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| Keeping my religion. 4-4-2006. |
| Passover is coming, and in honor of that I’m going to address a topic that comes up frequently during interviews and Q&As: my religious upbringing, and how it affects my work. I’ve written very little fiction or theater with explicitly Jewish content. I can think of one short story and one short play. There are oblique references to Gloria’s crypto-Jewish habits in Sunstroke; Mendez, for example, is a typical Marrano name. Other than that, there’s not much. Raised in a modern Orthodox household, I continue to observe much of what I was taught. My love for Judaism—its wild traditions, its sparkling intellectual life, its nurturing community—runs deep, to the extent that it’s hard for me to consider the subject with any clarity. My religion and culture are key components of my thought process, and in writing about them I confront a problem similar to the one described by neuroscientists and philosophers who posit that the mind cannot describe itself. (Note that these are two distinct impediments: one of bias, the other metaphysical.) I furthermore feel alienated from a lot of modern Jewish literature, which in my opinion traffics too much in stereotypes. Overbearing mothers, square academics, bumbling rabbis. Sexual repression, crushing guilt, Holocaust obsession. This is a neurotic, nostalgic, folksy, Yiddish-sprinkled, Old World Judaism that has nothing to do with mine, and while its tropes may have once been literarily revolutionary or even sociologically accurate, to someone my age, born and bred in contemporary Los Angeles, they seem broad-stroked, kitschy, and false. I think many of my Orthodox friends would agree. Our Jewishness is less self-conscious, more easygoing, than that of our parents or (more emphatically) grandparents. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because we, the children of 1980s America, weren’t raised under the looming specter of anti-Semitism. Or because we see in our parents people who already have left the first hurdles of assimilation far behind; men and women who are prominent and respected in their secular lives as well as within their own communities. I honestly dunno. My family provides a good example of how quickly Americans become American. My great-grandfather was a manual laborer; my grandfather, an engineer. My father was trained as a doctor but leapfrogged to a career in the arts. And I have done nothing but write. This chronology reflects both a rise in class (working to middle to professional to moneyed dilettantism) as well as a marked increase in participation in the American public sphere. Would my shtetl-born, shteibel-attending great-grandfather be able to laugh at the same jokes that I laugh at? Would he care about what I write about? I doubt it. (Or maybe I’m not giving him enough credit. After all, my grandmothers—vivacious ladies the both of them—read my work and seem to get a kick out of it. Who’s to say that great-grandpa Avrohom wouldn’t feel the same?) Anyway, I’m way off topic. The point is that I don’t experience Judaism as a separate entity, something to be clashed with or fought; and I therefore don’t think I can write about it in the way that people have been writing about it for the last 100 years. That stuff doesn’t speak to me a whole lot, if at all. My friends and I grew up with the Torah but also the Transformers; we revere Moses and Jacob but also Michael Jordan. In addition to Hebrew we speak Spanish, Italian, and Chinese. We sing the grace after meals and conclude its melodies by segueing into our college fight songs. We are, I think, comfortably fragmented, accepting low levels of hypocrisy as a small price to pay for happiness with our present and reconciliation to our past. I think that the current generation of Jewish writers—and I am a Jewish writer, if not a writer of Jewish fiction—will have to find new ways to describe ourselves and our place in the United States, to capture the many facets of what it means to be modern and observant. And by “new ways” I don’t mean Jewish hipsterism. Please spare me the ironic T-shirts and glossy magazines. I’m talking about a literature with self-respect, with the honesty and knowledge to convincingly and seriously describe the current cohort of educated, committed Jews. My reading on the topic is admittedly limited (and this is the heart of the paradox, wouldn’t you say: that I’m no longer much interested in what passes for Jewish literature), so if such a book exists, I’d be grateful for a point in the right direction. If not, I suppose I’ll have to write that book myself. There are new and subtle Judaisms forming every minute, and a lot of new stories to be told. |
