I’m not even sure this book is exactly what it purports to be, but I was still quite taken with my very first Francine Prose novel-length read.
This isI’m not even sure this book is exactly what it purports to be, but I was still quite taken with my very first Francine Prose novel-length read.
This is the story of Simon Putman looking back on a youthful time in his life. Technically speaking, most of the action takes place during his first post-grad job. But he breaks the fourth wall sometimes, passing judgment on himself from a distance.
The issue is, he comes to see what happened to him in his twenties as something ultimately fleeting and unimportant. “Once we know that something turned out all right, that we navigated a rough patch more or less intact, it becomes harder to pity our younger self or remember the grief and confusion, the dread of the disaster that didn’t happen, the panic of the deer frozen in the headlights of the car that stopped in time,” Simon declares from the future. The only problem is, his “rough patch” concerned a brush with McCarthyism, so. :P It’s kind of difficult for me to just brush it off.
The year, to begin with, is 1953. Simon and his parents are watching the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg execution for espionage on TV. They are constantly interrupted by snippets from regular programming—the primetime shows of yesterday—and Simon’s acerbic comparisons has me in the mindset of Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games. So, I'm hooked.
Young Simon recently lost out on the opportunity to go to grad school for his all-consuming mythology passion, so he’s sorta adrift. As are his parents, particularly his mother, who (like Prose’s own mother) knew Ethel in high school. The executions don’t only seem like a miscarriage of justice to this fam, but also a targeting of left-wing Jews.
Fast forward to the literary job Simon’s odious uncle Manny helped him to acquire. Suddenly, Simon’s boss is plopping a top secret project onto his desk for his editing expertise. The manuscript is a pulpy nightmare meant to save the publishing house from the dust bin—and it’s all about turning Ethel into a “vixen,” a woman who betrays her country for a salacious buffet of Soviet sex.
Simon enters an existential crisis about what to do. To pedal this crap feels like betraying his mother—and Ethel, with her famous last words about not being sullied by lies. Simon himself is a somewhat hidden Jew—his ancestors were given the Puritan last name on Ellis Island as some sort of antisemitic joke. (If Prose had taken the more realistic route, the family would have chosen that name for purposes of attempted assimilation. In any case, it adds to the aura of conspiracy surrounding Simon.)
From here, things kinda turn into a spy novel, complete with sexual seduction for our hero, and that’s skirting close to the line for spoilers! Let’s just say hidden conspiracies, propaganda and authoritarianism masking as patriotism abound. And that’s not to say that Prose and Simon paint Stalinist Communism with a rosy-colored brush, either. It’s just, that’s not really the enemy at Simon's doorstep.
And isn’t this a formidable enemy, not just some youthful indiscretion? Simon is duped by power players in a time of arrests and blacklists. Maybe he was lucky to get sucked in as McCarthy’s own star was finally starting to dim. Or maybe there’s something to be said that a nudnik mythology grad isn’t a big enough fish to fry for yesteryear’s MAGA folks. (My association more than Prose’s.)
This book is what Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles calls “either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story.” As the plot twisted and turned in it’s paranoid Cold War confines, I found myself as bamboozled as Simon was (what happened to be cynicism? I think it was just employed in a different direction.) Like Simon, I’m taken with myths of lore—House of the Dragon, say, might be a hack of the Viking stuff, but it’s still about scheming women, violent men and all-encompassing revenge. The audience salivates over it, where Simon and I push for more nuanced representation when it comes to modern literature (or television shows.)
Simon’s motives include a mix of progressive patriotism—the type where American democratic institutions win out—and yes, he’s able to win one over on the self-righteous propagandists who try and shame him. Feels more long-lasting than winning a Twitter argument, too. :P Other motives have to do with his family history, and his outsized sense of connection to Ethel. He knows, in his bones, that their situations, even their allegiances, are different. And yet, as American Jews, they’re sorta in the same boat, striving for purpose in a world that often lobs violent conspiracies against the tribe.
Looking back from middle age, Simon is probably right to realize that he’s not the center of the McCarthy saga. And, in fact, the relationships that have come to define his life are far less dramatic and pulpy than this sweeping experience of his youth. However, as religious Jews reckon with each Yom Kippur, the end always comes for us. Who would we be, if we had one last chance to redeem ourselves? What promises would we make, as middle-aged Simon does on a dangerous Coney Island ride? And though life usually continue on afterwards, don’t those promises, even made under fleeting duress, reflect something of our true selves?...more
A 21st century queer “Grease” retelling which, for its eyerolly moments, makes me think maybe I should keep dipping into romance sometimes. :P
In this A 21st century queer “Grease” retelling which, for its eyerolly moments, makes me think maybe I should keep dipping into romance sometimes. :P
In this technically dual-timeline narrative, Larissa returns home to Stratford, New York from a stunning vacation in the Outer Banks, where she came into her own. She’s glowing so much that her longtime crush, quarterback Chase Harding, *finally* notices her.
But—plot twist. Her personal growth over the summer was largely due to a romantic relationship she had on the beach with her mother’s boss’s daughter, Jasmine! And…wuddaya know. Jasmine, shockingly, transferred to Larissa’s school!
It’s senior year, and Larissa isn’t so keen on having her longtime dreams twisted. But that’s exactly what’s happening here, because Jasmine’s continued existence in her life means she has to contend with whether it’s best to keep that relationship going. Except, of course, no one but Larissa and Jasmine know of their secret past, and Larissa ties herself in knots as her fairytale with Chase gets off the ground and Jasmine ingratiates herself with the popular friends group.
There’s something that’s perhaps appealing about high school social hierarchies and those who subscribe to it. It kind of makes this novel like an Austen pastiche, since Austen’s protagonists also had social norms they were forced to follow. That being said, Adler’s characters and their conundrums are ultimately more shallow than the Regency stuff. Though maybe I should give them a pass for being modern high school students. :P
What I like in the scant offering of romance novels I’ve read is how relationships encourage protagonists to embrace the best in themselves. Sure, it was obvious which suitor Larissa should pick, but the internal journey felt genuine. The external journey, though…well, I think the thing that turns some readers off from novels like this is that the conflict revolves around people refusing to communicate with one another! (Until, of course, what my mother would call “the five minute mark” before the end of the Hallmark movie. :P) And, in some ways, those bad communication skills negate Adler’s assertion that these relationships are actually solid.
Still, I had fun. I liked that there were no pure villains, even if one or two character could be a bit self-absorbed. I liked the ruminations on how dreams for oneself grow and change. I like how Adler dealt with Larissa and Jasmine parsing their bisexuality. In today’s world, sexual identity often slides into morality politics. But at least when these two characters were probing the relationship, it felt human rather than scripted.
I also enjoyed that Larissa was a writer—of romance, of course—and other characters had quirky hobbies. I liked that the girls were confident in embracing their femininity when it came to beauty and fashion, though they never shied away from a good meal, either. :P I was okay with the obligatory snarky teen narrator voice, though I probably coulda done without the Larissa’s absent dad thing. Ah well.
Finally, I loved the Jewish rep, such as it was. Definitely not a heavily Jewish novel, but these are my GoodReads shelves, and I’ll do what I want with them! :P Even when Judaism isn’t centered, it’s always nice to imagine characters of the tribe who continue to engage....more
I had a more difficult time with this book than I thought I would, likely because of my own emotional state. I finished the book the morning of NetanyI had a more difficult time with this book than I thought I would, likely because of my own emotional state. I finished the book the morning of Netanyahu’s address to U.S. Congress, where I spent the day barricaded in my Capitol Hill office with road closures and increased police presence outside.
This slight novel doesn’t stay in its lane, as it were, when it comes to a chronological depiction of Jewish history, and I guess I’m not either. The whimsical Ashkenazi folkloric style—to crib from an easy example, “Fiddler on the Roof,” it’s “laden with happiness and tears”—left me feeling more wounded than anything. I grieved these three young boys, Jewish babes who left home and embraced a foreshadowing narrative.
One wonders if thirteen-year-olds were regularly assumed to be adept at map-reading in early 20th century Poland, where it seems the merchant Vevel sent three boys out, including his own kin, without a second thought. Elya is the budding salesman, tasked with selling brushes in the nearby city of Lublin. He’s an ambitious teen whose fate is the murkiest of the three (though Wilkinson assures us his dreams won’t be met.) Ziv is almost his opposite—his passion is for socialism, though he’s much mischievous than Elya, too. Kiva is the yeshiva bocher, a frail, religious boy who knows much more about ritual and texts than he does about the waking world.
Between the fairytale-esque names of towns and the three boys unwittingly taking a wrong turn, leading them to wader in a fruitless search, there’s a sense of unreality at play. We know, from the cadence of the writing, that the strictures of plot and destination have come undone. It’s a bit like THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff, where young characters ramble through the wilderness in search of a better future, except it didn’t feel as proscribed. Groff was trying to juxtapose a moral message whereas Wilkinson was haunted by what she uncovered of banal cruelties. Or at least I was haunted.
Elya’s turn to Yiddish humor tried to make the best of bad situations. ( “A young lad…who perished in the Odessa pogrom, goes up to Gan Eden where he meets Adoshem and tells him a vitz. Not just any vitz. A pogrom vitz. But Adoshem is not amused. ‘That’s not funny,’ Adoshem says. ‘I guess you had to be there,’ replies the lad.”) Wilkinson’s most direct grappling with the Holocaust comes when she discloses the fates of those celebrating a wedding. What is the point of all this? The easiest answer might be that for most of Jewish history, we couldn’t stop the tragedy. We could only live in the moment.
Elya, Ziv and Kiva’s journeys ended in character-appropriate ways for three young people who would never see home again. But between the antisemitism and the terrifying health realities of early 20th century Poland, there didn’t seem much to celebrate along the way. Sometimes I clung to these personalities, but I also often felt adrift myself.
I don’t think I can offer much by way of an objective review, but I’m grateful to Eric Karl Anderson of BookTube for inadvertently recommending this to me! It’s not yet covered on the Jewish Book Council website, but I hope it will be soon. ...more
I found this to be very moving and a little too dramatic at the same time? :P And the strange thing is, the most dramatic part of the story was the liI found this to be very moving and a little too dramatic at the same time? :P And the strange thing is, the most dramatic part of the story was the linchpin that worked best.
Beanland’s debut novel, based in part off of family history, imagines a family’s reaction to a daughter’s sudden drowning. But circumstances are even more fraught than they seem. The deceased young woman, Florence’s, older sister, Fannie, is in the hospital with a high-risk pregnancy. She’d lost a newborn the year before, in fact. So the mother, Esther, makes a crazy decision. They will hide Florence’s death from Fannie until the baby is born.
The year is 1934, so this is a slightly more possible endeavor than it would be today. Fannie isn’t scrolling through Instagram, heh. Still, this involves keeping Florence’s name out of papers, a radio out of Fannie’s new, solo room, and a bunch of subterfuge from friends, family and hospital staff.
Technically, Fannie isn’t the sun around which the rest of the cast orbits. They all have their own stuff going on, too. Fannie’s daughter, Gussie, is busy being seven-years-old in a fracturing family. Fannie’s husband, Isaac, is embroiled in a shaky real estate venture. Fannie’s parents, Esther and Joseph, are roiling from grief, micromanaging their surviving child's pregnancy, trying to keep Isaac at all involved with the family, caring after Gussie, and then there’s Anna. Anna is a family friend, to put it vaguely and possibly misleadingly for now, who came to them from Germany. The Adlers et al are Jewish, and things are rapidly worsening for Germany’s Jews. Anna’s here on a school visa, but she and Joseph are desperately trying to get Anna’s parents out as well. And finally, Stuart is the gentile character, a swim coach besotted with Florence who later gets involved with Anna.
Stuart may be the weak link for me, or perhaps the ultimate convenience of his plot with Anna, which I won’t spoil. While reading, I was largely engrossed. Beanland writes fully fleshed, compelling characters, who often transcend their plotlines. Even Isaac, easily the most dislikeable character, could be sympathetic, kinda. :P My good friend Kirkus criticized Anna’s inclusion, stating it was an “add Holocaust and stir” addition, but I think that negates the reality for a lot of American and European Jews at the time. From the very beginning, there were many active attempts to get Jews out from under the Third Reich.
I also like the sad irony that Florence, a confident and gifted swimmer, on her way to try to cross the English channel, in fact, could drown in what was a freak accident. I suppose it’s the pessimistic reminder that no one’s life is fully protected, that any moment could be our last. And yet, Florence lives on through her family, who remember her personal strengths.
….feeling very Yom Kippur with that last paragraph, and perhaps that’s apropos. The Holocaust is far from the only part of this story that’s riddled with Jewish history and custom. I appreciated how the “representation,” as it were, was threaded in as a significant part of their lives.
The story takes place over June-August, with each major character narrating once per month. Florence, who dies in the first chapter, is not included as a POV. Like SURRENDER, DOROTHY by Meg Wolitzer, the crux of this novel is dedicated to how others see her. Though Beanland’s subplot canvas is also much larger.
Philosophically, I think I grappled most with the framing of the story. It was very much about this bell jar of time, where Fannie didn’t know that her sister was dead, and no one else could fully mourn Florence, either. It’s sort of monstrous and fascinating, like watching a car crash in very slow motion. And yet: the legacy of this terrible secret will live on far beyond the bell jar. I’m pretty sure I listened to interviews where Beanland said that the post-secret reveal ripped generational holes into her familial fabric. How could Fannie not be psychologically affected knowing, later on, that she assumed Florence was alive when she wasn’t? And not because, like maybe what will happen with Anna’s parents, she has no way to know Florence’s fate; but instead, she was actively lied to? I almost feel like this book needs a sequel, heh. But I think Beanland has moved into fresh waters....more
An enjoyable, if strange, romp into 17th century Jewish England!
I say “strange,” because this particular designation is firmly held in my mind by THE An enjoyable, if strange, romp into 17th century Jewish England!
I say “strange,” because this particular designation is firmly held in my mind by THE WEIGHT OF INK by Rachel Kadish. It’s been a handful of years since I perused that book, and surely my memory of it has evolved past the actual reading experience. But I remember its accolades from both the Jewish and non-Jewish literary worlds; Steve Donoghue, in putting it on his best historical fiction list of 2017, wrote that “it’s a rich, detailed long novel, totally absorbing.”
And Siegel herself included THE WEIGHT OF INK on a JBC post where I found out about her book! She said that the author “interweaves the complex experiences of the nascent London Sephardi community with a perennial story about womanhood and how we connect with the past.” One might make the same argument for Siegel's sophomore novel, or perhaps make it in different ways.
Because here, the “how we connect with the past” might lead to a liiiiittle bit of anachronism. Siegel is definitely an author who is using her historical fiction as a template to explore completely taboo subjects of the day (the nascent Jewish community, interfaith marriage, homosexuality.) The main characters’ attitudes here are definitely more in line with our own than the 17th century main characters’ in THE WEIGHT OF INK.
But anywho. We are following Cecilia and David. Cecilia, a well-off young woman of the country, was able to marry in a love match—cut short when the two of them took holiday in London during the plague. :/ Since becoming a widow, Cecilia has been living in her sister’s London townhouse…but sister Margaret may have some ulterior motives with her altruism.
Meanwhile, David and his father are recent immigrants from Portugal, where they were fleeing the Inquisition. As Converso Jews, aka Catholic converts in name only, they would have faced death if they stayed. Luckily, around this point in history, England decided to open their borders to Jews almost 400 years after an expulsion. David is now able to live openly, but he’s unsure what his Judaism means to him. He’s still judged as a foreigner (and as a Jew,) but he throws himself into his work as a physician.
This is how his path crosses Cecilia’s. Cecilia has been suffering from “melancholy” ever since her husband died. But Margaret, herself hitched to a lord, wants Cecilia to go back on the marriage market for family networking purposes. David isn’t keen on that, but he wins Cecilia over by treating her like a human being with his care. Soon enough she feels well enough to defy Margaret and sneak out of the townhouse…only to randomly meet up with David in the park. :0
There’s a definite romance feel to this novel. Cecilia and David might in fact be a “meet cute” couple. Despite all the restrictions on their relationship (oh, and David is also bisexual,) they’re less ruled by fear than they are wonder in themselves and in their city. Siegel writes London’s enchantments with a thrilling amount of detail. Maybe this is her love story, too. :P
I enjoyed the push and pull between David and Cecilia up to a point—could get kind of repetitive after awhile. But props to Siegel for not letting their endgame get too 21st century—she also uses the infamous London fire of 1666 as a plot point, heh.
Cecilia was perhaps a more engaging narrator to follow with her, albeit simpler, story of an independent spirit trying to find her way in a sexist society. (Margaret wasn't completely evil, either.) As for David, I couldn’t help but wish we got a little deeper into his Jewish culture and ancestry, but perhaps that’s not in keeping with his character. He’d have to be a little bit of an outsider to engage in this particular journey.
Overall, I found this to be propulsive and fun. Probably for the best it’s not too much like THE WEIGHT OF INK anyway. This novel can stand on its own....more
Lots of big ideas in here that ultimately fizzled out for me. :/
Is this historical fiction, technically? I’m naming it as such for my own reading purpLots of big ideas in here that ultimately fizzled out for me. :/
Is this historical fiction, technically? I’m naming it as such for my own reading purposes this year. Be that as it may, we are predominately following Shiva, a twenty-something living in modern-day Brooklyn. After her father dies of cancer, her old grievances with her mother resurfaced (or maybe they never went anywhere at all.) Shiva wants her mother, Hannah, to open up about her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s tortured histories. This time when Hannah refuses, Shiva starts reading and ruminating on the works of Yiddish writer Sy An-sky, which leads her to quit her job and apply to grad school for Jewish folklore. As you do.
There’s definitely something a little Sue-ish, even if Fructer kinda/sorta acknowledges it, of Shiva winning over a checked-out professor with her half-baked ideas for a thesis, and even winning some grant money to travel to Poland, do research, and present at a conference that’s really meant for PhD students.
And we never get to the conference anyway. Because Shiva’s real agenda has less to do with academics than it does with traveling to her great-grandmother’s hometown where she randomly stumbles upon a crazy find linking great-grandma Mira to one of the most prominent Yiddish female writers of her day. As readers, we also get to travel back in time (see, historical fiction!) to Hannah’s childhood with her secretive mother, and we get to read some of Mira’s lost letters.
Fructer quite obviously means to tie Jewish folklore to queer identity. She highlights An-sky’s famous play, “The Ddybuk,” because accusations of possession were often directed at women who didn’t fit society’s mold. In Hannah’s youth, she followed the ritual of some urban Jewish superstition that claimed she could follow some steps and see her future husband in the mirror (turned out to be a woman, of course.) In generation-to-generation style, Shiva also falls for a woman with features detailed by both Hannah and Mira.
Shiva was born the day her grandmother, Syl, died, and in Ashkenazi custom, Hannah named her daughter in her mother’s honor. Still, “Shiva” (which is a post-death ritual) seems a liiiiiiittle too on the nose. :P
Shiva’s story may have had some sense of closure at the end, but no one else did. Maybe that was the point. Fructer is less interested in traditional folklore that catches my fancy—actual, full-fleshed stories—she likes fragments, rumors, superstitions. This could speak to broken family history, how little people like Shiva know about their pasts. But it’s less meaningful. Here, it’s mostly gimmicky.
None of these characters felt fully fleshed out. In fact, they all pretty much sounded the same. The folkloric writing style may have worked for the letters—kinda—and the prologue/epilogue, which explained the town’s history with laughter, because it was well known for badchens, or Jewish comedians who performed at weddings. For the present day, the writing could strain into flightiness and passivity.
I thought modern Warsaw was decent, the way Fructer made Shiva’s experiences in that city come alive. In terms of queerness, Shiva’s attraction to the burlesque and feminine was intriguing. I’m always a fan of seeing some Jewish cultural and religious practice (the latter came in Hannah’s storyline.) But overall, the story dragged. At the end of it, maybe there’s a scattering of interesting ideas. But nothing cohesive. ...more
I feel like I’ve been waiting to read a book like this for a long time. Even if it was, at times, veering into “autofiction.” :P
At the turn of the 21sI feel like I’ve been waiting to read a book like this for a long time. Even if it was, at times, veering into “autofiction.” :P
At the turn of the 21st century, Deborah Green is a Reform rabbi who is kinda treading water. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that like many people, one element of her life (work) is pretty fulfilling, while others (relationships)…not so much.
She has this in common with Lev Friedman, with whom she shares the POV stage in this novel. Lev is doing ok with his work as a science writer and his interest in ornithology, but ever since he stood up his bride-to-be at the altar, his family’s kinda been tiptoeing around him. This comes to a head when his father, Henry, is hospitalized for his second stroke (which he himself may have contributed to with a suicide attempt.)
Lev and Deborah meet while Deborah is doing chaplaincy visits at the hospital. Their relationship starts off slowly, with baseball dates being compromised by sudden requests for Deborah to conduct funerals (which also provides some foreshadowing for future events; more lighthearted than they may appear!)
I’ve been drooling to get a perspective of Jewish religious practice from a progressive lens. I may be missing more fiction titles that are out there somewhere, but this one certainly feels the most prominent. Alas, not every moment is filled with probing the mysteries of the universe, though Deborah does try to introduce Lev to the craziness of Talmud study. :P Mostly, Deborah visits the sick, counsels couples and conducts weddings, conducts funerals, and assists with Shabbat and other observances at the synagogue where she’s employed (less depicted on the page than the other stuff.) She’s a forward, if thoughtful personality, who can be as easy to judge as any mortal. :P Rabbis aren’t saints, after all. Though it was kinda disappointing that the relationship between the synagogue clergy members were so strained. (Not at all how relations are at my own synagogue, unless I’m buying into a mass delusion!)
Lev, meanwhile, is more cautious and conservative. Rosen goes back and forth between their heads, probing their thoughts and assumptions while getting to know each other, while at the meantime keeping a firm hand on a sense of place and situation. It’s a slow-moving plot, but these weren’t just characters stuck in a white room. I was very taken with Rosen’s balancing act.
Henry is a lesser, secondary POV who, like Rosen’s father, was the sole member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. He was put on the kindertransport to the UK. As a senior citizen he embraced more religion, and the “suicide note” he left for Lev is a major reason Lev turns to Deborah for religious guidance. (This also adds a little murkiness to their dance around personal vs theological feelings for one another.)
Henry’s boyhood friend, Neal, provides the dramatic climax to the book, for which I have mixed feelings. It’s hard to stay centered in the story when Neal is so clearly based on Michael Laudor, whom Rosen wrote about last year in his memoir, THE BEST MINDS. It almost feels like Rosen was using Neal to do some sort of therapy—maybe even a course correction—for an unrelated story.
Deborah’s real crisis came from an experience she had at the hospital, which shook her faith in God. Like one of the Orthodox characters in the novel, I’m used to dismissing supernatural belief as unimportant to Judaism, but Rosen deals with it poignantly and without overwrought fanfare. I can drool over literary fiction, too, and its ability to bring the interior lives of humans alive in small yet complicated ways.
I don’t know if Deborah is anything like Rosen’s real wife—also a Reform rabbi. I kind of hope not. I’d like Deborah to exist as a perfectly imperfect creation of the page. But no matter how much of her identity is owed to reality vs fiction, she won this Jew’s heart! ...more
Went into this book riding the hype train, and it mostly held up!
Disregarding the 1970s prologue, which sets up the mystery/thriller tassel of this liWent into this book riding the hype train, and it mostly held up!
Disregarding the 1970s prologue, which sets up the mystery/thriller tassel of this literary fiction tapestry, the story largely takes part in the 1930s. Chicken Hill is a community of Blacks and Jews in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Jewish Moshe owns some dance halls and his wife, Chona, runs a grocery store. As their fellow Yids slowly migrate down the hill to where the whites live, Moshe and Chona cater to diverse clientele, including the “Negroes,” largely due to Chona’s belief in tikkun olam.
I gave this “repair the world” pretext a little shade on BookTube, because technically I think it’s over-simplified and over-done in Jewish discourse. Still, it seems to fit Chona’s principles, and it leads her to the major plot of the story—hiding a deaf Black boy, Dodo, from the authorities who want to put him in a “special school” (read: institution.)
Unfortunately, the state brings the town doctor, Doc Roberts, into the mix. Roberts is a racist, antisemitic Klan marcher who wants his childhood home to go back to how he remembered it (kudos to McBride for walking that fine line of characterization in honestly depicting a villain.) He’s also had a thing for Chona since high school (both of them have physical disabilities) and when he goes to confront her, all hell breaks loose.
I’m sticking to cliches in order to avoid spoilers, but yeah, the action is compelling. But for better or for worse, McBride’s style is very Victorian (maybe I should choose my book club’s word instead, and say that he wrote the novel like a jazz fugue.) He jumps from character to character in Chicken Hill, making the general community fabric as important as Chona’s and Dodo’s fates. Some readers don’t like it, and others appreciate the look into this time and these relationships that could be dark but hopeful.
McBride deals a lot with American roots—from the false narrative from WASPs like Robert that they descended from the Mayflower, from the Black community made up from different southern migrant cultures, to the Jewish community made up of different Eastern European cultures. I think McBride lost the thread a little bit when he made grand sweeping statements about the future, even if I largely agreed with them and they grabbed me in the abstract. I’m pretty sure the “It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing” quote is the most shared on GoodReads, for example.
Besides, McBride already has an in-story character to use for this purpose: Malachi, who leaves the new world because he’s wary of Jewish assimilation. Malachi is also the only named character, “the last Jew in Chicken Hill,” in the 1970s. He’s really more of a narrative metaphor than anything, and I’d personally argue with him a little bit about some of his pronouncements. :P But oh well.
“Son of Man” is the Black character who comes closest to this, a character whose actions (villainous in this case) seem defined by the worst abuse suffered by his community. If you can’t beat the monsters, become them.
I guess that’s the thing, too. There’s something almost medieval about this novel, where the past is largely filled with inter-cultural community and hope, and the future is all about device[s] that fed [children] their oppression disguised as free thought.” Except that a band of Jewish immigrants do start a camp for disabled kids, modeled after the real camp that inspired this book and McBride’s interest in tikkun olam. So again, this is mostly a novel about hope. But McBride’s disembodied thoughts get in the way sometimes.
Still, this book is beloved because the characters and community shine through. As I write this review, the novel is still in contention for the 2024 BookTube Prize. I hope it goes all the way!...more
I enjoyed this one a fair bit, though the sense of overwhelm got a bit unwieldy after awhile.
In this upmarket novel, we are following Sophie BernsteiI enjoyed this one a fair bit, though the sense of overwhelm got a bit unwieldy after awhile.
In this upmarket novel, we are following Sophie Bernstein and Clemmi, the owner and events manager of a fictional northern Virginia indie bookstore respectively. Occasionally we are also in the head of a self-pitying, narcissistic poet, Raymond Chandler, which seemed unnecessary. The book dragged a little bit, and this seems like the easiest place to cut.
Anywho. The year is 2017. There is civil unrest around hate crimes and domestic terrorism, and a solar eclipse is on the horizon. Themes repeat as I read this in 2024, as luck (or its opposite) will have it. Sophie recently lost her husband to a heart attack, and otherwise feels a bit intimidated about the current state of the world. Like many of my tribe, especially in the face of “Jews will not replace us,” chants, she turns to “The Diary of Anne Frank” for solace. Or more escapism, really.
Sophie’s understaffed bookstore is always hanging on by a thread, and she secretly fantasizes about both selling the place and hiding out in its secret nook. Taking her cue from other novel protagonists, she also stubbornly refuses to be honest with those around her, lest maybe some of the conflict get resolved too quickly. :P But meh, maybe it fits her current breakdown mode.
Clemmi, meanwhile, is too busy for a breakdown; she’s overwhelmed by her never-ending job (end of day reports always remind her that her voicemail is full), and competing drama in her personal life. Her manic obsessive roommate, Florence, may be in the middle of a mental break (also, she’s crucially not contributing to the rent.) A drunken incident leads Clemmi to adopt a tortoise which looks suspiciously like Kurt Vonnegut, despite a lease ban on pets; more disastrously, she may be trying to get romantically involved with her self-involved, dickish colleague, Noah. Oh, and Raymond Chandler, recently made infamous for resembling Ted Hughes just a little too much (think: extramarital affairs and suicidal wife,) might in fact be her biological father. As you do. So, she does the “sensible” thing and arranges for the poet to do a reading in the bookstore, even as every other literary establishment is giving a wide berth.
Cancel culture protests are in the air, and Sophie dithers between her old school defense of free speech/separating artist from art, and her new-found fear of the world. Of course, the event goes on as planned (well, the drama shows up anyway) because Coll set it up in a novel, so. :P Honestly, the writing is quick and engaging, and Coll uses a lot of wit in describing how overwhelming it is to run a cultural mom & pop business (who knew that vacuum cleaners would be such a menace!)
But she heaped too much overwhelm into too little space, imho (one day could encompass Sophie fighting with the vacuum to the point of it eating her car keys, her car getting towed, picking up the wrong set of spare keys to retrieve it, getting into a tiff with the jerk who runs the impound lot before having to leave the car for another day anyway, and a bunch of meetings that go awry. Later, she’s served a lawsuit that’s baroque in the damages it’s claiming for a customer whose kid was startled by a dog—ending, of course, with the lawyer asking Sophie for a book marketing favor. :P) It’s all very funny, but after awhile, the funniness (I haven’t even covered Clemmi’s always-disastrous book events yet) gets fatiguing.
Still, as a book person it’s fun to geek out to the characters’ literary references. Plus, I always wanted to get a peek behind the scenes of operating an indie bookstore! I heard Coll, formerly an events manager at Politics & Prose, in conversation with another local bookstore owner at the Gaithersburg Book Festival last year. They both reminisced over the craziness, so maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on about things getting too over the top. :P
The ending was an expected cool down for upmarket fiction, which was moving but also felt alien to me. Totally my own bias: I’m hopefully ready to get over the existential crisis of 2017, but 2024, not so much. Maybe it would do me good to take a leaf out of Sophie’s…book (no pun intended. :P) There’s a world beyond the trauma. At the very least, I can get on board with the idea that books are the best way to mitigate things.
Final quirks and nitpicks: as a DC-area Jewish person, I very much enjoyed reading about those associations. But I think the cover should have substituted the dog for a tortoise and a vacuum cleaner! There’s a handful of complaints about the cover, methinks, and this one is mine. :P...more
A compelling trio of novellas about Israelis living in the United States. Like with WOLF HUNT by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, which I read earlier this year,A compelling trio of novellas about Israelis living in the United States. Like with WOLF HUNT by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, which I read earlier this year, obviously these pieces stand a little bit out of time in the post-October 7 reality. But they still have important things to say.
Or, if I’m to be honest, I was much more taken with numbers one and three than I was with number two. I’ll get to number two in a little bit.
THE HEBREW TEACHER, novella number one, centers around Ilana, an aging Israeli expat living in the Midwest. As an adjunct professor, she played a significant role in building up her university’s Hebrew and Jewish studies program. This is her little “fiefdom” and she’s happy here…until the university hires a new literature professor, Yoad.
Yoad, a 20s/30s something, is also from Israel but has a very different perspective of the land than does Ilana, who, pointedly, Arad decided should be born in 1948. Ilana hasn’t lived fulltime in Israel for decades, and her narrative about the country has largely been uncontested. She’s literally stunned when Yoad offers severing critiques of Israel’s more recent behavior, embraces a radical idea of Jewish diaspora, and refuses to engage with mainstream institutions like Hillel and synagogue book clubs.
Things only spiral from here, helped along by dwindling numbers in Ilana’s intro to Hebrew course, and her boss’s increasing desperation to keep Yoad from finding a different job. Beyond the Jewish/Israeli/Zionist politics is an undercurrent of power structures in the university system, which made me even more sympathetic to Ilana. Her entire career could be upended by some jumpstart professor (never mind that I agreed with some of his political critiques. Neither here nor there.) In terms of the writing, Arad was authentic instead of polemic, which, brava. Mazel tov. :P
The second novella, “A Visit (Scenes)” wasn’t polemic but it was underdeveloped. (Again, I’m reminded that I don’t always like more “experimental” writing, like confining the narrative to scenes.) Here, Israeli ema, Miriam, is visiting her son and daughter-in-law in Silicon Valley. She also wants to get to know her grandson better. This seems to be her first time in the States, or surely her first time since Yoram and Maya were married. She surprised them on a whim with her announcement, and she’s not really wanted.
Although Miriam is the most sympathetic of all of the characters, this perennial “old country parent can’t jive with new country mores of descendants” story doesn’t hold a lot of juice. I think it’s because it took me awhile to realize why Yoram and Maya were such assholes. And once I got there, I kinda wished I could hear their story, about stalled dreams, stale marriages, and the danger of Silicon Valley startups, from their own perspective.
But I got right back on board again for novella three, “Make New Friends.” Here, Efrat is a middle-aged Israeli expat trying to micromanage her daughter, Libby’s, failing social life. It goes really well. ;)
Beyond those mother/daughter dynamics, the crux of this story is in platonic female relationships and how difficult it can be to find stable ground. Libby’s specific designation in her friend group is “the odd one out,” which she feels keenly through being invited into social media apps where she’s ignored and forced to witness the others’ fun without her.
At one point in the story, the queen bee “dismisses” one of her ladies in waiting, so Libby actually gets some social interaction with the new outcast, only to be rebuffed when the queen bee takes her back. Man, did that bring back memories! :/ Social media may have exacerbated our social problems (sometimes,) but these friendship hierarchies go back generations.
The whole thing made me relieved afresh to be out of middle school, though like Effrat, I also find it difficult to maintain adult friendships. Arad’s ending is a little pat, where Efrat finally finds her way, but the earlier stuff is still solid.
Todah rabah to Jessica Cohen and New Vessel Press for making Arad’s work available in English! I hope some day I’ll be able to read more....more
I tried to squeeze in reading this book before my first-ever (or first in recent memory) in-person meeting with my synagogue’s book club. I only had aI tried to squeeze in reading this book before my first-ever (or first in recent memory) in-person meeting with my synagogue’s book club. I only had about 40 or so pages left when I sat down with them, but as this is a “literary thriller,” a lot happened in those pages, oy!
Can’t blame anyone but myself, really. And I’m always grateful for book club chats and perspectives. One of the only other women my age tackled this novel full-on as a true crime reader, and she impressed a lot of the group with her takeaways. But for me…I think my character-first literary snobbery came to bear, and I left realizing that although I liked the book a lot, there were some bridges I just couldn’t cross.
Gundar-Goshen, like me, might technically be more interested in character conundrums. She’s said her main impetus for writing this story is asking the question of her main character, Lilach, believes her son is a killer. :0
Let’s back up a bit. This novel centers on an Israeli-American family living in Silicon Valley. Lilach (grudgingly referred to as “Leela”) and Mikael (who now introduces himself as “Michael”) were adult transplants from Israel. Their son, Adam, spent all of his formative life in the States. Adam was a small, geeky boy for most of his life, though after a lone-wolf (pun sorta intended) terror attack at a local synagogue, he gets involved (very much with his parents’ backing) in a Jewish Israeli defense club. Flash forward a couple of months, and a boy who’d been bullying Adam dies at a party…and Adam becomes a suspect.
This novel was published in English (translated by Jessica Cohen) in September 2023, and because of October 7 it feels like it belongs to an alternate reality. I can’t imagine a scenario now where Israeli families wouldn’t be singled out for being Israeli. JTA has in fact covered some of this. But in the world of this story, Israelites is mostly an internal marker; to gentiles, they’re viewed primarily as Jews. The antisemitism of this book mostly stems from old tropes about Jewish money and power, which is placed equally on American Jewish shoulders.
Both the synagogue shooter and the dead classmate are Black. It made sense to me more with the shooter who, despite systemic issues being motivators, was a lone-wolf attacker. The dead classmate, Jamal, represented the Nation of Islam, which in my albeit limited perspective doesn’t ring true to how I understand the organization to operate. It also messes with plot issues I’ll get into later.
The book is a first person, almost epistolatory style where Lilach opens by talking about how Adam was accused of killing Jamal. She then goes back in time to lay out her story, starting with the synagogue attack that led Adam to Uri, the once-decorated Israeli war hero whose best days are behind him. Uri ingratiates himself in the family’s life, for reasons having to do with professional and financial mistakes me made later on, and he’s kind of a nice foil to Adam being “the bad guy.” Uri commits increasing unsavory acts as the story goes on, though the question of Jamal’s death remains a mystery. (The police ultimately rule it a self-inflicted drug overdose, but there’s some evidence that points to Adam mixing the drugs with his chemistry set.)
Gundar-Goshen also includes hints that Adam and Jamal may have been involved in a romantic relationship, but I’ll also leave parsing that ‘til a little later.
A lot of the older women from the book club were appalled at how much Lilach was inserting herself in Adam’s life, but I never fully got on board with that. Lilach made wrong turn after wrong turn in trying to get Adam to confide in her, but it didn’t seem unsound to me that she’d want to know about this relationship with Jamal, which was obviously very significant in Adam’s life. It was Mikael, with his hands-off “so long as Adam is following the narrative I want” sort of parenting that struck me as more problematic (and that thinking led him to professional problems as well.)
The intel we get about Adam and Jamal is completely second-hand, so that Gundar-Goshen can shroud things in mystery. :P Lilach learns that “everyone” (except Adam himself, to her) says Jamal bullied Adam. She also hears from “sources” that Adam voiced a desire to get back at Jamal. After Jamal’s death, his mother tells Lilach that her son was secretly gay, at least going by his computer history which, if I want to get technical, is not empirical evidence. Lilach also learns, after Jamal’s death, that at one point in the past, Jamal and Adam left school together, alone (not something you’d typically do with a bully.) This could indicate that they were once lovers, or at least friends. (Jamal also had lots of Adam’s clothes and shoes in his room, which could be either forced or willingly given. Adam reveals nothing to his mom! And readers are frustrated with Lilach??? :P)
So, what really happened to Jamal? Even if Adam was directly involved, it could be either malicious or an accident. The whole point is we won’t ever know definitively. But I’m still annoyed by this unexplored conceit that maybe an NOI kid and a Jewish kid were lovers solely for plot reasons, basically to give an “aha!” moment for book clubs like ours. :P Maybe if the story were more fleshed out, I could get behind it, but that would make the story more firmly literary, so. Alas.
But this is Lilach’s story, and thus we peel back the layers of her character. To me (and some others in the book club) what stuck out most is that Lilach was largely a loner, and outsider, who didn’t know how to foster relationships beyond her small bubble. She was also likely dealing with unprocessed trauma from a backstory incident. Gundar-Goshen is a therapist, after all, so mental health concerns aren’t too surprising to me. :P My takeaway is that Lilach viewed this whole situation through the lens of separation anxiety from the person she both felt the strongest need to protect and strongest impetus for a healthy relationship that was no longer there.
As to the question of whether or not you want your kid to be the “victim” or the “bully,” I see it a lot like “the promised land” issue. Nothing is that black and white. But our obsessions with these ideas say a lot about our cultural baggage....more
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