 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Books: Shaped by Our Choices
Judith Solomon
New York
Every evening, when Dara Horn was growing up, her mother would put a kitchen timer on the dinner table and say "Go!" Then Dara and her three siblings would take turns talking about their day. The rules were clear cut: Each child was allotted five minutes, and siblings who dared interrupt were forced to forfeit some of their own minutes to the offended speaker.
"This worked fine in the beginning," says Horn, the second oldest, who�s now 25, "until people started manipulating the system." A frequent tactic was to speak extremely slowly, provoking frustration and highly vocal complaints, and thereby ratcheting up extra time for oneself. On other occasions, the audience would respond with silence -- a shrewd move incurring no penalty -- and wave index cards rating the speaker�s day: "When people are holding up numbers and telling you, �your day sucks,�" she says, "it makes you very aware of what it means to tell a story and keep people engaged."
Horn�s lessons in humiliation brought public acclaim at a tender 15, when she became the youngest person ever nominated for a prestigious National Magazine Award. Her 1992 article, in Hadassah -- it was also the first time a Jewish publication was so honored -- described a trip she�d taken with a group of teenagers, retracing the steps marched by Auschwitz inmates to the gas chambers in Birkenau. After Horn�s high-school newspaper turned down her submission, she sent it elsewhere, and that�s how she ended up, braces and all, at the Waldorf-Astoria awards ceremony, mingling with such other finalists as Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike.
"In the Image," the author�s remarkable debut novel, reveals an adult who bore out her childhood promise and achievements: The New York Times called it "richly imagined [with] wonderfully deadpan humor" and the Christian Science Monitor, "a work of raw genius."
We first meet Leora -- no last name given -- as a disaffected and withdrawn 17-year-old, mourning her best and only friend, Naomi, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. Leora�s concerned parents take her abroad, which doesn�t revive her spirits, but does provide material with which she wins a local essay contest.
Her article, on Jewish historical sites in Spain, is read by Bill Landsmann, Naomi�s grandfather, who shares her interest in Jewish travel and invites her over to view his prized slide collection from a whopping 72 countries.
Leora rejects the old man upon realizing he�s seeking a substitute granddaughter and balm for his anguish, which developed a lifetime earlier in Europe, before Naomi�s tragedy aggravated it.
A few months later, Leora�s off to college -- no name given ("I wanted the reader to focus on the characters," says Horn) -- where she falls in love with Jason, a handsome, cool and Jewish soccer jock, whom she can�t believe would date so plain and nerdy a girl as herself.
Will wonders never cease? Apparently not. During senior year, Jason tears a ligament and starts hanging out at the Jewish student center, where he becomes a ba�al tshuvah (newly observant), a change that Leora, a knowledgeable though non-observant Jew, considers with disbelief, particularly as it was she who once had to explain to him something as basic as tefillin.
Needless to say, Jason no longer sees Leora as wife material. So she really shouldn�t have been so shocked when months later she bumps into a thin, pale, bearded and sidelocked man in Costco -- "the Promised Land of groceries" -- and it turns out to be her former boyfriend, who now calls himself Yehuda and works at his father-in-law�s 47th Street diamond dealership. His new bride isn�t above feeling threatened by the chance encounter: "And then Rivka dragged him away, leading him beside the still waters of Poland Spring," a line drawn, of course, straight from Psalm 23.
"In the Image" is strewn with numerous such references to religious texts and Jewish folklore. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, now working on a PhD there in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Horn can recall passages from Agnon, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Sholem Aleichem at the snap of a finger: "I was a big nerd growing up," she says, sitting in her living room across from Lincoln Center, sporting hip-hugging, black velveteen pants, flashing a shiny, lip-glossed smile, her clear blue eyes set off with black eyeliner. The nerd has turned into a bird.
On Shabbat she and her husband, Brendan Schulman, an attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore (the couple met at Harvard Hillel -- he was at the law school) attend services at Hadar, a non-denominational minyan that floats around Upper West Side locations: "It�s a very passionate and egalitarian community," says Horn. A connection to Judaism was instilled early on by her parents. Though the family lived in Short Hills, New Jersey -- made famous by Brenda Patimkin, Philip Roth�s spoiled heroine in "Goodbye Columbus" (1959), and the preppy Pingry School, Horn�s alma mater -- they belonged to Conservative Temple Beth Shalom in neighboring Livingston. Every Shabbat, either Horn or one of her sisters read Torah at services, and the next day they would trek to Manhattan for supplementary Sunday school at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Horn purposely chose not to make Short Hills Leora�s hometown because she feared readers would conjure up Roth�s Waspy portrayal, which she no longer considers accurate: "To live comfortably in this non-Jewish neighborhood, Brenda Patimkin had to get a nose job and go to Harvard," says Horn. "I go to Harvard and study Yiddish. That�s weird. Things come back in a strange way we don�t necessarily expect or anticipate � I don�t believe anything is ever lost."
Her sentiment is core to "In the Image": Juxtaposed against Leora�s coming-of-age story is Bill�s coming-to-terms story, spanning several generations in his family�s history, taking us from the Austro-Hungarian empire to turn-of-the-century Lower East Side, World War II Amsterdam, and finally to a surreal underwater city beneath today�s Manhattan, where all we assume is gone forever -- dodo birds, saber-toothed tigers, departed loved ones, even the lives we could very well have led but didn�t, that is, every possibility, every dismissed choice -- exists in eternal defiance.
Up above, on dry land, both Leora and Bill also live in defiance, but theirs is against life. Leora�s survivor�s guilt -- her first kiss brings pain over Naomi, who will never experience one -- grows worse in her 20s. Subsisting on spaghetti while churning out meaningless magazine articles, Leora oscillates between resignation to and struggle against life�s unfairness, reflected in barbarians who grow fat and happy while lovely innocents die.
Barbarians are one of many leitmotifs -- clocks, cats, lions, dollhouses, stitches, even window slats are some others -- woven through a complex narrative, melding characters from far-away times and places. When a young Bill, originally Wilhelm in Vienna, then Willem in Amsterdam, asks his abusive father, Nadav, to explain what the word "barbarian" means, he receives a mouthful: "People like you, you idiot, who know so little that their vocabulary doesn�t even include descriptions of themselves."
Like Leora, Bill cannot deal with the hand dealt him. Instead, he becomes obsessed with his massive slide collection, the be-all-to-end-all of everything he does, so that images of life replace living it.
His own father, too, opted out of life, as a suicide. Born to an impoverished widowed mother, shell-shocked in World War I, Nadav rejected the Judaism of his youth, marries rich, tortures his wife -- she ends up in a mental institution -- becomes a millionaire in his own right, and womanizes with abandon, until the Nazis come along and invade his own barbaric turf.
All three characters are directly affected by circumstances beyond their control, circumstances which can lead, as they do in Nadav�s case, to their undoing. That he undergoes such trials and tribulations makes his own cruelties understandable, but not, Horn maintains, nervously fiddling with her diamond ring, forgivable. She invokes another character, Anna, as best expressing the novel�s viewpoint: "I think we are not shaped by our experiences, but by what we do choose -- by the way we react to our experiences." Nadav chose bitter hatred as the shaping force of his identity.
Leora and Bill fare better: She falls in love with Jake, a professor of Jewish history, who unbeknownst to both, is distantly related to Naomi. He helps her see life�s unfairness as potentially ennobling:
"[J]ust because life doesn�t work the way you want it to doesn�t mean that what happens in the world is completely random," he says. "The times when people really do interact with God are exactly those times when life doesn�t work out fairly, and that�s when people can really feel God�s presence in the world."
Jake�s encounter with Naomi can be taken as either completely random or as a twist of fate. Horn has a response for those reviewers who she says found parts of her book "absurdly coincidental," including a marvelous scene where Jake buys an engagement ring from Yehuda: "What about all those times you�re sitting on a plane, and you talk to the person next to you and find out, for example, they dated your brother," she says. "And then there are all those times you�re sitting next to someone on a plane who you don�t talk to, who also might have dated your brother."
One might even argue that Horn�s birth, her very existence, is due to a spectacular twist of fate. It was 1966 when Susan Linker and Matthew Horn filled out a questionnaire for America�s first-ever computer dating service, Operation Match, which, coincidentally, was run by Harvard undergraduates. They mailed in their punch cards, which were put through the computer, and voil�, a love equation: "My siblings and I are the products of modern technology," says Horn.
Old-fashioned technologies, like slides, are Bill�s preference; movies and videos record too much information. As frozen moments in time, slides not only mirror his own inability to move forward -- to confront his miserable past -- they allow stories to be created around them, before-and-after stories of happiness and hope.
Only when his 7,000 slides, repositories of his dreams, are wiped away in a hurricane, does Bill finally surrender to his rage and, like Job, curse the day he was born. Out of the whirlwind, God appears and says:
"I dare you, William Landsmann, to collect
A gallery of images like mine.
The oceans� roar, and the fullnessthereof --
These are my images, my universe, my eternity
That I have planted here upon the dry land in your midst.
I created you in my image.
I am not created in yours!"
Horn does not like the phrase, man is made in the image of God: "It�s something that�s bothered me a lot," she says. "Because I often thought, �well, if we�re made in the image of God, there�s something left out, right, which is the part about being immortal.� Why aren�t we eternal like God? Some people will say in Judaism the soul is eternal, but obviously during our whole life, we�re aware we�re going to die."
In the novel, Horn offers a compromise out of her dilemma: We, as images, are indeed a few steps behind the real deal, and must acknowledge so. Once we�ve gained perspective and are sufficiently humbled, however, reaching for immortality, through, for example, art or mementos -- or novels -- is perfectly human. "I think the eternal part of us wants to recreate and revive what we can of our lives," says Horn. "Even though we know the people we love will not always be with us. We want to preserve our time with them."
Books
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |