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May 28, 2004/Sivan 8 5764, Vol. 56, No. 36
Heaven-sent, of blessings and demons
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
It shimmers.
How else to describe "Seven Blessings" (St. Martin's Press, $23.95 hardcover) by Ruchama King?
Its setting is suffused with the glint of Jerusalem light, its characters infused with the city's spirituality and its story line just magical enough to make the reader believe in its happily-ever-after ending. In short, a gem of a novel, much less a debut effort, by King, who lived for 10 years in the holy city where she taught at a number of women's yeshivot and was immersed firsthand in the world of Jewish matchmaking.
The story turns on - what else? - the search for love and marriage in Jerusalem, where the pursuit is imbued with religious obligation as well as human aspiration. King creates a host of characters to play on her theme, deftly capturing the physical desire, human need and spiritual longing that inspire a match.
Readers meet Beth Wilner, an American of a certain age, or past a certain age, who is the object of the matchmaker's determined efforts. A ba'al teshuvah, a returnee to what is termed observant Judaism, or a form of Orthodoxy, a lapsed Torah student, she lives in a Sephardic enclave in the city, works as a bookkeeper at a social service agency and volunteers at a local psychiatric hospital. Her malaise is evident, as is her inherent appeal, and grocery store owner cum matchmaker, Tsippi Kraut-hammer, initiates a match.
This American, writes King, "brought moods to the grocery store. Sometimes she walked down the aisles, poking, squinting, yearning for something Tsippi's shelves couldn't deliver; sometimes she seemed annoyed, scowling at an eggplant, shrugging at a tomato; and sometimes her hands moved with happy efficiency, like the hands of a regular ba'alabusta whose years of list-making had already been absorbed into her very fingertips...
"Now this American woman ... intrigued her ... she would have to go through her list more carefully to see if anyone sprang to mind..."
So Tsippi, who in the course of the novel also rediscovers new romance in her own marriage, suggests an introduction to Akiva, 41, also a ba'al teshuvah, a part-time house painter and yeshiva student, who, as she describes him to Beth, has a slight problem, a twitch.
"'A twitch?' Beth said. 'Do you mean an eye tic?'
"'No, it's not an eye tic,' Tsippi said slowly. 'It's hard to describe.'"
So the story begins.
Along the way, King introduces readers to Rochel Leah, a resident in a Jewish old-age home, who writes flowery love notes to Reb Israel, a revered Torah scholar on his deathbed; Binyamin Harris, a malcontent ba'al teshuvah in search of an ideal partner; and Judy Bartosky, a wife and mother of six who gradually recovers her love of learning while finding new ways to deepen her relationship with her husband.
While the ending may have been preordained and predictable, King's sympathetic characters and artful intertwining of their lives transcend the ordinary with luminous incandescence.
A gem of a novel? Perhaps, in terms of its ability to engage the reader and capture the essence of religious life against the backdrop of Jeru-salem. But King's first effort glows rather than sparkles, some of its facets not yet polished to real brilliance. The words beg for more precision, the syntax to be more finely tuned.
But, a novel, like a good marriage, can always be burnished to shine. Look forward to King's next effort while savoring her first.
Sherwin B. Nuland's "Lost in America" (Vintage Books, $12 paperback) is compelling in a different way. Nuland, a medical doctor who serves as clinical professor of surgery at Yale where he also teaches bio-ethics and medical history, offers an unsparing look at the often-romanticized immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of his father, Meyer Nudelman. With writing as searing as the welter of emotions that define his father's life, Nuland captures the insecurities, the disappointments, the difficulties of making life in a new country. He takes the idealized concept of the goldine medine, the city with streets paved in gold, and turns it on its head with the story of his father, an unskilled laborer who makes a meager living as a garment worker. He is a perennial stranger in a new land who never masters its language beyond the most crude level, a man who suffers from a mysterious ailment that slowly impedes his mobility and leaves him with chronic pain.
"I am writing this book to finally come to terms with my father," Nuland writes in the introduction, explaining why he has delved into his past. Nuland reconstructs a troubled relationship with a father unable to express his love and whose unhappiness often led to uncontrollable rage. And he reconstructs the resulting tension in his own life, the powerful drive to escape the confines of the cramped apartment in the East Bronx with the equally powerful ties that continually brought him back to his father and his immigrant past.
In the end, Nuland writes with breathtaking honesty, he had to acknowledge both.
"My father had always held me back by his needs and his power over me, while at the same time propelling me forward in my haste to increase the distance between us."
Nuland's frankness makes for a riveting read that clears the generational divide. Human pain and suffering are ageless, as is our quest to understand and make sense of them.
In his own way, Nuland has made peace with his own demons.
"In seeking to escape (my father) I have drawn closer," he writes, "and now at last I know that the closeness can be good."
Lastly, another new release, "Little Edens" (W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd., $23.95 hardcover), by Barbara Klein Moss, entices readers with its collection of eight stories that play on contemporary themes. Meet Ebrahim Nahavendi, an Iranian rug dealer who makes a paradise of his prison cell while weaving an elaborate carpet in his mind. Or grieving parents, Myra and Russell, who escape to sunny California from New England in an attempt to recover paradise lost after losing their adult son. Or Dilys Cathcart, an English piano teacher, who finds her own little piece of heaven in an unlikely relationship with an Orthodox butcher.
Moss juxtaposes hoped-for Edens with the complexities of everyday life in an arresting collection of stories.
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