So Many Jewish Mothers

A recent book in French is out

A CATHOLIC EDUCATION

by Catherine Cusset

From a review:

Catherine Cusset’s coming-of-age novel manages, as does real life, to be both heart-wrenching and humorous. Sex and love—of course—but also the importance of friends and enemies, of truth and lies, faith and failure are explored by a devout little Catholic Goody Two-Shoes as she evolves into an atheistic, two-timing adult.

Marie is a ten-year-old who just wants to please. She relishes the drama of the biblical stories her father reads to her at night. She is a star student, the teacher’s pet. And she truly believes that the more devout she is, the better the chances that her mismatched parents will stay together. None of which stops her from shoplifting with her best friend and accomplice Nathalie. Nor does it stop her from faking piety, telling the priest at her first confession not about her long string of thefts but only about once stealing a pencil. She is absolved, and the wrath of God does not, she realizes, descend on her.

By age fourteen, Marie, perhaps influenced by her atheist Jewish mother, has lost her faith in God and Catholicism. 

Oops.

Jewish mother?

She's ... Jewish.

And she has a friend:

"Olga is the Russian, divorced, Jewish, redheaded mother of my friend Nathalie. She terrifies me. She never stops screaming and scolding her daughter, not because Nathalie doesn’t do her homework or get good grades, but because she doesn’t practice the piano every night. To Olga, nothing is more important – which to me, seems like a strange sense of priorities. When our parents discover we’ve been stealing things – another little girl tells on us – Nathalie and I are forbidden to go to each other’s house. Forbidden to be friends...Just before my First Communion, on my way to church for a general rehearsal, I happen to run into Olga and immediately tell her that the event is about to happen. She speaks to me with such friendliness that I’m stunned: “Come and see us when you finish at church on Saturday, so I can see you in your white robe.” I do just that. I ring the bell, anxiously. What if the dragon has forgotten she invited me? What if she’s shouting at her daughter again and asks me how I dare come to her house against all the rules? But she gives me a big hug, for the first time, kisses me, as sweet as a lamb, a smile on her face..."

So many Jews.

The author's mother is also Jewish.


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The Temple Mount Gets Blown Up or, A Novel Approach to the Revenants of Yesha

I guess the Temple Mount gets blown up - again:

Again?

Well, I have noted that over the past decade there have been a dozen novels that have a Temple Mount theme; Chabon's novel that has the Mount being blown up; and a second Chabon novel that mentions the Temple Mount.

So, here is from an interview with Joan Leegent, author of the new novel:

Wherever You Go is an engrossing novel...The writing style is contemporary. The storytelling is solid. And the prose moves along so gently that you’ll forget you’re even reading a book...Wherever You Go follows the emotional journeys of three protagonists. (More about them in a moment). Their journeys, all quests for redemption in one form or another, take them to Israel. And Joan Leegant’s descriptions of that place had me longing to catch the next flight to Tel Aviv! Through her characters we’re able experience different facets of this amazing and troubled country – West Bank settlements; the Jewish radicalism/extremism at the fringe of Israeli society; the complicated relationship between Jewish Americans & Israelis; the religious and the secular citizens of Jerusalem, desirous of peace. It’s an engrossing portrait of a country as described by the people who live & visit there. And when I had the opportunity to ask Joan Leegant a few questions: Israel was at the top of my list.

tolmsted: All three main characters find a home & solace in Israel, regardless of their level of commitment to religion and not always with good results...Can you talk about the role of Israel in the book and in your character’s lives? Part of me wants to ask what Israel represents (maybe I am asking that), but the idea and actuality of the country of Israel is so loaded with meaning and expectations it’s hard to imagine it representing anything other than itself.

Joan Leegant: You’re correct that Israel itself is almost a character in the book; the  story could not have taken place anywhere else. One major element of the novel  is religious extremism, in particular Jewish religious extremism. This is a huge issue in Israel today, commanding headlines in fact this week due to some incidents involving religious extremists. Israel is also central to each of the three main characters’ lives and quests, though they are all Americans who find themselves in Jerusalem for different  reasons. Yona Stern has come to make amends with her sister who is a radical West Bank settler fiercely committed to the settler movement. So Yona’s experience of Israel in the novel is given largely through the lens of the settlement issue. Mark Greenglass is a more overtly devout man who, when the book opens, is enduring a crisis of religious faith. For him, Israel is the place that enabled him to embrace that faith most fully in the first place...For Aaron Blinder, a year-abroad drop-out who struggles in school
and is a failure in his father’s eyes, Israel is the place where he plays out his
need for approval and acceptance, for a sense of self-worth and belonging. He does this by aligning himself with violent radical settlers, to tragic ends.

And here are two of the three protaganists, as described by a reviewer:

For Yona Stern, she struggles with rebuilding the relationship with her sister Dena for the last 12 years while rebuilding the issue of trust that has dissolved between them. Yona cheated on her sister with her boyfriend at the time, who confessed he didn't really love Dena for the last year and instead has fallen for her. Riddled with guilt, he ultimately confesses to Dena and ends the relationship thinking that they will now fall in love. The only problem is that Yona doesn't love him and never did.

Now she finds herself trying to finally reconcile the gap that has come between them in her section of the book and it seems that Dena only wishes to punish her sister through her actions while she allows her to visit by barely speaking to her, and for the most part staying so busy they don't have time to be alone.

...Aaron Builder is a unique individual who is trying to make sure that the Jewish people are not forced out of Israel by their Arab neighbors. He will join whatever cause is necessary to make sure that the rising hostilities against Israel will not eliminate the country he has come to love.

Is there a film in the making?

Here's the official site's excerpt and you'' notice on page 9 that the precautioary blast to check if a suspect object is a bomb is mistakeningly described as "an earsplitting explosion"and "a thunderous boom". Obviously, she has never heard one. Tsk-tsk.

And the "settlement" is...Kiryat Arba. A typical Jewish community.

Creative license, I presume.

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Yet Another Novel on a Temple Mount Theme

Over the past few years, there have been almost a dozen novels published (see here and also here) with a central Temple Mount theme.

And here's a new one:

A New Thriller, The Essene Conspiracy, Reveals a Wall Street Scheme Funding a Clandestine Plot to Retake Jerusalem’s Temple Mount

S. Eric Wachtel’s The Essene Conspiracy, now available in print and Kindle editions on Amazon.com, tells the intriguing story of how the murder investigation of a high ranking Israeli minister led to the discovery of a secret Messianic brotherhood and its plans to overthrow the secular Israeli government.

As the timely novel begins, Israel’s finance minister has been murdered in Jerusalem. Muslim terrorists are suspected, but no group has claimed responsibility. Finding a barely legible name scribbled on a blood-stained card in the shirt pocket of the slain minister, the head of Israeli Intelligence asks security consultant Harry McClure to investigate a possible American link to the brutal crime. Unexpectedly, McClure is drawn into unraveling the link between a sophisticated Wall Street money-laundering scheme and a Messianic sect, the Essene Brotherhood, plotting to overthrow the Israeli government. The clock is ticking as Israeli Intelligence, aided by McClure, race to organize a preemptive eleventh-hour strategy aimed at thwarting the imminent Essene attack.

Don't mix it with this book.


UPDATE

A new story">Tablet story.
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New Temple Mount Novel

I have noted close to ten novels dealing with the Temple Mount over the years at my blog. (Here together with here, and here and also here, for example)

Frank Shapiro, a former high school history teacher and assistant researcher at the Museum of the Diaspora, has written God's Elect, his first novel.



From its blurb:

On Jerusalem's Temple Mount, masses demonstrate for the rebuilding of Solomon's Temple, fired by rumours that the Temple Treasures, taken to Rome two thousand years previously by Titus, are making their way to Israel. But what is behind this newly elected Pope's statesmanlike gesture of releasing these holy vessels? Is this the trigger ushering in the triumph of Christianity over Islam and the hastening of the End of Days - the war of Gog and Magog?

Nothing is at is seems - not even the Pope. A fanatical sect has embedded itself in the heart of Christendom, and is determined to change the fate of the world. This is the backdrop for a clash of civilizations, led by the rise of religious fanaticism - both Christian and Muslim!

The book's site.

Yiddish, Alaska, Detective Novel

Here.

And the author's admission (with which I identify completely):-

“I don’t like having my ignorance pointed out to me. I was embarrassed and shamed. I had the nice Jewish boy impulse that I disrespected my elders and caused pain and embarrassment.

Blah-blah Blau

I have, in the past, interviewed Sahara (Sarah) Blau on my radio program together with Rami Sadan at Arutz 7 (from which I am on leave; finishing my MA at Hebrew U.).
She has a first novel out, "Yetzer lev ha'adama" ("The Book of Creation").

She's a "dati-lite" icon and I will quote only a bit of the book's theme:-

Talma, the narrator, is indeed hard to digest: She is very hungry. Her life unfolds within the small perimeter marked off by her parents' home, her grandmother's house, and her all-girls school ("daughters of Satan," she calls the students) where she teaches and which is also nauseatingly familiar, because she herself studied there. She has never been with a man...Talma, who inherited her grandmother's house and now lives in it alone, uses words, the secret words she learned from her grandmother, to make a man, a golem; a perfect man whom she shapes with her own hands out of the muddy earth of the graveyard

...So what if the golem does not have a soul, and so what if he did not speak a single word, and so what if he had no alternatives, and Talma is the only woman he ever saw. And so what if he is made out of mud. When Talma weeps in his arms, his muddy chest dissolves, leaving a hole; and Talma, instead of sinking into her own tears, finds herself deep in the mud, his mud. What could be more human?

Well, one has to acknowledge her originality, although I think she should now be termed as "dati-heavy", if not "dirty".