 |  |
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 |
Gained in Translation
Judith Solomon
(Avi Katz) |
(November 22, 1999)The long-lost Yiddish letters written by her grandmother 60 years ago help a Southern woman find a way back into her Jewish identity
Thea McKee, the North Carolina-based radio therapist in Judy Goldman�s enjoyable if highly contrived debut novel, offers callers impeccably rational advice on everything from children�s imaginary friends to marital infidelity. She is chock-full of theories, derived from both self-help bibles - "How to Do Every Single Thing Right," "Tips for People Who Want to Be Informed and Fully in Control of Their Lives" - and her need to compensate for her own "uninformed" 54 years on earth.
Thea�s theory of marriage: People seek the opposite of what they grew up with; once they get it, usually "in spades," they want less. With the gentile Reid McKee - whom her younger but more self-assured and Jewishly involved sister Mickey had warned her not to marry - Thea "always knew exactly where he was and what he was doing even when she wasn�t in the room."
That certainty is heaven for a woman plagued with curiosity, a delver whose family secret has been fiercely guarded by three generations of sisters. "Keep the last word to yourself" was the motto of Bella, Thea�s maternal grandmother.
Thea�s inborn sense that something was amiss crystallized at age 10; upon finding her mother Mollie�s wedding gown, she tried it on, only to be confronted with a blistering slap by the normally gentle - at least to her favorite daughter - now-enraged Mollie. What may have prompted this bizarre reaction haunts Thea into adulthood, long after the death of her mother, who, sphinx-like, eluded all questions.
When a packet of eight tissue-thin letters, written in Yiddish in the 1930s by Bella to her sister Celia, turns up at Thea�s Charlotte home, she immediately thinks, "This outdated language has nothing to do with me." A "self-hating" Jew, filled with all the tortured ambivalences the term implies, Thea believes that "Judaism is a blemish you try to scrub away with lemon juice." Then her curiosity gets the better of her and she decides to have them translated, hoping at last to solve the mystery of the wedding dress.
The letters, initially a clever narrative device, a way of weaving the past into the sisters� illness-laden present and growing closeness, turn into a liability. That Goldman has the translator send Thea the English versions one at a time - slowly, over a year - holding the important "wedding letter" for last, makes the device a tiring tease. By the novel�s end, whenall is revealed, the reader is wholly unsurprised.
But not uninterested: Goldman is an astute social observer, and a poet with an eye for rich imagery and ear for ethnic cadence. The letters evoke the state of mind of Russian Jewish immigrants who built solid businesses in the South before World War II but still felt unsure of their place in society, with regard to both their fellow Jews and the larger surrounding environment. These are not the German elite of Alfred Uhry�s "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," as Bella�s plain prose attests: "Molkeleh goes every day to the store to help her Mike; A man comes with ice three times a week; They have a Negro who cooks; I would like to go to see a live play in person; Your sister Bella from the South."
Thea�s parents were more assimilated than her grandparents, and due to the efforts of the extremist Mollie - she delivered Christmas poinsettias to everyone in town - the family, unlike the rest of Rock Hill�s tiny Jewish population, became part of its debutante and country club world. Unfortunately, Goldman doesn�t use her gifts to detail the family�s relationship with Judaism. Facts are sprinkled here and there - Mickey and her father were the observant ones - but nothing gels.
That ambiguity sloughs off onto the protagonist. The reader is told of Thea�s animus to Judaism, an animus tempered by the guilty acknowledgment that "just one lukewarm Jew automatically let[s] down generations of Jews" - but never achieves a clear understanding of its why and wherefore, until perhaps the mystery�s resolution, with the operative word being "perhaps": As an explanation, what we�re offered is at once too subtle and too schematic.
Thea�s recall of the Shema, a prayer of Jewish essence and community, signifies her return to the fold. That this epiphany, or as Thea deems it, "a small veer of her mind," comes only hours after her long-awaited discovery seems too tidy an ending. Even if, as Goldman deftly shows, there are no real family secrets, that at a subliminal level everyone knows everything, it would take more of a struggle to change the way one sees the world; at least it wouldn�t happen in an afternoon. The Slow Way Back was never so fast.
Books
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2001 |  |