The Bible to drunken angels

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

From the academic to the personal, from explorations of the past to ideas for the future, the nonfiction books reviewed by the Independent this year are an eclectic mix. Readers may not find every book entertaining, but each has unique stories and lessons to impart.

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Sacred texts influence almost everything in our lives, whether or not we would call ourselves religious: our notions of morality, our nation’s laws, our relationships with others, how we approach scientific inquiry, our social, political and economic systems, our cultural endeavors. How much the world has been – is and will continue to be – shaped by such texts cannot be understated. Religion has been used to comfort and enlighten, as much as it has been used to oppress and conquer. With globalization, it is hard to feel optimistic when a war(s) between absolutes seems inevitable. In what appears to be an increasingly polemic world, The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present is a welcome collection of essays.

Published by University of Toronto Press last year, The Calling of the Nations is part of the University of British Columbia’s Green College Thematic Lecture Series, wherein “each book brings together scholars from several disciplines to achieve a new synthesis in knowledge around an important theme.” This particular title had its origin in a series of lectures “on issues of land-title, territory and national identity arising from narratives that connect peoples and cultures of an ancient and ‘biblical’ Near East to those of a modern, putatively ‘post-biblical’ West and Far West.”

Editors Mark Vessey, Sharon Betcher, Robert A. Daum and Harry O. Maier had a challenging job in bringing such a range of views into one collection. Though weighted to Christian perspectives, the contributors often use the Hebrew Bible as a resource, or as the basis of their discussion, and Daum, also a rabbi, contributes a critical chapter. The other editors also provide summary, introductory or concluding essays, all of which help this volume maintain its focus, for the most part, on its stated themes: exegesis, ethnography and empire.

Though a dense work overall, several of the chapters are accessible to readers unfamiliar with the lingo of the writers’ academic fields and the subtleties over which there is debate within those fields. It is worth the effort of reading if solely to see the benefits of messiness, in-betweenness and ambivalence. According to Betcher, who contributes the epilogue, the anthology’s editors set out with the question, “What potential does sacred text have as a counter-hegemonic text and how can it be kept from reassimiliation to the dominant cultural narrative?” In her words, this question and the resulting anthology allow for “the possible hope of, even now, even yet in these conditions, unraveling bodies from the way in which a commitment to honor the ineffable as sacred sovereign/ty has been lived as superiority to others, exclusion of others and/or as en/title/ment to land/s.”

Betcher concludes, “... what the postcolonial practice of clearing or emptying delusions opens out upon today is not a vacuum, but a field of dynamic valences, the site-space of today’s urban neighborhoods – places that might yet be enabled to flourish by the practice of hospitality, humility and solidarity among persons religious. The form of this anthology itself, the give and take among editors and authors, suggests, I trust, something of a model for the ongoing public engagement of religions.”

Perhaps ironically, for the anthology to be an effective model, someone needs to take its key ideas, break them down into more readable articles and disseminate them through various media. Its ideas should reach a wider audience and, in its current form, the likelihood of that is minimal.

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When Cécile Charua’s mother asked her how she could be a member of the Parti Communist Français and take part in its resistance against the Nazi occupation in June 1940, especially since she herself had a daughter, Cécile replied, “It is because I have a child that I do it. This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.”

A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France (HarperCollins Publishers, 2011) by Caroline Moorehead relates the stories of several of the 230 women of the French Resistance who were rounded up by the Nazis, imprisoned in France and then sent to Auschwitz on Convoi des 31000, which pulled out Compiègne on Jan. 24, 1943. “The front carriages of the train, already closed, contained 1,446 me, put on board the night before,” writes Moorehead near the end of the book’s first section, which not only describes the women’s resistance efforts, but their lives prior to the occupation, their reasons for resisting and about their imprisonment in Romainville: “by the summer of 1942, it was the main holding depot for hostages from the Paris area.”

On Aug. 1, 1942, the first of the 230 Resistance women to be sent to the death camps arrived there. “She was a 32-year-old Spanish nurse called Maria Alonso, known to her friends as Josée, and she had looked after injured and sick members of the Resistance and assisted a woman doctor in a hospital to perform small operations in secret. Arrested for providing a network of post office workers with a mimeograph that had belonged to her brother, and given away by another member of the Resistance who had been severely tortured, Josée was acquitted at a trial that saw the men in her group sentenced to death. She could have fled, but that was not in her nature and, in any case, she had two small sons who lived with her since she was separated from her husband.”

The first half of A Train in Winter introduces readers to diverse women who tried to confound their occupiers and save potential victims of the Nazis. The second half describes how the women’s solidarity helped them fight for life in unlivable circumstances; even with their mutual support, most would die, and the 49 survivors would be forever haunted by their experiences.

Moorehead has done a vast amount of research using primary and secondary resources. From that, she has written a novel-esque history and her admiration of the women is clear. The narrative underscores the theme of friendship and its power to aid, if not secure, survival. A Train in Winter is a valuable addition to Holocaust-related history and literature.

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In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (Ecco, 2007), Lucette Lagnado told the story of her father. In The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn (Ecco, 2011), she recounts that of her mother, and herself, beginning with a description of the family’s synagogue in their newfound home: “Most of the women behind the divider,” writes Lagnado, “were refugees from the Levant like us, who had retreated to this small comfort zone whose name alone promised a buffer from the vagaries and pressures of the outside world: the Shield of Young David.”

The retreat began for her mother years earlier, when, despite thriving as a schoolteacher and librarian in Cairo, Edith, 20, was married to Leon, a man 22 years her senior, a ladies’ man and gambler. Marriage meant no more job, no more library, and four kids for whom to care. Edith wouldn’t recover her independent spirit and flourish again until well established in Brooklyn, when she manages to secure a job at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Lagnado’s life takes a similar rise and fall, the memoir beginning with an account of her first rebellion, at 10 years old. With the strong, intelligent Emma Peel of The Avengers as her role model – it is the mid-1960s – Lagnado organizes a group of girls to violate the mechitzah of her synagogue, and achieves short-lived success. Lagnado maintains her confidence until, just out of high school, she is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. As does her mother, Lagnado regains her footing and, in the end, the move to the United States benefits the whole family, perhaps her father excepted.

At times, Lagnado’s enthusiasm for her youth results in writing that is more youthful than one would expect from an experienced journalist with the Wall Street Journal. However, The Arrogant Years is an enjoyable read about a world with which many of us are unfamiliar.

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Motivated to broaden what he feels is the stereotypical image of a “true Jew” – think Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof – Bernard Beck sets out to solve a numbers game in True Jew (Algora Publishing, 2012).

After the Second Temple was destroyed, “Only about 25 percent of the Jews who lived during the first few centuries of the Common Era chose to join the rabbinic communities,” argues Beck. “The limited opportunities that these communities offered for the non-scholarly population and their restrictive environment resulted in disaffection and defection of more than 75 percent of the early Diaspora Jews.

“What happened to these Jews who chose not to compete in the scholarship race of the rabbinic community?”

Beck seeks out these unaffiliated Jews over the centuries and, if he had focused True Jew solely on this search, it would have been a unified, solid publication. However, he also tries to convince readers of the need for what he calls the “entrepreneurial rabbi,” who has management and marketing skills in addition to his ordination, and “self-sustaining synagogues,” which are owned and operated solely by the rabbi. He is apparently in the process of writing a book about these ideas, and it might have been better if he had saved this chapter for that book, instead of adding it to what is basically an engaging history of Jewish migration from 70 CE to the mid-20th century.

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One of the most succinct reviews of Alan Kaufman’s memoir Drunken Angel (Viva Editions, 2011) is from Kristen on Google Books: “He is just annoying.”

Normally, one might sugarcoat a criticism, or at least depersonalize it – calling the book annoying, for example, not its writer – however, Kaufman himself is not afraid to mince words and, quite frankly, he has been called and treated much worse. He can take it. Anyway, this book is all about him, so a reviewer could be forgiven for not differentiating between the creator and his creation. And, Drunken Angel is somewhat annoying. Yes, Kaufman has suffered a lot of abuse in his life – from others, starting with his mother, who beat him mercilessly, as well as himself – and he did struggle against alcoholism, for which he could serve as a role model to others. He also became a successful writer and father, impressive achievements given the trauma he experienced, the illnesses with which he was afflicted and the depths to which he sank. The first half of the book gets us there, while the second half focuses on his recovery. (He has been sober for some 20 years now.)

Kaufman has written other memoirs – Jew Boy, about his tragic childhood, and Matches, about his “shattering love affair” with a married woman and his time in Israel. How much more do we really need to know about him? However, as much as other reviewers have remarked on Kaufman’s tendency to name drop, self-aggrandize and lose focus, Drunken Angel has received acclaim. It will appeal to readers who like aggressive, explicit, fast-paced writing that supposedly tells it like it was/is, no holds barred, no embarrassment spared. Others will just find it exhausting.

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