Good American Jews on the Road
Aaron Hamburger's first novel
mixes funny with existential
Volume 4, Number 52
| Dec. 29 - Jan. 4,
2005BOOKSFaith
for BeginnersBy Aaron
HamburgerRandom
House340 pages,
$23.95Good
American Jews on the
RoadAaron
Hamburger’s first novel mixes funny with
existentialBY SETH J.
BOOKEYTravel can be a
life-affirming experience, but not if your trip is a forced march. In Aaron
Hamburger’s debut novel “Faith for Beginners,” Mrs. Michaelson
has dragged her husband and son to Israel hoping her Detroit suburb’s
Millennium pilgrimage will be inspiration for them both. Her husband is dying
slowly of cancer, and her son Jeremy, an NYU student, recently placed either a
recent suicide attempt or an accidental overdose under his belt, depending on
whom you ask.Taking your
Jewish family to its ancestral home should be very uplifting, right? Not so
fast, Mrs.
Michaelson!Hamburger uses
humor and insight to get to the heart of Mrs. Michaelson and son Jeremy as he
follows them through a variety of
tribulations.Being
on a guided tour certainly suits Mrs. Michaelson, since she is a dutiful servant
of manners and formality. The plans, however, are quickly thwarted. Mrs.
Michaelson is blessed with two gays sons, and Jeremy, who insists on calling her
Helen rather than Mom, comes complete with green hair and a nose ring. Almost
immediately after their arrival in Israel, he runs off on a Friday night, and a
day later, the long-suffering Mr. Michaelson suddenly decides to go home. Mrs.
Michaelson, left on her own, is pursued by the group’s ultra-hirsute
rabbi, and fails to fight his affections. Meanwhile, Jeremy has found himself
offered a free Shabbat meal that comes with heaping spoonfuls of dogma. The host
family’s teenage son, Noam, is clearly gay and gravitates to Jeremy, who
winds up abandoning him for a deaf foot-fetishist Palestinian named George. He
wakes up the next day in Silwan, an Arab part of Jerusalem probably not
recommended by Mrs. Michaelson’s beloved
Fodor’s.While
Hamburger’s story centers on the mother and son, it also gets an eyeful of
Israel’s kaleidoscope of politics and propaganda, which hit them
everyplace they visit. Mrs. Michaelson is emblematic of “good American
Jews” who support Israel, while Jeremy’s sole purpose is to be an
agent provocateur, forever spouting moralizing anti-globalization speeches.
Jeremy is used to basking in the freedom of being a gay American, but his antics
wind up hurting George and pushing Noam before he’s really
ready.The author skillfully
balances the funny with the existential. Mrs. Michaelson realizes that
she’s lonely but “there was no one she wanted to be near,”
even though there’s the rabbi pursuing her madly. He is able to quickly
follow up one of her painful self-realizations such as, “I don’t
know how to enjoy myself with people. I’m much better at thinking of ways
to tear them down and then hating myself for it later,” with a joke:
“His eyes had that compassionate look in them, like she had just told him
she couldn’t afford to donate to the Jewish National Fund at the
five-hundred-dollar
level.”Hamburger refers
to Helen as “Mrs. Michaelson” throughout the book to reflect her
overriding sense of propriety, as well as giving her the same literary weight as
other literary ancestors, like “Madame Bovary” and “Mr.
Darcy.” He told Gay City News, “She believes that if everyone would
just behave and say please and thank you, we’d have a better world. She
can’t comprehend why it is that so many people choose to engage in
behavior that’s harmful to himself or to others.” Meanwhile, Jeremy
insists on crossing the line, which can cause trouble in Israel, where politics
are “the national
sport.”Hamburger spent
about three years writing this novel. In 2000, as he visited Israel to learn
more about the attitudes of gays there, he found that they shared the national
obsession with the political landscape, and were more interested in handicapping
that than in gay life per se. He made a conscious choice of setting the novel in
2000, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak faced a recall as he offered to divide
Jerusalem; everyone Hamburger met worried about war, and civil war
too.The author also noted,
“It’s interesting that a country which has inspired so much print
hasn’t inspired that many defining works of literary fiction in the way
India, for example, has inspired books ranging from ‘A Passage to
India’ to ‘Midnight’s Children.’ This is especially odd
when you think of how many outstanding Jewish-American writers we have. I think
when people try to write fiction about Israel, they get caught up in the
politics of the place and lose their story. I wanted to write something that
would be strongly story-based, though of course it would intersect with
politics.”The novel is
successful on any levels, most of all because the story has universal appeal and
doesn’t require specific knowledge about the region’s history or
religious conflicts. In “Faith for Beginners,” Hamburger recreates
an Israel that reflects its many potential experiences—from the American
fast-food chains, to the free lunches served by insular ultra-Orthodox yeshivas,
to the breakfast table of an Arab woman in a Palestinian slum, to the
frightening Muslim cemetery that’s also a notorious cruising
ground.The novelist has
differentiated the pre-conceived notions people have about Israel from the
actual place.“As a
tourist, you often find yourself staring at a pile of rocks and you’re
expected to feel inspired, but all you see is a pile of rocks,” Hamburger
told Gay City News. “That disjunction interested
me.”It will interest you
as
well.------------------------------------------------------------------------Gay
City News is published
byCommunity Media
LLC.Gay
City News | 487 Greenwich St., Suite 6A | New
York, NY 10013Written permission of the
publisher must be obtainedbefore any of the contents of this
newspaper, in whole or in part, can be
reproduced or redistributed.
Posted: Thu - December
29, 2005 at 01:10 AM
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Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:04 PM
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