one misconceived attempt to plumb “the deep damp dark mysteriousness of a Finkler woman,” he eventually finds a genuinely Jewish partner in Libor’s zaftig niece Hephzibah, learning Yiddish phrases in order to woo her, then reading Maimonides under her direction. Finkler, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction. Using a guest appearance on “Desert Island Discs” as a career-booster, he gratuitously proclaims that he is ashamed of Israel’s policies in Palestine, and finds himself almost overnight the spokesman for a group of anti-Zionists in the arts and academe that he calls ASH, for ASHamed Jews. “They’ll soon realize their mistake,” his wife had prophesied; “with a greedy bastard like you around they’ll soon discover how hard it is to get their own share of shame.”

Increased anti-Semitic attacks at home and Israeli actions in Gaza and the Occupied Territories abroad take the action of the second part of the book well beyond passing comedy. Most importantly, Jacobson’s characters grow on us as people, giving their lives as much heartbreak as humor. I was reminded of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which treats similar issues of Jewish identity in a comic vision of American academe, but Howard Jacobson is richer as a novelist, wearing his smartness more lightly. I also thought of Ian McEwan’s recent Solar, another London-based satire of contemporary issues, but while McEwan seemed to be slightly out of his comfort zone, Jacobson is very much in his; this is satire that never sacrifices character to humor, and says something profound at the same time. And my goodness, the man can write:

“The London dawn bled slowly into sight, a thin line of red blood leaking out between the rooftops, appearing at the windows of the buildings it had infiltrated, one at a time, as though in a soundless military coup. On some mornings it was as though a sea of blood rose from the city floor. Higher up, the sky would be mauled with rough blooms of deep blues and burgundies like bruising. Pummelled into light, the hostage day began.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 158 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (October 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Yes!  Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	British Council on Howard Jacobson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Indignationby Philip Roth Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Coming from Behind (1978)
• Peeping Tom (1984)
• Redback (1986)
• The Very Model of a Man (1992)
• No More Mister Nice Guy (1998)
• The Mighty Walzer (1999)
• Who’s Sorry Now (2002)
• The Making of Henry (2004)
• Kalooki Nights (2006)
• The Act of Love (2008)
• The Finkler Question (2010) 
• Zoo Time (October 2012)

Nonfiction:

• In the Land of Oz (1987)
• Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993)
• Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997)