Storytelling Through a Hasidic Lens

By SANFORD PINSKER

The Seventh Beggar
By Pearl Abraham
356 pages. Riverhead Books.$25.95.

Pearl Abraham came to wide public attention with her first novel, The Romance Reader, a disturbing, insider account of the limitations young females face growing up in a Hasidic community. The novel ends with her conflicted protagonist lighting out for the non-Hasidic territory, as did Danny Saunders, the male hero of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Abraham’s first novel did not become, like Potok's, a best-seller, but she collected enough readers who were interested in what her second novel, Giving Up America, would explore. Here, Kabbalistic interpretations were used to inform—and, yes, transform—the mundane details of contemporary American life. This pattern of yoking ultra-Orthodoxy with secular America continues in The Seventh Beggar, Abraham’s most ambitious work of fiction thus far.

The Seventh Beggar is about storytelling, as possibility and limitation. The puzzling tales of the 19th-century Hassidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, provide the background against which Abraham tells the story of a young boy obsessed with reduplicating Nachman’s spiritually/sexually tortured life, and then, after his mysterious death by drowning, how the search for a 21st-first century golem led his nephew, an MIT student doing research in artificial intelligence and robotics, to create Gog, a robotic golem all his own.

In the contest between the continuing power of Nachman’s 13 stories and the possibilities of technology, Abraham clearly sides with the need, then and now, for storytelling: “In the end, no matter how far we’ve advanced technologically, significant world events, important lives, and outstanding work continue to be passed on as stories, whether oral, written, or visual.” A few years ago Abraham delivered a paper at a meeting of the Modern Language Association arguing that imaginative Jewish literature begins with the great Yiddish writers of the nineteenth century—and perhaps especially with the enigmatic Nachman of Bratslav—because they felt the light and darkness of modernity most powerfully. Nachman’s fabulist tales are akin to Kafka’s parables, many of which foreshadow a Holocaust he imagined and that less than 20 years after his death, millions (including his sister) would experience first hand.

Abraham is well aware of the tradition in which young men are enjoined not to study Kabbalah until they were over 40 and safely married, but as a writer she knows that conflict is what makes readers turn the page. Thus, Joel adds the stories of Nachman to his reading while his sister Ada works on reshaping designer dresses so they meet the stringent rules for modesty and still maintain a sense of high fashion. Unlike the pinch-faced family in The Romance Reader, the Jacob children have opportunity to explore their creativity, but also to venture well past the limits. This is certainly the case with Joel who begins to feel that rote learning—i.e. how many pages of Talmud he has memorized—is less important than his effort to turn permutations of the Hebrew alphabet into a golem. The walls of Joel’s room are covered with letters just as his sister’s room is filled with sewing machines and manikins.

There are of course important differences between the two siblings: Ada blends the religious and the secular with few problems while Joel, who makes a pilgrimage to Rebbe Nachman’s grave Uman (in the Ukraine), is entirely given over to the utter honesty Nachman required of his disciples.

When Joel dies, less than halfway through the novel, one wonders how Abraham will complete. One could say that this was also Nachman’s problem with his unfinished tour de force, “Tales of the Seven Beggars.” At this point her plot becomes so complex, so given over to reworkings of Nachman’s stories and the box structure of stories-within-stories-within-stories, that mere plot summary seems quite beside the point. Suffice it to say that the novel provides us with an English translation of Nachman's unfinished story and then has the artistic daring—or the sheer chutzpah, depending on your point of view—to complete the tale. This is clearly the biggest risk in a novel filled with them. Others may disagree but my own feeling is that Abraham pulled it off—although I also suspect that if she rereads her ending thirty or forty years from now, she would insist on changing it.

What one remembers about The Seventh Beggar is its wide array of voices: the wedding jester who sings “This is a story about a bride and groom/ yaididaididaididai/ whose future the Nazis nipped in the womb”; Ada’s feeling that “if she were a detective, a Sherlock Holmes, or a skilled storyteller who found patterns and consequences everywhere, she could connect the disparate details and find Joel”; or the opening verse from The Book of Cog: “In the beginning there were zeros and ones, unordered and without meaning. And Cog hovered above, where memory stood empty and void…”

It has always been true that good fiction is easier to read than dry books about history, sociology, or philosophy because it sweetens them with stories. Abraham is squarely in this tradition but what she has done that strikes me as remarkable is the way Jewish ideas, many probably unfamiliar to her readers, first come alive and then resonate long after the storyline fades away. Rebbe Nachman did not intend his tales to be homiletics in the usual way that Hassidic rebbes did; rather, his stories were meant to be challenges, and among the things they challenged most of all was spiritual complacency. The pursuit of the pure soul was a matter of asking the right questions rather than of memorizing the right answers. That, in essence, is what each of Nachman’s stories illustrate; and that is also what Abraham, to her credit, points us toward in this absolutely brilliant novel.