Defenders of the Faith

From Cathleen Schine’s nicely written review of Zoe Heller’s new book “The Believers” in the New York Review of Books – a novel about a Jewish family of “ardent believers in the progressive cause,” including the mother Audrey (“For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions”) and her daughter Rosa (a “pink diaper baby”):

From within the Litvinoff circle, however, the family faith is showing some cracks. Rosa, for one, has come back from Cuba with some doubts about that battered a priori cannon, announcing “that her lifelong fealty to the cause of revolutionary socialism was at an end….” Disorienting as this is, it is only the beginning:

Recently, she had delivered another, infinitely more shocking punch to the collective family jaw by informing them that she had begun attending services at an Orthodox synagogue on the
Upper West Side.

Audrey is appalled. And to some extent, so is
Rosa. The absurdity and indignity of the mikvah attendant checking for telltale menstrual stains, the prissy, parochial self-regard of the womenfolk of the rabbi’s household she visits in upstate New York, the unfashionable long skirts, the forbidden toothbrush on Shabbat—the accessories of her blossoming new faith are an embarrassment to her and a challenge. . . .  

But from her perch in the women’s section upstairs,
Rosa undergoes a kind of religious conversion. She has been brought up in a household vigorously hostile to all religion, but particularly to the one closest at hand:  Judaism.  Nevertheless, as the congregation sings, there is “something in the prayer’s austere melody” that strikes at her heart. She thinks,

You are connected to this. This song is your song. When next she glanced down at the siddur lying open in her hands, she was amazed to see the little ragged suns of her own teardrops turning the wafer-thin pages transparent.

. . .
Rosa is caught between genuine emotion and intellectual dismay. Some other woman might settle the issue by joining a less stern iteration of the faith, but this is Rosa, for whom it took four years in Castro’s
Cuba to tire of one totalitarianism. We worry for
Rosa throughout the novel, and root for her to find emotional peace and intellectual integrity, but sometimes, too, we cannot help but cheer on the awful Audrey:

Audrey looked at
Rosa‘s calf-length navy skirt and high-necked black blouse. Her eyes narrowed. “Is this something Jewy?”

“Actually, I’m attending a Shabbaton.”

“And what the fuck is that when it’s had its hair washed?

A short video interview with the author is here. Shabbat Shalom.