The War of the Rosens by Janice Eidus, Behler Publications, 232 pages, $16
It's 1965 in the Bronx. Many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe have by now gathered enough capital in America to be able to move on to better neighborhoods, and the Bronx remains a borough for the other, "left-behind" Jews. The Bronx of that time has also become home to many Catholic families from the Caribbean and Latin America, who, together with the Jews, live alongside the borough's veteran African American community. This cultural mosaic will grow to symbolize not only the Bronx (most Jewish families will in time leave, to be replaced by other ethnic minorities), but also New York City as a whole; and not only New York, but the multi-cultural United States at large.
It is this cultural collage that Janice Eidus skillfully depicts in her new novel, "The War of the Rosens." Eidus is the author of "Urban Bliss" and "Faithful Rebecca," two novels dealing with the choices and dilemmas facing modern, Jewish and in both cases also New York-based women, and highlighting questions of Jewish identities with issues of sexual and political repression. A native of the Bronx herself, Eidus once told an interviewer about her familial background, and it very much resembled the one she portrays in her latest novel - that of a secular left-wing Jewish household, where parents read aloud to their children from such writings as "The Atheist Manifesto."
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"The War of the Rosens" centers on Emma Rosen, an intelligent and poetic 10-year-old girl, who is troubled by questions of faith and spirituality despite - or perhaps because of - her parents' lack of religious conviction. "Remember, Emma, there's no one up there watching out for you," Emma's father, the communist Leo, constantly tells her. Leo certainly does not watch out for Emma, nor for her 13-year-old sister, May, who finds herself drawn to Orthodox Judaism through her infatuation with an observant Jewish boy, which leads to her hiding a copy of the Bible under her pillow. Emma is left to clandestinely seek answers to her big questions at a local Catholic church, and in a rather endearing episode at the church graveyard, she ironically turns to a statue of the Virgin Mary to ask how one can "become a good Jew."
The girls' mother, Annette, does not offer a better parental alternative. Still, suffering from severe migraines that leave her feeling incompetent as both wife and mother, Annette makes for a more sympathetic character than her violent husband. She slaves away in the kitchen to cater to Leo's demands of "vegetables tender yet crunchy," to guava jelly "with no lumps" and to his other culinary whims, while secretly harboring fears about his fidelity; and reflects on her two daughters, whom "she is certain she loves, but not at all certain she likes."
A seminal incident revealing the family's clash of beliefs occurs when the tyrannical Leo humiliates his daughters by taking them to the beach on Rosh Hashanah of all days, parading them in bathing suits outside their apartment building as the scandalized neighbors look on. When the three later ride up in the elevator - the girls thoroughly debased, the father triumphant - May notices the way Leo warmly greets their black neighbors. His manner is quite different from the marked contempt he displays for "the so-called Jews," who, he believes, "foolishly and desperately turn to the supernatural, wrong-headedly calling their fears 'faith,' despite all empirical evidence to the contrary." May is convinced that he likes blacks and Puerto Ricans better than he likes the Jews, or anyone else. The neighbors respond cordially to Leo, their friendly approach quite the opposite of the critical Jews', but still May can't help wondering what they really think of her unusual family.
Leo and Annette seem to be representative of the seam between two extremes in the American middle-class world of the 1960s: that of the pre-women's liberation movement and the Eisenhower legacy of social conservatism on the one hand, and the radical, black-is-beautiful "cultural revolution" of the '60s, on the other. In this respect they embody the peculiar, yet common, hybrid of the time, combining progressive socialist politics alongside strict domestic conservatism. It is when disaster strikes, in the form of a brain tumor being detected in May, that this highly dysfunctional household is put to the test, and the novel shifts from being a traditional coming-of-age story to a more complex narrative, as it examines the fragile thread that holds a family together.
The book's title says it all: A Jewish family is engaged in a private war, first against each other and later, united, against an external threat. But what obviously springs to mind is the title's "Jewish" pun on the "War of the Roses" - not just the medieval battles between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, but also Warren Adler's 1981 novel (later turned into a film), in which a couple's contentious divorce escalates into an atmosphere of sheer terror. Eidus' title thus achieves a double irony in alluding to the two distinctly different sources - to the historical milestone on the one hand, and to the popular-culture novel-turned-film, on the other.
Despite the promising setting and themes of the novel, Eidus' writing style often comes off as contrived and lacking in subtlety. Consider, for example, this passage: "Leo glances down into Emma's radiant, childish face, and is suddenly wistful, wishing he could honestly tell her that life isn't as hard as he knows it to be... But if that were true, Hitler would not have gotten away with such monstrous deeds, would not have gotten so far in his plan to exterminate the Jews." Eidus does not allow room for guessing; she is busy spelling things out for the reader.
Of course it could be that the author's blunt style is deliberate, intended as it is to filter events through the black-and-white prism of young Emma's sensibility. Yet it seems unlikely that even a highly intelligent child such as Emma - whose imagination and love for books offer refuge from oppressive parents and a spitefully envious sister - would remark, as she is gazing at an image of Christ on the cross: "He seemed to recognize her as a trespasser, a heathen, a pagan - His killer." Had the novel been narrated by Emma, on the other hand, we might have been awarded more witticisms and a sense of child-like rawness that characterize other novels featuring a young protagonist (such as Roddy Doyle's brilliant "Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha," also set in the 1960s, which tells of a young boy's childhood experiences in the poor housing projects of Dublin). Such credible and sensitive narration is sadly missing here.
Some readers may also be offended by the book's seemingly disrespectful depiction of Holocaust survivors, represented here by two neighbors - the marginalized and rather pathetic Mrs. Zelig, and by the unsettling Mr. Roshansky, whom the girls refer to as the "Dirty Old Man" because he is known to fondle young girls in the building's elevator. But this problematic portrayal of concentration camp survivors, albeit bordering on sensitive territory, lends a touch of authenticity to the novel - set as it is in a decade still characterized by an ambivalent treatment of Holocaust-related issues.
The brisk style and simple language of "The War of the Rosens" might mislead the reader into thinking it belongs to the popular "young adult" genre. In fact, the themes of religion and compassion - or lack thereof; the often brutal relations between parents and children, as well as the hovering shadow of impending tragedy, render it anything but a fun read, and might be hard to digest, and not only for young teenagers. Eidus succeeds in raising important issues, but one cannot help but feel that this is often done at the expense of character reliability, bestowed as they are with archetypal and often schematic characteristics, and that the final outcome remains heavy-handed and lacking in emotional depth.
From Tolstoy we may learn the lesson that only unhappy families are worth writing about. But perhaps not every unhappy family gets the writer it deserves.
Ruth Margalit is on the editorial staff of Haaretz.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
