The Little Bride by Anna Solomon

Some works of fiction leave the reader marveling over the imaginative powers of the author; such is the case with Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride. We are introduced to the lead-character, Minna Losk, when she is sixteen and living in Odessa as a servant girl, but about to travel to America as a mail-order bride to an orthodox Jewish man more than twice her age. The time period is the tail end of the 19th century, and Minna hopes to escape not only the pogroms targeting Russian Jews but also the daily drudgery of physical labor involved in providing everything for a once wealthy Jewish woman whose wealth and health had deteriorated long before Minna at eleven years of age began to care for her.

While it is obvious that Solomon did a lot of research about the homesteading of Jews in the American west as well as of mail-order brides sent from Russia and other European cities to homesteading Jews, I am still stunned by her incredible imagination in creating and describing the journey of young Minna from Odessa to a sod house in South Dakota. The reader is introduced to Minna as she is undergoing a physical exam that has been mandated by her to-be rigorously orthodox husband. Shy and almost totally ignorant of sexual matters, she is subjected to a physical inspection by a Jewish doctor and his female assistant that Minna is later to describe as being inspected like a horse. Stripped and prodded and questioned in a cold, dark room, subjected to indignities that she had not even imagined, before finally receiving the stamp of approval: “’Unremarkable,’ said the doctor, and the hands closed Minna’s legs.”

From the dismal descriptions of a Jewish ghetto in Odessa where the inhabitants live in near constant fear of the next night-time raid by Russian soldiers, the reader travels with Minna across the Atlantic, steerage class, when nearly all the desperately poor emigrants are sea sick from the first day to the last, many dying before they reach the promised land. Minna sees New York for a day, sees Chicago from the windows of a train, and still dreams that a wealthy and handsome husband awaits her at the end of her journey. Instead, from boat to train, train to wagon and a trip though grasslands seemingly as vast as the ocean she just crossed until she arrives finally not at the fine house she had hoped for, but a rough sod house dug out of a hill in the flat sea of grass—dirt walls and floors, two step-sons, one of whom is older than Minna, and Max, her ultra orthodox husband who knows almost nothing about farming but who intends to create the new Jerusalam.

The men washed themselves in the same bucket she used to wash the dishes. The outhouse was made of crates, and stood only a few feet from the cave. There was little, within a few days, that Minna didn’t know of their habits and smells and noises. And yet no one had asked where she was born, or whether she had siblings or parents or any family at all, or what she had done with her life up until now.

I have to admit that this is a book I could not wait to finish, not because of curiosity about how it would end or wanting to read more of Minna’s bravery and endurance, but because of how utterly real and convincing Solomon’s descriptions are. While I admired the author’s incredible talents and Minna’s courage, I wanted to escape from the world that was being described to me. Like Minna, I wanted to be free, to breathe, to live.

Although raised as a Jew, Minna’s father was not orthodox, not really even a believer, so it comes as a series of shocks to Minna to see what is expected of her, what is expected of wives and woman even here in this new country. She does recall once as a child trying to follow her father into the men’s section of the synagogue, recalls the shame of being hauled out by the elbow and led to the dingy, lace-curtained women’s room in the back.

Minna cried until the woman next to her grabbed her hand, and leaned down to explain, in a friendly hush: “The man’s body? Contains his mind. The woman’s? Only a body. We are body bodies. Yes? Understand?”  

Minna had not understood. But she remembered. And over the years she’d seen how her body became a body body. Each swell of flesh, each darkening, each sudden hair that appeared full blown, like a black moth from a chrysalis, made her more powerful and doomed. This was what made Max shake, she knew. To him, Minna was dangerous simply because she was she, and he was he.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you how this story ends, nor even try to describe the incredibly harsh winter Minna suffers through during her first year in the sod house—the cold, the hunger, the isolation from the world. Solomon describes everything with an eye to detail that makes this read like memoir. Remarkably, Minna does not hate these men whom she has been thrown together with, and she certainly understands them better than they understand her. One commentator described this as a love story, and while I think that is the height of hyperbole, Solomon does create a character who sees so much more than her own misery. Speaking of that horrendous, seemingly everlasting winter.

A calm fell over her limbs. She wondered if this was prayer. If prayer was nothing more than a giving in, like sickness—if you weren’t required to believe, only to stop struggling. The exercise grew familiar. The boys grew hair on their faces. And though Samuel’s was a full beard, and Jacob’s a layer of fuzz like a playactor might draw on, the hair made them look alike, and like Max, and Minna gave in to their merging, their repetition, as she gave in to the repetition of hunger. She knew that she loved them, the beards, the bodies, the men themselves. She saw them out of the corners of her eyes, she brushed them as she passed. They were furniture. You could love anyone, she thought, if you needed to. And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe.

I don’t think I have to add that this is not a happy book, perhaps not one to read on a dark winter’s night. But it is nevertheless a wonderful book, and I think we can expect great things from this writer.

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36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein

If you ever look closely at the rational arguments for the existence of some god or other, I think you will find that only those who already believe on grounds quite other than reason or argument tend to be impressed by the arguments. The arguments, sometimes called proofs, are afterthoughts given to buoy up beliefs and to give them a patina of rationality. Rebecca Goldstein, who got her PhD. in philosophy from Princeton, is well aware of the above, but she also realizes how the lived life of religion, what some have called the phenomenology of religion, is far more important than rational arguments for or against the existence of a God. To put it another way, the psychology of religious belief is far more important and interesting than the logic of religious belief.

In her highly amusing and clever novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Goldstein has a lot to tell us about what has been dubbed evangelical atheism, Hasidic Judaism, some of the many absurdities of academic life, the current state of analytic philosophy, the split between reason and emotion, and much, much more.

Goldstein’s main character, Cass Seltzer, is a professor of psychology in a small eastern college which, like so many small colleges and state universities, suffers from what some have called the ‘little Princeton syndrome’. In its attempt to achieve the elevated status of a Princeton or Harvard or Yale, the mythical Frankfurter University lures big name academicians with promises of light workloads, generous salaries, lush offices and other perks. Jonas Elijah Klapper, as pompous and didactic as his name suggests, is one such academician hired by Frankfurter. Klapper’s encyclopedic memory and his love affair with himself have catapulted him to fame. The novel jumps back and forth between the mature and newly famous Cass Seltzer who has just written a book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, and the much younger Cass who, while struggling along as a premed student, finds himself bowled over by the excitement and breadth of the history of ideas, and more particularly by the compendious mind of the already famous Jonas Elijah Klapper. He changes his major and his university in order to sit at the feet of the intellectual giant.

The other central characters in the book are Cass’s early girlfriend, Rozlyn Margolis, who resurfaces in his life after he has become famous, and Lucinda Mandelbaum, “known in her world as ‘the Goddess of Game Theory.’ Lucinda is, pure and simple, a wondrous creature, with adoration her due and Cass’s avocation.” The beautiful and mathematically talented Lucinda, while trying to leverage more money and more privileges from Princeton by threatening to accept a monetarily huge offer from little Frankfurter, finds herself outmaneuvered and ends up, much to her dismay, in the psychology department of Frankfurter with the newly famous Cass.

While the novel suffers to some extent by overblown, one-dimensional characters, none of whom is quite believable, the underlying themes in psychology of religion, and insights into academic wars currently raging between computer driven number worship and an older humanistic view of the history of ideas, make up for the stylistic weaknesses of the book. It is no mistake that the title of Cass’s book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion is so close to William James’ famous, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Sigmund Freud’s essay "The Future of an Illusion". Although James was all in all unimpressed with the so-called proofs for the existence of God, he was very interested in what might be called the religious temperament and religious experience. Cass is adored by many undergraduates as well as intellectuals sympathetic to what has been dubbed evangelical atheism, but he, himself, is not really an ardent atheist, nor is he immune to the attractions of religious life. I think we can say the same for Goldstein. Her dismantling of the 36 arguments in an appendix to the novel is both insightful and amusing, and quite clearly she does not think reason can take us far towards religious belief. But that hardly ends the matter for her, since she sees clearly that logic has so little to do with religious belief or religious lives.

One central character whom I have not yet mentioned is a brilliant young Jewish boy, son of an Hasidic Rabbi and heir to the leadership of an isolated Hasidic community. His name is Azarya, and at the age of six he exhibits a mathematical genius that astounds Roz and Cass. It is quite obvious that Goldstein, who is herself gifted with a wonderful analytic and mathematical mind, is intrigued by mathematical and musical geniuses who seem almost to be born with their prodigious talents. Certain that his tremendous mathematical talents will wither and die if he remains in the isolated community of New Walden, when Azarya is sixteen Roz and Cass find a way to hook him up with a famous mathematician at Columbia who is equally impressed with his intellectual promise. But as Azarya himself sees, while it is necessary for him to leave New Walden if he is to prosper as a mathematician, it is impossible for him to leave his people and his role as future leader and Rabbi. And while it is in some sense impossible for him to remain in New Walden (he is not himself a believer in God), it is necessary—as a debt to his loved father and his loved community. An unresolvable paradox, impossible and yet necessary, necessary and yet impossible.

I read this book with a colleague of mine, and we found ourselves wondering why Azarya and New Walden were brought into the novel at all, since it seemed almost an appendage to the main storyline. But in retrospect, I think that Azarya characterizes a split in Goldstein herself, and a living proof that the logic of religious belief has so little to do with the lived life of religion or with the psychology of religion. No doubt Goldstein uses Azarya and New Walden to talk about the dangerous intellectual narrowness of fundamentalist religious beliefs and communities, but also to bring up the psychological benefits of religious community. Whatever she believes about the existence of God or the powers of reason to establish God’s existence, she is culturally Jewish (as are her main characters)—to leave behind the beliefs is not to leave behind the culture.

I have not said much yet about the bombastic Jonas Elijah Klapper or the very funny and irreverent Rozlyn Margolis, but both play very significant roles in the novel. Roz calls the allegedly great man simply The Klapp, and tries to warn Cass early on that his near worship of Klapper will lead to nothing good. We in academia have met many Jonas Elijah Klappers, and while it is easy to laugh at him and his pretensions, Goldstein also gives him some great lines and uses him as a mouthpiece for her own humorous asides about the Academy.

This is not a great novel, but it is often very funny and it contains much of importance about religious experience and warns against a too quick rejection of all that is so-called ‘spiritual’. There is a wonderful mind at work in this novel, not Jonas Elijah Klapper’s, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s, and it is well worth the read.

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The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen

Good morning, I want to talk to you this morning about a wonderful little collection of stories by a woman who died years before they were published. Thanks to the perseverance of her husband and the endorsement of a number of well-known writers, the stories were finally published in 2010 under the title, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay.

Beverly Jensen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002 and died in 2003. She told her husband, Jay Silverman, that she felt she had been given writing talents but had not used them. In fact, over a period of sixteen years, between her part time office job and the raising of her two daughters, she had written a number of stories about her mother, Idella, and her aunt Avis. She had written them for herself, but after her diagnosis, she made copies for her two teenaged children and her three sisters.

With the help of Elizabeth Strout, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Russo and finally Stephen King, Jay Silverman managed to get the stories published. This little book is as much a tribute to his love and dedication as it is a celebration of Jensen’s story-telling talents.

The stories begin in 1916, when Idella is eight and Avis almost six. The setting is New Brunswick, Canada on a tiny farm on impossibly rocky soil near the sea. Their father had built it with help from his brother. “He put it on the high cliff overlooking the bay that pounded and raged beneath them. Mother had wanted it there…All the houses were slanted and gray and sparse-looking, sticking up out of the flat land like rotten teeth.”

The two girls share the little house and farm with their parents and one older brother, Dalton, their father insisting that he literally has to push the potatoes up out of the ground, and that the rocks multiply over night no matter how much time he spends clearing them. Already a hardscrabble life, when their mother dies after giving birth to yet another child, the two little girls are left to cook and clean for their father and older brother, the new baby sent off to live with relatives.

The two older girls get some respite from the almost impossibly hard life on the farm when they are eventually sent to live on another relative’s New England farm, a time during which they are able to attend school. But when they are still only eleven and thirteen, a hunting accident leaves their father bedridden for many months, and the girls have to return to New Brunswick.

Home. Back to the house and barn on top of the cliff overlooking the Bay Chaleur. What few trees there were about the house were all leaned over and bent from the cold, constant pressures of the winds that blew off the water. That’s how the people got, Idella thought, from living up there their whole lives—bent over and gnarled and hard, rooted in one place. The wind worked on people the same as it did on trees. It howled and bit, especially in winter, and scraped away at you. There was nothing to do but buckle over and try to get where you were going, which was never very far—to the barn or the field or the buggy to New Bandon, two miles down the road.

In spite of the hard lives, the light and laughter that shine through these stories as the two sisters travel back and forth between Canada and New England is enchanting. Tough girls who have learned from their own father and the men they grow up around just how mean and dangerous men can be, they nevertheless manage to carve out lives for themselves and to tame the men whom they allow to join them on their journeys.

I can only imagine how many times Beverly Jensen listened to her mother, Idella, telling stories about her beautiful sister Avis and the wild times they had. Each retelling planting some new seed in her daughter’s mind, providing some delicious new detail about the lives of these sisters welded together by struggle, but also by daring and a thirst for more life, for a different life.

While the men are hard working, hard drinking, and difficult to live with, the portraits   painted by Jensen and derived from her mother’s stories are also forgiving and compassionate. The girls’ father sends them off to New England not because he wants to be free of them, but because he realizes that life without their mother is impossibly hard; the love he shows for his lost wife is luminescent. And he calls them back home only because he is bedridden and cannot keep the house and farm going without them. He sees the fear he inspires in his own daughters, but simply cannot be other than he is.

These days he knew that the sound of his boots was a different thing. There was some poor French girl on hand to hear them. Or Idella and Avis, poor mutts, in there trying to scrape something together for his supper. He scared them all. He couldn’t help himself. It was seeing them scurry around the table trying to put food out, afraid to look at him for fear he’d light into them, that brought it on—the temper, the hurt, the anger at the goddamned world that had taken Emma away and left him alone. It wasn’t them he’d be mad at. But it was them that got the brunt.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking of the hardscrabble lives these girls led, but what I came away with as a reader was the joy they shared, the strength they manifested and expected of themselves and of each other. These stories of ordinary people carving out lives in what can only be called dire circumstances are uplifting and somehow serve as social-political commentary as certainly as if they had been written as manifestos. I recommend them to you wholeheartedly. If you like Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munro, you will like Beverly Jensen.