Exodus and Aliyah: Jewish-American Writers on Israeli Turf

By SANFORD PINSKER

For many Jewish-American readers the novel about Israel they know and love is Leon Uris’s Exodus. Many read it in high school and the effect, on even those who did not especially like novels, was extraordinary. Exodus had everything that stirs young hearts: heroism, history, and mythic sweep. Zionism oozed from every page, so much so that complications—political or otherwise—checked their headaches at the door. Exodus gave the world vivid portraits of Jews who had equal measures of brawn and brains, and who could act decisively in their own interest.

Problem was, Uris was a clumsy writer. He had a lead ear for language and a disturbing way of telegraphing his punches. Even worse, his characters were not terribly realistic. Indeed, the litany of stylistic complaints could rattle on for pages but none of them would diminish by one whit the raw power that Exodus packed. And when Uris’s novel made its way to the silver screen, an altogether dreamy Paul Newman made teenaged girls (and their mothers) swoon. Most literary critics knew when they were outmatched by the popular culture and either dummied up or gave Uris a pass.

Serious literature about Israeli life would come later: Hugh Nissenson’s A Pile of Stones (1968), the late Saul Bellow’s non-fictional account, To Jerusalem and Back(l976), Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (l993) and the “Judea” section of The Counterlife (l987), Tova Reich’s Master of the Return (l988) and The Jewish War (l995), Ann Roiphe’s Lovingkindness (l993), Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate (l998), and Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Strange Fire (2001). These books, and others written in the years between the publication of Exodus and the early years of the 21st century, made it clear that Jewish-America writers had an imaginative range no longer confined to family squabbles and corned-beef sandwiches. They could also write about the tangled life that Israelis lived an ocean away.

Not surprisingly, some writers were more penetrating than others. Here, a comparison between  Philip Roth and Saul Bellow can be instructive: Roth’s Operation Shylock not only asks us to believe that a character named Philip Roth worked with/for the Israeli secret service but also that his extraordinary efforts  literally saved Israel from annihilation. “Take that!" the book fairly screamed at those who had been on his case since the early days of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. "Enough already with the dreary talk about how I’m a self-hating Jew," the novel seems to insist, "I’m as much a Zionist—indeed, more of a Zionist, than you."

The trouble, of course, is that nobody really believed that the Mossad would trust the likes of Philip Roth—or indeed, any fiction writer—with state secrets. The novel, with all its slipping in and out of autobiography, fell awkwardly between two stools: it was neither objectively “true” nor persuasively “false.” Like about half of Roth’s novels, Operation Shylock quickly landed in the “remaindered” pile, where it languished and was soon pulped.

By contrast, The Counterlife remains one of Roth’s most interesting fictions, if only because it marks the place where his ongoing experiments in postmodernist narration begin. It also marks the place where Roth tries to sort out the tangles that increasingly define life in Israel. I would like nothing more than to report that Roth’s account of Jewish fanaticism is by now dated, but, alas, it is not. Indeed, his telling fictional portraits demonstrate—as though more demonstrations are needed—that Keats’s “negative capability” is still the best way to probe the underside of deep political divides. In a land where there are five strong opinions for every four citizens, Roth was able to imagine a wide variety of Others, and in the process to portray an Israel still in the grip of fanaticism by Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Not only did Israel unleash some of Roth’s best writing to that point but it also suggests why The Counterlife still has life and why Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back was always dead in the water. Whereas Roth speaks to us through his riveting counter-voice, Nathan Zuckerman, Bellow’s rumination are, well, Bellow’s. The result in the latter case is an extended travel sketch, one that reminds us of how much we believed, really believed, that an egghead like Moses Herzog could lead us out of the postmodern wasteland (that is, if his breakdown somehow abates), and of how much Saul Bellow walks around Jerusalem as perplexed and confused as the experts he meets for coffee.

Granted, Israel has a long history of inspiring gush, even among writers known for their wise cracks (Mark Twain) or multi-layered ironies (Melville). Painters look upon Jerusalem sunsets and try, usually without much success, to capture the way that light glints off its stone buildings. In some cases, a good deal of research and first-hand knowledge goes into, say, the portraits of “Jerusalem fever” in the Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate; but there are also cases (Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Strange Fire is Exhibit A) in which an author may never have set foot on Israeli soil and still can make telling observations the land and its people. True enough, some Israeli reviewers were quick to point out that Bukiet was not always a reliable guide where street names and places were concerned—on this score Stone was much more informed—but Bukiet is much more concerned with capital-T Truths than with small-t ones.

The latest round of books about Israel written by Jewish-American writers suggest that a religious education and a life devoted to observance—once regarded as delimiting conditions for would-be artists—has become at once important and nearly a necessity. Why so? Because a growing number of Jewish Americans, especially in their 20s and 30s, have joyfully turned  a long history of assimilation on its head. As Dara Horn, the author of an ambitious first novel entitled In the Image puts it, “when young Jewish adults want to be rebellious, they become Orthodox.” Indeed, the desire of many young people is not to be richer than their parents or to live in larger houses than they remember from childhood but rather to be more religious. Even when parents are frum (religiously observant) what their children want to be is more religious. They not only want to be frum but to be very frum: “They [many beleaguered Jewish parents] had heard stories,” the narrator of Tova Mirvis’s novel, The Outside World, tells us, “about children who came home from Israel and carted off all the dishes in the house to be dunked in the local mikvah” (ritual bathhouse).

What this extremist behavior comes down to the latest spin on the old fairy tale question, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall/ Who’s the fairest of us all?” For a long time those in the grip of identity politics insisted that the issue wasn’t “who’s the fairest,” but, rather, who’s the blackest or the poorest or the most disabled  group in America. There was no end of candidates, especially when estimates of “authenticity” got thrown into the mix. Here’s one case (there aren’t many) in which the Jews were Yakovs-come-lately because what they asked was “Who’s the most authentic Jew of us all?” This query simply would not have occurred to an older generation that prided itself, above all else, on being thoroughly assimilated, mainstream Americans.

For a long time Jewish-American writers shied away from Israel because the land was not theirs—in its language, daily rhythms, and everything from Jerusalem’s confusing streets to the special coin required to make a telephone call. But a sea change has gradually emerged—an aliyah of sorts—as many young writers find themselves attracted to the omnipresent “Jewishness” of the Jewish state. Granted, I am not using aliyah in the strict sense that describes Jews who have resettled in Israel but rather as a way of pointing to the sympathies that prompted a number of Jewish-American writers to spend limited stays (a couple of months. perhaps a year) in Israel. The exception is Allan Hoffman, author of Kagaan’s Superfecta, a quirky comic writer who teaches at Bar Ilan University and who lives—easily, comfortably—among the ultra-Orthodox of Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter. When he writes fiction, Hoffman gives into his postmodernist imagination; when he prays, he does so in the company of his ultra-Orthodox chums by the Western Wall.

As with any grouping of writers, some are more interesting than others. That is true for the latest wave of Jewish-American writers on Israeli soil: Risa Miller (Welcome to Heavenly Heights), Ruchama King (Seven Blessings), and. Naama Goldstein (The Place Will Comfort You).

Miller’s novel is set in Israel’s West Bank where several orthodox Jewish families from America have made aliyah. What makes the work interesting, even distinctive, is the way that Miller gives a human face to people often written off as dangerous zealots. For many Jews, the presence of these Jewish settlers on the West Bank makes the peace process infinitely more difficult; so far as the settlers are concerned, a fundamentalist reading of scripture—indeed, God Himself—has granted them the land and that, thank you very much, is the end of that.

Fortunately, the community of Heavenly Heights is not as single-minded nor as intractable as the liberal media often suggests. They, too, have human faces, forever adjusting to the army helicopters that circle overhead or to the very real possibility that Palestinian militants will murder them in their sleep. Still, Miller gives only scant attention to the clash of political ideas; instead, much more attention is paid to the small details of daily life among observant Jews. Unfortunately, the details do not add up to a coherent, much less compelling plot. In the end, the upper middle-class family that the novel has been following decides to return to America and life in Heavenly Heights goes on as usual

By contrast, King’s novel is a love story, one in which how the plot shakes out is important. That said, however, I hasten to add that King sets her double- and triple-plotting in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish Quarter, a place King knows well. At one point she lived with a marriage broker and it is easy to see how real-life moments  crept into her fiction. Moreover, King knows how the ultra-Orthodox dress, eat, pray, and act. She is particularly good on the layer upon layer of customs that govern dating rituals, and it will surely surprise some readers that marriage brokers often arrange a whole series of “first dates,” before finding the right lid for the perfect pot. That, of course, is were the tensions in the novel reside, even though we know that her middle-aged American protagonist is headed for the chuppah in the concluding pages.

Finally, there is The Place Will Comfort You, a collection of eight stories that stretch from the l970s to the present and from difficult adjustments to living in Israel to ambivalent returns to America. Goldstein’s title, taken from the verses in Genesis that describe Jacob’s ladder ascending and descending from heaven, drips with irony because the various protagonists of her stories (one suspects that the person we see growing from a child to an adult is none other than Goldstein herself) are hardly “comforted” no matter where they live.

For Goldstein’s characters. Israel is a land with mixed blessings, especially if one is an outsider. In “The Conduct for Consoling,” where the phrase “The place will comfort you” is traditionally uttered, a bright but awkward American girl is picked to represent her class at the shiva of a classmate’s mother. Not only is her unfamiliar with the etiquette that surrounds shiva calls, but she was chosen solely on the basis of her academic performance. Try as she will, however, she cannot fit in: a classmate points out that “Americans are fat.”

In “Pickled Sprouts,” an America girl in much the same pickle as the protagonist of “The Conduct for Consoling” is mortified that her mother makes her take an American-styled lunchbox to school. These small details, which to be sure are not “small” to those who want to fit in with their new Israeli classmates, is one place where Goldstein’s book outshines her competition.

Another is her sense that Israel is a place where, as one character puts it, “you look out your window in the morning [and] your eyes might hit on the exact spot where Hannah prayed for a son. Hang your laundry, the wind on your clean sheets is also stroking the same ground where Eli the Priest lay his head at night.” The sacred and the profane so mingle that each embodies the other. That is what makes Israel so attractive to Goldstein but it is also why she waxes satirical about American visitors who want nothing more than to turn Israel into a religious theme park (see “A Pillar of Cloud”).

Most encouraging of all, Goldstein has a sharp ear for language, for those whose Hebrew speech is rendered in an appropriately awkward English as well as those American transplants struggling for fluency in Hebrew. The result are  sentences that capture Israeli rhythms, often slightly askew,  just as her sense of humor humanizes characters honestly trying to do their best: “My last report card in Leviticus I got an Almost Very Good Minus, in History of Our State Almost Very Good Plus, in Math Good Minus, which is a difficult subject for me, but English Class, even though it’s new this year, from the minute I started I was ahead. I can come up with more rhymes than anyone for Pin.”

Given the heart-wrenching news that comes out of Israel on a weekly, sometimes daily basis—about suicide bombings on buses and in pizza parlors—it is understandable that many Jewish-Americans put off making tourist visits much less making aliyah. Nonetheless, there are those who feel that if Israel needs the financial support of Jewish-Americans (and, indeed, of America) it also needs Jewish-American feet on Israeli turf. If the trio of Miller, King, and Goldstein bring varying degrees of talent to the literary table, their books suggest that Israel is now a congenial subject for those in the new generation of Orthodox storytellers.