Four Gates to Modern Jewish Stories

This issue features the following four publications:

The Place Will Comfort You by Naama Goldstein (Scribner)
Natasha And Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (Picador)
An Hour in Paradise by Joan Leegant (W. W. Norton)
The Curse of the Appropriate Man by Lynn Freed (Harcourt)

You can also download a printable version (requires Acrobat Reader)

Review by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Four writers. Four voices. Four sensibilities. Four worlds. A quartet of recently released short story collections features many characters as permanent transients. “Everything we have is new,” says a transplanted Russian in Toronto. In Israel, olim, those who have immigrated, stand on the periphery waiting for their lives to take off, to ascend. Jewish families established for generations in South Africa are never fully invested in the civic life of the country. Then there are Jews in America and elsewhere attempting to reclaim their cultural or spiritual identities.

In The Place Will Comfort You, Naama Goldstein's Jewish Americans characters run through a range emotions as they adjust to Israeli society. The resulting experience is as uplifting as it is disorienting. Although these American Jews have returned to their ancient homeland, their country of origin is stamped on their souls. The homes they once had in America bear no relationship to the homes they now have in Israel and that fact extends to the dilemma of adjusting to a bilingual life. “I talk two languages without being taught,” says the ten-year-old protagonist in “The Conduct of Consoling.” “I know—I understand with the full feeling of living life—that you can be of one place and another, not all the same.”

But Goldstein is too accomplished a writer to belabor the difficulties these Americans have in learning Hebrew. Instead, she turns the tables by focusing on the awkward attempts of visiting relatives to speak Hebrew to the new Israelis. “The Hebrew studded in the cousin's English is dampened by her accent and misuse of the possessive form. We've noticed this in other relatives, the scant unintegrated stash of Hebrew tossed in like exotic peppercorns in a bland stew.” Goldstein creates her own exotic blend of words and sentences and paragraphs—all of it conveyed in stories in the first person, the second person and the first person plural. The effect is a spicy translation of the experience of feeling both familiar and foreign—the experience of aliyah.

David Bezmozgis's linked short stories chronicle an aliyah from one Diaspora to another. At age six, Mark Berman and his parents emigrate from Russia to Canada and grapple with disorientation and dislocation. The Bermans cannot return to the home they know, nor can they find any connection between their old and new surroundings. This sorry condition manifests itself in the acquisition of a new language. A six-year-old Mark recalls how “at three o'clock, bearing the germs of a new vocabulary, we tramped back home.” For his middle-aged father “the English language was more an enemy than an instrument.” Bezmozgis presents his readers with an ingenious rendering of an adult's embarrassment at speaking a new language like a child; it is the literary equivalent of shouting at someone as if that will help him understand. The Bermans eventually adjust to life in Canada, measuring their material and cultural successes in terms of a series of better houses.

The gap between immigrant and citizen becomes a great divide in “Mezivosky,” one of ten stories in Joan Leegant's exceptional collection, An Hour in Paradise. “The Russian next door was driving Koenigsman crazy.” The Russian is Mezivosky, and he has turned his backyard into a workshop junkyard. The neighbors argue and kibbitz over a fence with the tacit understanding that it marks a border not to be crossed. Mezivosky bitterly complains about life in America, and Koenigsman is reflexively as well as pathetically defensive.

Leegant's stories are deep, philosophical evocations of Jewish culture and life, and they never veer toward the pedantic. “The Tenth Man,” widely anthologized and arguably the book’s signature story, is the surrealistic tale of conjoined twins who are recruited to complete the daily minyan of a rundown shul. Leegant presents a conundrum of Jewish law, not to mention the shock that their appearance causes among the elderly regulars assembled for prayer, with equanimity and humor. “How should they be counted? Were they one man, or two? The tenth or the ninth as well? Were they even a man at all?” A lesser writer might play the situation for an easy laugh or slip into voyeurism. Instead, Leegant has written a cautionary tale of what it takes to count as a person as well as a mensh in this life.

In “How to Comfort the Sick and the Dying,” Leegant explores the dark side of returning to traditional Judaism, of becoming a ba’al teshuva. Three months ago Reuven was Robert, a small-time drug dealer who sold an eighteen-year-old girl a fatal dose of heroin. Reuven is now deemed ready by his rebbe to visit a dying AIDS patient. Reuven's life as an ultra-Orthodox Jew is meant to confer a new identity, to give his life a sturdy structure that will eventually give his days a higher purpose. Ash, the eerie last name of Reuven's patient, assumes that Reuven is a rabbi, a harbinger of death. Reuven does his best to dissuade the man of that idea as well as to fulfill Ash's request to tell him a story. However, the only stories that Reuven knows have tragic endings, endings that resonate with storyteller and listener. The visits to the hospital take their toll on Reuven. Like a recovering addict, he lapses and devours a bacon cheeseburger in a back alley. It's a moment that conveys the desperation of a man who, despite the promises of transformation and spiritual fulfillment made by his rebbe, can do no more than superficially embrace Judaism.

In her new volume of short stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man, South African writer Lynn Freed writes about Jewish families challenged by apartheid as well as their own outsider status. In “Foreign Student,” the unnamed narrator, who is a student from South Africa, is placed with the Grossman family of Far Rockaway, New York. It is July 1963 and she is eager to participate in the Jewish American dream of inclusiveness. The Grossmans—Goldie, Sam, and their daughter Marsha—waste no time in introducing their guest to their strange version of that dream by taking her on a weekend trip to the Catskills. Goldie preps the girls for the ultimate Jewish “meet market” with a trip to the beauty parlor and a shopping spree. Although everything about this family and their life is utterly alien to the narrator, they are cringingly familiar to most readers:

“See what I told you?" Goldie whispered. “Ever seen such clothes in your life?” She was right. Chunks of gold and precious stones circled fingers and arms and hung from ears like ripe fruit. Hair, dyed and teased, stood out in horns and wings. Silver and gold fabrics glittered in the light of the chandeliers. They were furs everywhere. Beaded bags. Jeweled spectacles. No one stared at me in my lamé and tiara. No one giggled as I did. I felt absurd. I blushed. I wanted to turn and run.

Unfortunately, Freed's sharp observations are occasionally dulled by plodding narrative or clichéd language. The cloying father, the daughter's botched nose job, the mother's vulgar taste, sends the narrator to the phone begging her parents for a ticket home, and the reader hurriedly turning pages to get away from these stereotypes.

In “Songbird,” Lena, a Holocaust survivor, regales her South African relatives with her wartime fairytale. Lena's version of her deliverance from death is contradicted by an elderly aunt who asserts that Lena's singing had nothing to do with her survival. Lena claims to have saved herself by impressing a German soldier with her sweet voice. What is revealed is that she had sex with the soldier while others around her were shot in front of a mass grave. Freed admirably succeeds in her risky venture beyond conventional history, revealing a dark, buried memory of survival.

In mystical lore, there were once four rabbis who tried to enter Paradise with varying degrees of success. These four short story collections showcase restless imaginations and heartfelt explorations of identity and exile with uneven results. But considered together they make a notable quartet of Jewish literature.

Excerpts from the Short Stories

Miss Alboit is cutting up tomatoes. She uses a little gadget, which she has let you hold and test, to gouge out the hard green cicatrices. When you handed her tool back, you saw her coded forearm, flickerings of blue-green ink, and tried not to brush it with your blank one. She hums once in a while. Otherwise, only the gentle sounds of blades.
--The Place Will Comfort You by Naama Goldstein

When survivors came, she kept tea going all afternoon, offered the cake again and again. For them, she would explain, it’s as if it happened yesterday. A crust of stale bread, a bowl of watery soup—that’s all they had, year in, year out.
--The Curse of the Appropriate Man by Lynn Freed

It seemed as though my parents had no secrets. I was nine, and there were many things I did not tell them, but there was nothing they would not openly discuss in front of me, often even soliciting my opinion. They were strangers in the country, and they recognized that the place was less strange to me, even though I was only a boy.
--Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis

The Germans were walking in single file near the factory buildings, corrugated metal roofs glinting in the sun. For an instant Boaz imagined they’d come to do penance, to work in the factory before moving on to some more terrible destination. Noah snapped a picture. “It wasn’t heroic, Chaim,” Boaz said flatly, staring ahead, listening to his own voice as if he were hearing someone else. He sounded almost cruel, and didn’t mean to, was talking to himself as much as to Chaim. Or the Germans. “It’s just how it was, and we had no choice."
--An Hour in Paradise by Joan Leegant

Questions for Discussion

1) Discuss the ways that Naama Goldstein and David Bezmozgis address the experience of learning a new language.

2) In what ways do Jews in these stories cling to their Jewish identities?

3) Discuss how the characters in Joan Leegant’s stories try to access halacha—Jewish law—during a crisis.

4) Discuss some of the difficulties that Naama Goldstein’s characters experience in making aliyah. How do they differ from those immigrating within the Diaspora?

5) What does the idea of a homeland mean to the characters in these various collections of short stories?

6) Should an author write about the Holocaust if she is not a survivor?

7) Are Jewish American stereotypes different today from those in Lynn Freed’s story, “The Foreign Student”?

8) Is the short story a more intense vehicle than a novel for addressing emotional issues such as identity?

9) Could the young women in Joan Leegant’s story, “The Lament of the Rabbi’s Daughters,” be considered post-modern incarnations of the four sons of the Haggada?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
Editor: Nancy Sherman
www.jewishreader.org