The first Jewish novel I ever read was – as I bet it was for many British and American Jewish children of my generation – When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr’s (very) lightly fictionalised autobiographical account of when her family fled Germany in 1933. I was around eight when I read it – too young to understand the Holocaust, but the right age to grasp that Kerr leaving her pink rabbit soft toy behind in Germany meant an unprecedented historical tragedy had occurred – and this began a lifetime of reading Jewish novels.
Judith Kerr in junior school was followed by Chaim Potok, Elie Wiesel and Leon Uris in high school, then the big Jewish American Beasts at university (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, EL Doctorow.) At some point in my twenties I realised there were Jewish women novelists, too, and they became, and remain, my favourite writers, especially Nora Ephron and Melissa Bank. Since then, I have added many more Jewish authors to my bookshelves, mostly from Brooklyn (Michael Chabon), most named Jonathan (Safran Foer, Lethem), an occasional atheist (Shalom Auslander), a token Englishman (Howard Jacobson) – and all, of course, very funny.
All of this is a long way of saying I have just read a new Jewish novel – now one of my favourite Jewish novels – and I’m baffled why more people aren’t talking about it, because it is SO good. Long Island Compromise, by the wonderful New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, came out this summer and it is by some measure the most Jewish novel I have read in a very long time. The characters in it aren’t Jewish in the way, say, the characters in Ephron’s novel Heartburn are – definitely but incidentally. They are JEWISH, in capital letters. It’s not that they’re frum – they are an assimilated wealthy Jewish family in Long Island – but their Jewishness defines their lives and self-image, and Brodesser-Akner captures this in a way that sang to my soul. Also, the characters give Israeli bonds to celebrate a bar mitzvah – how much more Jewish can you get?
Narcissism must play a part in my love for Jewish novels, seeing parts of myself reflected in a book, or at least thinking I see it. I thought my heart would explode the first time I read Melissa Bank’s glorious novel The Wonder Spot, which opens with the main character, Sophie, feeling too hot in her tights at the bat mitzvah of a girl she doesn’t even like, but her mum is friends with the mother. Every single Jewish girl – former and current – has had that exact same experience. And yet, until Bank captured it, I never considered the commonality to that awful, hilarious, seemingly at the time unique rite of passage.
More obviously, I read these books to understand my family. Potok, Wiesel and Uris explained my grandparents to me, just as Roth and Bellow taught me about the America in which my father grew up: the country clubs and Ivy League colleges that wouldn’t let Jews in, the sense that being Jewish was embarrassing and yet inescapable. “Like a club foot,” as my father later said to me. And how else would it feel, when your aunts and uncles have been murdered for being Jewish, and you’re then bullied at school for the same reason?
For the next generation of Jewish-American novelists – Lethem, Safran Foer and so on – being Jewish meant being curious about the past but not, at least initially, being suffocated by it. It means revelling in the cultural parts of being Jewish (smart, funny, anxious, yadda yadda yadda) and ignoring the frummer parts (Auslander, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community, is the exception here, and all the more fascinating to me for it.) All of this felt right to me, and I loved these authors for defining me to myself.
But Long Island Compromise goes further. Based on the true story of the kidnapping of Jack Teich in Long Island, it is really the story of how Jews came to America, how they made a success of their lives, and what happened next, told over three generations of the Fletcher family. No generation, the book says, can be understood without compassionate understanding of the one before and the one after, and I don’t know how that is in other kinds of families, but it’s definitely true in Jewish ones.
As it happens, my father grew up near Jack Teich and knew his family, so all the Long Island background in the novel was both familiar and illuminating to me. But it does more than that: it explains the concept of “inherited trauma”, an idea of which I remain sceptical, but it shows how the older generation’s emotional reaction to traumatic events – the Holocaust, antisemitism, a violent crime – inevitably impacts on the children who come after. It is a magnificent, beautifully written book. And it is, of course, very funny.
So here’s my question: why is this book not more successful? Brodesser-Akner’s previous novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, was a massive bestseller, but the Jewishness was not as emphasised. It was – as in Ephron’s book and films – definite but incidental. The first chapter of Long Island Compromise opens with Yom Kippur followed by a Jewish funeral. There’s also a druggy S&M orgy in the first chapter, not to mention a kidnapping in the introduction, so it’s not like this is The Chosen by Chaim Potok. But still, I wonder if Long Island Compromise hasn’t been as successful as Fleishman because it’s so Jewish, and now is a complicated time to be Jewish (when isn’t it? etc etc).
Well, bad luck to the goys because this book is too good and wise for them anyway. It is one that will be read for the ages and will provide a lot of joy, comfort and recognition to people now. Because it’s not just a great Jewish novel, it’s great literature.
