Bearing the Body by Ehud Havazelet, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 296 pages, $24
Like Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Kraus, Nathan Englander, Dara Horn, Michael Chabon and a host of other contemporary Jewish writers, for Ehud Havazelet, Jewish identity and experience drive a heroes' story through complex American narrative terrain. For them all, Jewish problems in a modern landscape - not merely American or general ones - churn at the center of the conflicts which their characters must encounter.
If Israeli literature by definition is accustomed to engaging the thick web of Jewish history tangled up in even the most secular tales, the 20th-century genius of American Jewish writers lay in striking out for the Big Questions through stories denuded of most Jewish language, religious content, or communal commitment. In this regard, a novel like "Bearing the Body," the author's second novel, after several highly regarded collections of short stories, represents an important shift in literary tone and intention.
While perhaps not a masterwork, "Bearing the Body" is fresh, honest and jarring, particularly because its Jewishness is not a foil to the meaning of its characters' struggles, but rather an integral part of the lives described.
Havazelet, who teaches writing at the University of Oregon, interweaves Jewish history and identity within an American narrative, and does so with stellar prose, and the stamina to carry sad, deeply poetic emotional tension from start to finish. This may be a model of how today's Jewish literature can lead readers through the intimacies, restlessness and ambiguity of modern life with mature Jewish voices and conflicts woven into its core.
The dominant American Jewish literary figures of the past 50 years - most famously Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and the recently departed Norman Mailer - focused the Jewish portion of their narrative energies on Jews as American seekers and iconoclasts. The Jewish-outsider status of their Jewish characters (and the writers themselves) deepened the hues of the American burdens and gifts at the heart of the project - philosophical, sexual, literary, political and economic. Yet the struggle of Jewish identity and history itself was barely a back story in most cases. Judaism was an old, dead skin to be shed, Jewish identity a conflict to be outgrown.
With exemplary literary milestones authored by popular writers such as Foer (hunting for the broken line of his family heritage in Ukraine in "Everything Is Illuminated") or Chabon (searching for a new Jewish state in Alaska in "The Yiddish Policemen's Union") preceding him, Havazelet tracks the remnants of Holocaust survivor Sol Mirsky's family from Boston to Queens to San Francisco.
ghThe message of these works and others is that Jewish American literature as a whole now stretches further than ever across the abyss of Jewish meaning opened by the nexus of Shoah, Israel and assimilation. The Jewish mark on narrative conflict and resolution is indelible and unrepentant. These are authors who cannot tell an American story without engaging Jewish voices and tradition deeply.
In order to appreciate the difference in tone and perhaps mission of today's leading Jewish writers, consider how most maintain a connection with the formal cultural institutions of the Jewish community as well, even as they strive for general appeal. Imagine Bellow or Roth not only on the New York Times Bestseller List, but also at a JCC book fair, synagogue lecture or Nextbook reading - the kinds of places where one can consistently find any of the younger Jewish writers mentioned above. Members of this "new wave" sometimes emerge from traditional Jewish backgrounds, and in other cases gained an interest in Jewish text and culture only as adults, but in either case, Jewish engagement is essential to their work and public role.
Havazelet's Sol Mirsky is a Holocaust survivor straddling massive gaps in Jewish history, crippled by and obsessed with the memories of a wasted Jewish Eastern Europe as he wades through the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s in America. By day he battles labor unrest at the ladies' shoe plant he manages, a victim of the overall meltdown of American manufacturing industries, while at home he personifies the slowly simmering anger of the working middle class, his children radicalized and rejecting his way of life. But at the heart of the book is more than mere generational conflict, because the America Mirsky's children rebel against is also the refuge he has built from the destruction of the Shoah.
Widening generation gap
With all of the trauma that the father carries with him from Jewish history - and particularly with that he cannot explain to his children, being able only to display the damage it has caused - the burden of the Jewish past widens the American generation gap even further. Until it is bridged, it is as if time itself has stopped in the novel, which makes for a harrowing and deep reading experience. American and Jewish conflicts are intertwined in ways enlightening and thematically complex, and the resolution the novel seeks must unravel both.
In one of the most painful and compelling scenes of the book, Sol's eldest son, Daniel, and Daniel's admiring younger brother, Nathan, both approach the turmoil of their father's working life as an amusing political playground where they can romp and masquerade in their newfound hippie political consciousness. Goading their father's striking workers to pile massive heaps of shoes on the factory floor to protest their low wages, the boys unwittingly create a flashback to mountains of abandoned shoes, eyeglasses, and of course, bodies, from the Shoah that burns a hole through their father's heart. This is a betrayal he is unable to describe to them, but it is something he will carry with him for the rest of his life.
And while "Bearing the Body" never explicitly suggests that Daniel's self-destructive path from naive '60s radicalism to '90s junkiedom is a mutation of his father's paralysis and pain from his memories of the Holocaust, the relationship is clear. When Daniel dies in a gunfight on a San Francisco corner known for gang warfare and drug deals and is cremated in accordance with his wishes before the family even has a chance to see his body, the parallel between the European and American Jewish story becomes brutally visceral: ashes.
Revealed early in the novel, the symbolic nature of Daniel's death and the liminal state of his physical remains drives forward the familial and Jewish
historical conflicts at the heart of "Bearing the Body."
Beginning with Sol's youth and his survival of the war, through the children growing up and stumbling through their adult lives, Havazelet recalls the family's poignant day-to-day struggles, culminating in a solemn but somehow hopeful concluding scene in which Sol, Nathan and Daniel's girlfriend and her son finally find a fitting ending for Daniel's remains. But in telling the story of the death of the boys' mother (and Sol's wife) by cancer, Daniel's rise and fall as a hippie activist, Sol's lonely life as a widower in retirement, obsessively grunting and pushing his way through long daily swims at the Y, and Nathan?s unlikely career as an angry, alcoholic ER doctor, Havazelet makes the resolution of the fate of Daniel's body into more than a families' struggle, but rather a metaphor for how Jews can make sense of a past almost too heavy for them to bear.
Suicide note by mail
Throughout the story, it is the Holocaust that continues to haunt Sol and the book as a whole, as he sits at his desk through the night and into the wee hours of the morning, his head buried in the shadows of reams of correspondence from other survivors, for whom he attempts to track the fate of family members still lost since the war.
The narrative thrust of the novel is split between Sol and Nathan, who is depicted mostly during his period as an addled internist unable to maintain relationships. When Nathan receives word of Daniel's death in a long and intractable suicide note delivered by the U.S. Mail, he drops nearly everything in his life - including his long-time girlfriend - and heads off to collect the remains of his estranged brother on the other side of the continent.
It is not only the occasional Hebrew phrase or stories of smoking pot in the Jewish day-school stairwell that suggest a Jewish presence to Nathan's gloomy spiral. There is also the sense that ghosts of the Holocaust are in some way the cause of his bad behavior. Even as a second-generation survivor, he bears so much of the burden of his father's unresolved past that he can sustain neither the passion nor the people nor even his place in his own life.
Before leaving his job as a doctor, Nathan only finds meaning in the sleeplessness and constant life and death chaos of the emergency room - an ultimate extreme of human drama and life's cruelty - even though he cannot translate the subtleties of being a healer into relationships with his lovers or his family. He only feels alive when the world is falling apart - an experience somehow paralleling that of the camps that has seared his father's life, yet had remained all but unspoken in the Mirsky home as the family came of age. Nathan's fate, then, becomes a long trial of creating and living out his father's Old World chaos for himself, but on new American terms, until his brother's death forces the family to confront the roots of its turmoil.
To fully appreciate the shift of Jewish focus in the work of Jewish writers, compare the story of Sol Mirsky with that of Swede Levov, the patriarch of Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" (1997). As the tragic hero of a tale narrated by Nathan Zuckerman - Roth's fictional alter ego of three decades who appears to have reached his natural end in this year's "Exit Ghost" - Swede Levov is American born and bred, tall and blond, a wunderkind high school athlete who grabs the prettiest girl in the state for a bride. In building a successful factory, becoming wealthy, and living the life of a New Jersey suburban lord, Levov has only one ostensible quirk as he pursues a secure, common, prosperous American life - his Jewishness. But Roth's story is not about what makes a Jew unique from any other American tumbling in a heap from the top of the social ladder like Swede Levov, but how flawed and shaky the scaffolding of the American dream as a whole really can be.
Clearly, in some sense the specific American tragedy at the heart of the Mirsky and Levov families is the same: Levov's only child, his daughter Merry, and Mirsky's son Daniel are both pulled into the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era, as their adolescent dinner table rebellion evolves into radical rejection of the fathers' sacred values of order and hard work. Alternately expanding and contracting their identities by keeping shady company and burrowing deep into the American radical underground, each commits a horrible crime, and, ultimately, succumbs to violence that in turn exposes the family to forces that had split it apart.
But the thrust of Havazelet's novel adds a layer to the American Jewish experience that "American Pastoral" only really suggests fleetingly - the forces obvious, mystical, and often ignored that animate the Jewish element of American Jewish life. "Bearing the Body" becomes a story not only about what American Jews eager to assimilate into the general culture run from - the story of so much Jewish American literature until recently - but also what of the Jewish past, even inexplicitly, they cannot help but run with.
A writer like Havazelet offers a fresh reflection on how the foundations of Jewish life in America are shifting. Literature that trades Jewish ambivalence for Jewish interest may not yet match the artistic achievements of the iconoclastic giants of decades past, but for now, the budding popularity of smart, compassionate, gutsy engagement with Jewish meaning by the "new wave" of Jewish writers suggests that, in America at least, where writers lead, Jewish cultural sensibilities and general readership will often follow. Both readers and writers are restless for richer contemporary definitions of what a Jewish American story might contain, and, having borne so much cynicism and irony about the nature of the Jewish experience in the most famous generation of Jewish literature, it is time for the body of the canon to bear more Jewish weight than it could have carried before.
Stephen Hazan Arnoff is a writer and teacher, and the executive director of the 14th Street Y of The Educational Alliance in New York City.
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