Seize the Day School

By MICHAEL KRESS

The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green
By Joshua Braff
272 pages. Algonquin Books. $22.95.

I, like the rest of the world—or at least my (pseudo)intellectual-snob corner of it—read Wendy Shalit's New York Times Book Review attack on Orthodox writers and their portrayals of Orthodoxy, and I've followed some of the responses assailing Shalit's belief that writers like Tova Mirvis incorrectly and unfairly portray the world of Orthodox Judaism negatively. This cultural debate burbled in the back of my head as I read The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, by Joshua Braff. While Braff's novel does not revolve around an Orthodox family, I kept thinking about Shalit as I read about Jacob Green's abusive father, comically futile Hebrew School experience, and especially, the years he spent (prior to needing that supplementary Jewish education), at a woeful Orthodox day school.

In The Unthinkable Thoughts, Braff offers a painfully truthful portrait of a household that seems to offer everything—affluence and its trappings, love and support, education and tradition—but leaves its occupants psychically wounded, ready to flee at the first opening. The cause is Abram Green, a father who goes well beyond the domineering parent of Jewish stereotypes. This guy is emotionally abusive, in the classic borderline-personality way: cuttingly cruel one moment, loving and sweet the next moment, all the while narcissistic to the core. And apologetic... until the next time his expectations, large and small, go unmet, and his fuse is lit once again.

We meet the Green family at one of their—or rather, their father's—parties, this one a housewarming for their new neighbors and old friends. And immediately, we are drawn to the father's expectations, yearnings, self-centeredness, and ultimate emptiness. Here he is offering long-winded, aggrandizing, if lovingly sincere, introductions (over a PA system no less) of each family member, choreographing their moves all the while and expressing frustration at their missteps. Here he is agitated that his wife and baby are not where they are supposed to be for said introductions. Here he is, emotionally wounded, after his wife failed to show requisite emotion and gratitude at the love poem, embarrassing and over the top—"The white rose told me of your brow, / The red rose of your cheek"—that he read to her during his star turn at the mike. Already, we feel his controlling personality and the deep insecurity and neediness it masks.

Jacob, the narrator, starts the novel at age 10 and ends it at 15. The book mostly focuses on him, his coming of age in suburban New Jersey, and his relationship not just with dad, but also mom and older brother Asher. Disappointingly, Jacob's two younger siblings are little more than bit players. It would have enriched the novel to see the effects of Abram's personality on these youngest clan members, as well as seeing how Jacob assumes his role of older brother—and, presumably, protector—to them, as Asher was to him.

I don't know if Braff is (or was) an Orthodox insider, but Shalit would have a field day tearing him to shreds, verbally of course, for his depictions of ultra-Orthodox teachers with no control over classes and no connection to their students, concerned significantly more about Judaic than secular studies, and regularly submitting their students to embarrassing--and questionably legal, given the physical contact--inspections to ensure they're wearing tzitzit, the fringed undergarments of Orthodox men. Shalit's assumed condemnations aside, Braff displays a comfort with halakhah (Jewish law) and Orthodox culture that leads me to assume he is writing with some insider knowledge. More importantly, the novel's day school rings true for anyone who came out of that system. Sure, at my day schools we had many good teachers along with many problematic ones, secular studies were strong even as Judaic ones were privileged by administrators, and very few (notice, I didn't say none) of the teachers performed invasive tzitzit checks. But Braff's portrayal is dead-on; likewise, we Modern Orthodox day school alums all heard horror stories from students at smaller, more right-wing yeshivot where Braff's depiction would be considered journalism, not fiction.

But ultimately, the book is about neither Orthodoxy nor day schools, and even Hebrew School only plays a background role, and its depiction in the book will surely be distressful to many boosters of that type of education. It is the Green household that is center stage for Braff, and we are the better for it, even if the four Green children and their mother are not.

Painful to read, the novel's intensity mingles with and is relieved by Braff's humorous touch and his child-narrator's youthful observations and imaginings, his often-comical fantasies of a world where bullies don't bully, in the schoolyard or the living room. One wonders what Shalit--or some comrade of hers attacking depictions of Reform Judaism--would do with the Green family. But the point (or one of the many points) such criticism misses is that Abram Green doesn't stand for anything or say anything about any religion, any specific way of life, any ethnicity, at all. He is what he is, a parent whose desires for order and approval—from his family, friends, and community—lead him to wound those he loves, to push them so far that he's pushed them out of his life, in some cases literally and in others figuratively. He is a man who can't handle disappointment, especially if the neighbors might find out, and who tries to live out his own fantasies by making his children veritable golems whom he can make in his own image and then control absolutely. And in that, along with the reactions of those striving to break free of his grip, we can all see at least a glimpse into ourselves and our experiences and the drama of family life, Jewish or not-Jewish, Orthodox, Reform, or anything else.