OBLIGATORY MULLAH REFERENCE:

Must Orthodox fiction be so fictional? (Wendy Shalit, Feb. 15, 2005, Jewish World Review

Last month, in a move that shocked many believing, observant Jews, The New York Times published an essay in which the author takes issue with the negative portrayal of Judaism's most fervently Orthodox in contemporary fiction. It didn't take long before the literary world was abuzz with attacks against her.

Here, she responds to her critics — a JWR exclusive.

My recent January 30 New York Times essay on fictional representation of Orthodox Judaism seems to have touched a nerve. I wanted to spark discussion, but I've been surprised that some have reacted against what they suspect I am thinking, as opposed to what I actually wrote. Some have deduced that I feel "people don't have the right to their own experiences," or that I'm a "Soviet" who secretly advocates "lowering our artistic standards in order to accommodate a better message." One writer accused me of covertly thinking he didn't "stand at Sinai"; another likened me to "the mullahs of Tehran" who want to ban books.

Since I do not actually aspire to be a mullah, I feel the need to clarify. . . .

All the authors I discussed are great writers, and I'm sure they are good people too. Nevertheless, they are simply not from the fervently-Orthodox community that is featured so negatively in their novels. Unfortunately, the media (and many readers) seem to feel that these writers are representing the traditional Jewish community — one "grants us the illicit pleasure of eavesdropping on a closed world," and another describes wacky newly religious types with "devastating accuracy" — when by their own admission the authors do not identify with these worlds.

In quoting the authors' public statements about themselves, such as Nathan Englander's explanation that he's disillusioned with his modern Orthodoxy or Tova Mirvis's considering herself "liberal, feminist, open Orthodox," I am not critiquing their personal choices. I am examining why sometimes their haredi characters lack realism. The fact that these authors do not come from the specific subgroup they often write about would not be an insurmountable obstacle, so long as they didn't rely on negative stereotypes. Unfortunately, sometimes they do. The traditional Orthodox characters in their novels tend to be hypocrites.

Why is the best writing advice to "write what you know"? Why did Joyce write with maps of Dublin on his desk, when he was born and raised there? Because the fact is, authenticity in fiction does matter.

Everyone knows this intuitively, so why are certain literary types so upset by my essay? I think I've run up against a shibboleth. It's simply taken for granted in the literary world that if you can come up with a sufficiently odd cast of Orthodox characters, you're on your way to a great novel. And I'm challenging that formula. I'm saying: maybe this is not sufficient. Cynthia Ozick has said that "fiction has license to do anything it pleases," and indeed it does. But is that any guarantee that the fiction will be good?

Don't get me wrong: I think all these novelists are talented writers. But I think that they would be even better if they didn't rely so much on their characters' hypocrisy to fuel their plots.

I'm not advocating any sort of litmus test for Jewish fiction. I object to these novels on purely literary grounds: I find much of the contemporary fiction dealing with Orthodox Jews to be too predictable. Whenever an "ultra-Orthodox" character comes on the scene, I already know he's gonna be a bad guy. I have the same problem with officially "kosher" novels: before picking them up, I already know all the characters will be sugar and spice. That's just as tedious. Even religious people aren't all good — or bad. Sometimes they can surprise us.

At the same time, we have relied for too long on people disaffected with the Orthodox world to produce an Orthodox literature that verges on caricature. Their characters, ostensibly spiritually motivated, never show anything resembling an inner life or concern for others. For me it's hard to get inside such flat characters, and I always had this problem — even before I became interested in Judaism. Sometimes there is not even much of a setting in these novels, because a steady parade of weird religious Jews is seen to be sufficient.

I don't think it is.

Most of all, such literature is just lazy and hackneyed. You'd think anti-religious authors might recognize that while it's fine to portray the faithful in a negative light, you have to do at least a little heavy-lifting to explain the endurance and appeal of these beliefs over thousands of years. It can't all be weirdness and hypocrisy.

MORE:
The Observant Reader (Wendy Shalit, 1/30/05, NY Times)

JONATHAN ROSEN'S novel ''Joy Comes in the Morning'' features a beatific Upper East Side Reform rabbi named Deborah whose days are spent reassuring insecure converts, studying the Talmud and cuddling deformed newborns whose parents have rejected them. This paragon is, we are told, like a ''plant . . . nourishing herself directly from the source.'' But if Deborah is a plant, she's certainly not a clinging vine. When she propositions a man named Lev, it's with a sexy whisper: ''I'm a rabbi, not a nun.''

In contrast, Deborah's Orthodox ex, Reuben, is a Venus' flytrap. Although he wasn't supposed to touch her, he had no qualms about sleeping with Deborah, a slip she's sure was ''only one of the 613 commandments he had violated, but perhaps the one he most easily discounted.'' Curiously, Reuben showed ''more anxiety about the state of her kitchen'' than he did about spending the night -- next morning, he went through the dishes to make sure she had separate sets for milk and meat.

You might think Reuben is just a guy with a problem, but the problem may also be the author's. In the course of the novel, Rosen dismisses modern Orthodox men as ''macho sissies'' and depicts ''pencil-necked'' Orthodox boys ''poring over giant books instead of looking out the window at the natural world.'' Rosen's yeshiva students ''give in to the simplicity of rules rather than the negotiated truce that Deborah seemed to have achieved.'' Even an elderly lady attracts his withering eye: ''Like many Orthodox women of a certain age, she had the look of an aging drag queen.''

Authors who have renounced Orthodox Judaism -- or those who were never really exposed to it to begin with -- have often portrayed deeply observant Jews in an unflattering or ridiculous light. Admittedly, some of this has produced first-rate literature or, at the least, great entertainment, but it has left many people thinking traditional Jews actually live like Tevye in the musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'' or, at the opposite extreme, like the violent, vicious rabbi in Henry Roth's novel ''Call It Sleep.'' Not long ago, I did too. [...]

Consider, for example, Nathan Englander, a talented writer whose collection of stories, ''For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,'' brimmed with revelations of hypocrisy and self-inflicted misery: a fistfight that breaks out in synagogue over who will read from the Torah; a sect whose members fast three days instead of one and drink a dozen glasses of wine at the Passover seders instead of four; a man whose rabbi sends him to a prostitute when his wife won't sleep with him. Of course, the Orthodox don't actually brawl over who reads the Torah, no rabbi is allowed to write a dispensation for a man to see a prostitute, and even extremely pious Jews can't invent their own traditions for fast days or seders. Englander's sketches were fictional, but did most people realize this?

Apparently not. The world at large took him to be a ''former yeshiva boy'' who had renounced his old life. Englander didn't help matters by referring to the ''anti-intellectual'' and ''fire-and-brimstone'' aspects of his ''shtetl mentality substandard education'' -- a strange way of describing the Long Island community where he grew up, which prides itself on its tolerance and dedication to learning, both secular and religious. Englander is about as much a product of the shtetl as John Kerry. He actually attended the coeducational Hebrew Academy of Nassau County and then the State University of New York, Binghamton. It was one of his supposedly substandard teachers who encouraged him to write in the first place.

Englander is one of a number of outsider insiders. In 1978, Tova Reich's novel ''Mara'' depicted an Orthodox rabbi who doubles as a shady nursing-home owner, married to an overweight dietitian so obsessed with food that she gorges herself with five-course meals, even on the fast day of Yom Kippur. The Hasidic hero of her 1988 novel, ''Master of the Return'' (praised by Publishers Weekly for its ''devastating accuracy'') abandons his semi-paralyzed pregnant wife in her wheelchair in order to spit on immodestly clad female strangers; at home, he helps his 2-year-old son get ''high on the One Above'' by giving him marijuana. Reich's 1995 novel, ''The Jewish War,'' told of a band of zealots whose leader takes three wives and encourages his followers to kill themselves. Reich herself prefers not to comment on the level of observance she keeps today, while Englander for his part publicly boasts about eating pork.

Ostensibly about ultra-Orthodox Jews, this kind of ''insider'' fiction actually reveals the authors' estrangement from the traditional Orthodox community, and sometimes from Judaism itself. Unlike Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, assimilated Jews who have written profoundly about the alienation that accompanies that way of life, the outsider insiders write about a community they may never have been part of.

One of the most popular of these is Tova Mirvis. In her first novel, ''The Ladies Auxiliary,'' the Orthodox women of Memphis appear in an unsettlingly harsh light. One of Mirvis's favorite themes is the oddball ba'al teshuvah (literally, ''master of repentance''), a deeply observant Jew who did not grow up as one. Such a type can be seen in ''The Ladies Auxiliary'': Jocelyn, who after years of keeping kosher still regularly indulges in the shrimp salad she hides in her freezer.

In Mirvis's more recent novel, ''The Outside World,'' we meet Shayna, a mother of five girls living in an ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community. Shayna supposedly chose a more spiritual life as a young adult, yet now she spends most of her time reading bridal magazines. Another character, Bryan, is a 19-year-old who returns home from Israel as a deeply religious radical, renamed Baruch. Yet at his engagement party, he's suddenly starring in a Harlequin romance: out on the porch, Baruch embraces his fiancée and she leans ''in close, their bodies gently pressing against each other.'' It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse. Yet Baruch's younger sister isn't surprised: ''They who pretended to be so holy in public were just like everyone else in private. It confirmed what she had suspected: that it was all pretense.''

It certainly seems that way. Shayna's supposedly observant husband, Herschel, ignores his job as a kosher supervisor for the Orthodox Coalition while collecting a salary, without experiencing a moment's guilt. Meanwhile, Shayna has a television in her bedroom, ''its presence an unacceptable connection to the outside world. It had long ago been smuggled into the house in an air-conditioner box to hide it from the neighbors, all of whom had done the same thing.'' All of whom?

There will always be people who fail to live up to their ideals, and it would be pointless to pretend the strictly observant don't have failings. But before there can be hypocrisy, there must be real idealism; in fiction that lacks idealistic characters, even the hypocrite's place can't be properly understood. Like other outsider insiders, Mirvis homes in on hypocrisy, but in the process she undermines the logic of her plot. The novel's jacket copy announces that ''The Outside World'' is meant to explain ''the retreat into traditionalism that has become a worldwide phenomenon among young people,'' but the uninformed reader might wonder why any young person would want to be part of such a contemptible community.

On her Web site, Mirvis says she ''did very little research'' for her books because ''I grew up with all these rules and customs and rituals.'' People who grow up with some traditional customs may imagine themselves experts, but until they've logged real time among the haredi they may know as little as most secular writers. Come to think of it, they may know less, because a secular writer might do more on-the-spot research.

What is the market for this fiction? Does it simply satisfy our desire, as one of Mirvis's reviewers put it, to indulge in ''eavesdropping on a closed world''? Or is there a deeper urge: do some readers want to believe the ultra-Orthodox are crooked and hypocritical, and thus lacking any competing claim to the truth? Perhaps, on the other hand, readers are genuinely interested in traditional Judaism but don't know where to look for more nuanced portraits of this world.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2005 8:18 AM