Fiction fuels reflection

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The world is a hostile place; it always has been, and likely always will be. The novels reviewed by the Jewish Independent this Rosh Hashanah are set in time periods ranging from the late 800s to the 2030s and they take place in several different countries, but one aspect is common: their protagonists must deal with a host of conflict, and some very difficult choices.

The best read by far of the six novels reviewed is The Golem and the Jinni (HarperCollins Publishers) by Helene Wecker. From start to finish, the story is imaginative, well constructed, smartly written and compelling, asking at its core whether it is possible to live beyond one’s nature.

Wecker’s novel – unbelievably, her first – begins in 1899, with the golem and her master on a steamship bound for New York from Danzig. The golem was created as a wife for Otto Rotfeld, who, in addition to “his arrogant disposition ... was gangly and unattractive, and had a tendency to leer,” by the mysterious and frightening Yehudah Schaalman, who “liked to dabble in the more dangerous of the kabbalistic arts” and was “willing to offer his services for a price.” (Schaalman will also make his way to New York eventually.)

Though advised to wait until the ship arrives in New York to waken the golem, Rotfeld panics, thinking he might have been duped, and summons her to life on board. As her life begins, Rotfeld’s ends: the stomach pain he has been ignoring turns into a burst appendix, and he dies. The golem is alone, “her reason for being” gone. Not only is she “dizzy, unmoored,” but she finds that she can hear people’s thoughts, in any language, without their speaking them. “It was as though, without Rotfeld’s commands to guide her, her mind was reaching out for a substitute and encountering the ship’s worth of passengers that lay below. Without the benefit of the bond between master and golem, their wishes and fears did not have the driving force of commands – but nonetheless she heard them, and felt their varying urgencies, and her limbs twitched with compulsion to respond. Each one was like a small hand plucking at her sleeve: please, do something.”

Schaalman’s warning to Rotfeld encapsulates the golem’s main challenge: “A creature can only be altered so far from its basic nature. She’ll still be a golem. She’ll have the strength of a dozen men. She’ll protect you without thinking, and she’ll harm others to do it. No golem has ever existed that did not eventually run amok.”

Meanwhile, “not far from where the Golem came ashore, there lived a tinsmith by the name of Boutros Arbeely. Arbeely was a Maronite Catholic who’d grown up in the bustling village of Zahleh, which lay in the valley below Mount Lebanon. He had come to adulthood at a time when it seemed every man under the age of thirty was leaving Greater Syria to seek his fortune in America.” Arbeely is working on “an old, battered, yet rather lovely copper flask” that had been in coffeehouse owner Maryam Faddoul’s family “as long as she could remember”: “Would it be possible, she asked Arbeely, to repair a few of the dents? And perhaps restore the polish?”

As he touched the fire-heated soldering iron to the flask, “A powerful jolt blasted him off his feet.... He flew through the air and landed in a heap.... Stunned, ears ringing, he turned over and looked around.” There was the jinni, looking “as though he’d be chained for years in the world’s deepest, darkest dungeon, and then hauled roughly into the light.” Not noticing his nakedness, but seeing the iron cuff on his wrist, the jinni attacks Arbeely, wanting to know where the wizard is, the one who trapped him in human form. The jinni chafes at his imprisonment, and finds it difficult to humbly accept the type of life possible in his newly inherited community.

Both the golem and the jinni encounter humanity – and themselves – at their best and worst. For the first third of the novel, the two new immigrants find their own way, getting some help and some interference from, among others, their intriguing neighbors in New York’s Lower East Side and Little Syria, respectively. Chava, as the golem is named by the kindly rabbi who thankfully takes her into his home, becomes a model of restraint and sacrifice, while the jinni, who has chosen the name Ahmad, revels in taking risks, not overly concerned with the well being of others. When Chava and Ahmad finally meet, each recognizes the other’s true self, and the excitement (and relief) of possibly being able to connect and share with another “person,” is palpable, but initially the fear of being exposed wins out. The relationship develops, however, and it is truly beautiful.

Much else happens in the book, of course, and Wecker somehow manages to connect all the many strands of her complex tale into a perfect ending. The whole story is simply wonderful.

Another well-told story or, more accurately, stories, is The Storyteller (Atria Books) by veteran author Jodi Picoult. Incorporating the mundane, the horrific and the mystical, Picoult tackles some heady topics, most notably whether it is possible to ever atone for a particularly heinous action or to forgive someone (or yourself) for such an action.

In The Storyteller, four stories dominate: that of Sage Singer, a young woman bearing a scar on her face that motivates her to avoid people, to the extent that she has taken the job of a baker so that she can work at night, out of public sight; that of elderly Josef Weber, who asks the Jewish-by-accident-of-birth-only Sage to kill him for the crimes he committed as a Nazi SS officer; that of Sage’s Holocaust-surviving grandmother Minka (Sage’s mother has died); and the story that Minka wrote during the Holocaust, which helped her survive. We also get to know a little about the people in Sage’s life in the small town in which she lives: her boss and co-worker, her married lover and the FBI Nazi hunter assigned to her case, Leo Stein.

On her website, Picoult talks about why she wrote the book. She credits Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. “In it,” writes Picoult, “Mr. Wiesenthal recounts a moment when, as a concentration camp prisoner, he was brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew. The moral conundrum in which Wiesenthal found himself has been the starting point for many philosophical and moral analyses about the dynamics between victims of genocide and the perpetrators ... and it got me thinking about what would happen if the same request was made, decades later, to a Jewish prisoner’s granddaughter.”

Picoult notes, “A lot of people will ask me why, after all the Holocaust literature that has been written, I wanted to tackle this subject. I am agnostic, but I was raised by Jewish parents and so, like Sage, I find myself in the odd situation of being a spokesperson for a religious group I do not personally affiliate with anymore. And yet, someone has to be that spokesperson. Am I more qualified because I have relatives who died in concentration camps? That’s not for me to say. But some stories need to be told, and this is one of them, even though naysayers will insist that it’s ludicrous to hunt down ninety-year-old men at this point. But ... is it? There’s no statute of limitations on murder.... If we have a moral responsibility to the past, it’s to make sure that history like this doesn’t repeat.... Perhaps by doing this, we are also sending a message to the person who, in another far away genocide, is thinking of pulling a trigger because a dictator has told him to do so. Maybe that person will remember that no matter how long it takes, for the rest of his life, this government will pursue him. And maybe that will be enough to make him put down the gun.

“That’s why I wrote this book,” she concludes. “Because stories matter, and there are six million people who did not have the opportunity to tell theirs.”

In The Storyteller, Picoult does not shy away from describing brutality in detail, but she breaks up the tension with some witty one-liners and silly situations, mainly in Sage’s narrative. The writing is uneven, the elements of brilliance in the imagery of and feelings evoked by Minka’s story within a story and the harsh reality of Josef’s life mixing somewhat uncomfortably with the romance-novel nature and predictability of much of Sage’s story. That being said, The Storyteller is a fine read and well worth the time. Especially given Picoult’s incredible selling power, it is a book that needs to be out there – because it is written by such a popular author and in an entertaining way, it could go a long way to educating many people about the Holocaust, and genocide in general, and this is a benefit that cannot be overrated.

Just as there are those who wonder why Jews “just can’t get over it already” when it comes to the Holocaust, there are those wonder why everyone “just can’t get along already” in the Middle East. While Michael Lavigne’s The Wanting (Schocken Books) doesn’t provide new insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it does lay out the many issues well and provides an interesting perspective that might speak to readers more than any facts and figures can.

Lavigne ably ventures into the mind of his two protagonists: the father, Roman Guttman, and his daughter, 13-year-old Anyusha. A survivor of a terrorist bombing,

Roman is haunted by the head of the Palestinian whose explosives killed himself and 10 others, as well as injuring 42, including Roman and a number of Arabs. The Palestinian’s head flew through the window of Roman’s office, causing him to fall to the foot of his drafting table, thereby saving his life, as the entire window shattered soon thereafter. Roman suffers much physical and mental damage, however, and he begins a journey of recollection (of his life in Russia) and of trying to make sense of the present (still not being safe as a Jew, even though he is living in the Jewish homeland).

Roman abandons Anyusha as he tries to sort things out, and ventures into the Palestinian territories to find the suicide bomber’s family. The head/spirit of the bomber, Amir, follows Roman around, confused that he is not in paradise and that Roman is not as dead as he is. We become privy to the events leading to Amir’s deadly choice, as we witness Anyusha falling prey to similar zealotry on the Jewish side.

The manipulability/vulnerability of people, especially those who are dispossessed and in desperate need of belonging; the toll that violence and oppression take on the mental health of a person, a people and a nation; and the futility of vengeance are adeptly portrayed in The Wanting. Lavigne is a skilled writer, who makes readers feel everything that his characters are experiencing. The only major problem with this book is the last page, the last four paragraphs to be exact. There is no reason for Lavigne to provide a glimpse of his characters’ futures; he should have left them unknown, he should have left his readers wondering.

A much-different reaction to a violent, life-changing act comes from the imagination of author Janice Weizman. The main character in her first novel, The Wayward Moon (Yotzeret Publishing), is 17-year-old Rahel. About to be married, her charmed life in mid-ninth-century Iraq comes to an abrupt end when a rival of her father (her mother has passed away) breaks into their home, murders her father and attempts to kill Rahel, who manages to defend herself. Forced to go on the run because, as she recognizes, it would be “only a matter of time until Abu Said’s relatives came looking for me. Revenge would be demanded and taken, long before I could plead my story to a judge. The only way for me to survive was to flee.”

Disguised as a boy, Rahel sets off from Sura to find her father’s uncle, who “had long ago gone to Tiflis in the footsteps of a Karaite woman,” in the hopes that he will take her in, and arrange for her to be married. During the first parts of her journey, and the dismal and demeaning circumstances she is forced to endure (including rape, slavery and illness), Rahel overcomes suicidal thoughts and fear by a desire to read Antigone: “My father had tried to educate me, far more than is normal for girls.... Rather than accepting my limitations ... he chose to ignore nature and teach me reading and writing, not only in the Aramaic that we spoke at home, but also in Hebrew ... and also a little Greek.” One of the last father-daughter moments Rahel experienced was leaning over a book and slowly sounding out the Greek letters spelling Antigone. When she asks her father what it means, he explains that it is the name of the heroine and that, “a day will come when you’ll recall this conversation and then, when the opportunity falls into our hands like a ripe fruit, we shall speak of Antigone again.”

After she finally is able to read the work (while hiding in a monastery), Rahel’s drive comes from within herself. With the help of one of the monks, and the education she received at the monastery, Rahel is able to appreciate her hard-fought and unique freedom, though, ultimately, being a woman in the ninth-century, her fate isn’t entirely of her own choosing, so her life has a conventional ending. However, she does choose to write down her story, so that it “would live on”: “In this way, the truth about my life, my real life, would be saved.”

Another brave heroine – and another harrowing adventure – is depicted in Klara’s Journey (Marion Street Press) by Ben G. Frank. A veteran journalist and travel writer, Frank is at his best when explaining the historical circumstances in which his title character finds herself. At the beginning of almost every chapter, he sets the scene, describing what (really) took place at that time and/or place, quoting from historians and offering fascinating lessons about the events leading up to and just following the Russian Civil War.

The story itself is well told and it is an interesting one. Fittingly, given the chaos reigning around her, Klara’s journey to find her father, who left the family for Canada but hasn’t been heard from in years, is nonlinear. The trains don’t always run on time, or at all; soldiers and other fighters are everywhere; poverty and famine, distrust and unrest add to the hardship and uncertainty. Klara witnesses the brutalities of ar, but also the generosity and kindness of which people are capable, even in the most desperate circumstances. Mirroring the greater conflict around her, Klara’s closest ally and enemy is her brother, Mischa, who is jealous of her being chosen by their mother to find their father. In reaction to that feeling, he becomes a soldier, managing to stay on the winning side, becoming quite successful in military terms.

The unevenness of the writing quality detracts from the overall impact Klara’s Journey could have had. Descriptions of Mischa’s “strong upper torso” or of Klara’s “smooth, filled-out body, her sensuous thighs, her perfectly formed breasts,” for example, take the reader out of the moment. Other descriptions are so violent and disgustingly realistic, such as when Klara witnesses a priest masturbating on a train or when Mischa calls her a bitch, that they also catch readers off-guard in their extreme in the other direction. There are several passages that would have been improved (or removed) with tighter editing but, that being said, Klara’s Journey is still worth reading. Frank constructs a believable story, he isn’t afraid to create imperfect characters (Klara and Mischa’s father, for example, is a splendidly flawed character) and he knows a lot about Russia, and so, too, will readers when they put down Klara’s Journey.

The final book reviewed by the Independent this year also suffers from inconsistent writing and the need of a good editor. An author who has obvious talent, Gila Green’s first shot at fiction, King of the Class (Now or Never Publishing), is part love (or hate) story, part apocalyptic fiction, part thriller. If she had chosen one of the latter genres, that novel likely would have been a great read. As it is, the love story is frustrating and it overshadows the book’s other aspects.

It is 2019 and Israel has experienced a civil war, the ramifications and violence of which are continuing, but, at this point, there is secular Israel and Shalem (Jerusalem), both places so highly oppressive it’s a wonder that there’s the need because of a burgeoning population in the region, later in the book, for a third “country,” Yovel Island, to be built in the Mediterranean.

The story begins with Eve being abandoned by her fiancé Manny, who bails on their planned wedding when he suddenly decides to become Orthodox. The religio-political divisions make a union between Eve, who is not religious, and Manny untenable, unless one of them gives up their life/beliefs for the other. Eve does this because she is visited by a “before-lifer,” a soul “in between before-life and life,” i.e. Eve and Manny’s as-of-then-unconceived first child. Despite this vision, Eve leaves Manny after trying to live with his new selfish, intransigent self, and she returns to Ottawa, where her mother lives. (Her sister lives in Israel.) In Ottawa, Eve feebly attempts to find a job – she goes to an interview at a Reform synagogue without taking the time to find out anything about Reform Judaism! – then the novel skips ahead to Yovel Island in 2021, with her and Manny talking about baby names for their firstborn. In another two pages, it’s 2032, with Eve still unhappily married to Manny (who remains a jerk), now with more children.

Terrorism and conflict continue, and friendly fire brings tragedy to Eve’s family. The science fiction part of King of the Class is the most compelling, and it is a meaningful thought experiment to take the divisions that exist within Israeli society, as well as the external enemies the state is facing, and to extrapolate them to their extremes, examining their effects not only on maps, but on the people living in the region. It is a call to consider the type of society that we hope Israel will be(come), and Green has valuable ideas on the subject. However, the book veers off at this point to the thriller section, when Eve and Manny’s eldest, 11-year-old Netsach (the pre-soul for whom Eve returned to Manny) is kidnapped. If the reader is emotionally vested enough in the family, the last 100 pages of the novel will be page-turners.

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