Customer Reviews

Faith for Beginners: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

this is actually a rather decent first novel for Aaron Hamburger. Although the figure of the ill father isn't developed as fully as I would have liked to see and there were some odd devices thrown in (such as the father/husband appearing as a ghost when he isn't dead, etc). This was a pretty clever book in that we get to look at several different people's search for meaning and transcendence from typically boring and superficial lives. Faith for Beginners isn't meant to be wholesome or completely satisfying, it's meant to highlight the bitter and confusing struggle of people finding their places (or inability to find a place) in the modern world. Oh, and the sex scenes that previous reviewers have complained about really aren't particularly graphic. However, I wouldn't recommend reading this for a church or otherwise religious discussion group

Aaron Hamburger, the author of a collection of short stories, THE VIEW FROM STALIN'S HEAD, has written a first novel practically as good as his first book. In the year 2000 the Michaelson family from Michigan makes their first visit to Jerusalem. And what a family they are. Helen is a fifty-eight woman intent on "straightening out" her twenty-two year old son Jeremy, (one of two gay children) who has spiked hair with green highlights, a ring in his nose that resembles a safety pin, is a part-time vegetarian who has forgotten his Hebrew-- oh, the family is Jewish-- and the father/husband who used to call himself "Doctor" before he was diagnosed with cancer but is now just "Mr. Michaelson."

Mr. Hamburger has written both an extremely funny at times as well as an erotic novel-- both Jeremy and his mother fall off the abstinence wagon while in Jerusalem-- that asks serious questions about religion, politics, family relationships, gay relationships, the Arab-Israeli conflict, etc.. In fact the author asks a lot more questions than get resolved; but perhaps that is what he intended, given the complexity of the issues he discusses.

What Mr. Hamburger has done is to create a half dozen or more characters here who come alive on the page. We know a myriad of details about each of them. We can catch their body odor, sweat with them in the awful summer heat and-- pardon me, President Clinton (who gets mentioned by an Arab boy accosting Helen-- feel their pain. There are so many wonderful passages that draw the reader in. Example 1: When the Michaelsons visit the Wailing Wall, Helen "impatient to feel inspired. . . kissed the Wall, caressed the coarse stone blocks. She felt no God there, but then she'd never felt Him anywhere else, either, not even in her heart. Did He exist, then? Of course He did. it didn't matter that you couldn't pick Him out of a lineup." Another example: When Robert, Helen's oldest gay son wants to adopt a child with his male partner and chides her, one half of a mom/dad family, because she says that children need both a mother and a father, and tells her that "thanks to you, [he] hasn't felt a genuine emotion in years," she wonders what happened. "If what Robert said was true, then what had she done wrong?. . . Perhaps she's been overly cautious with Robert, since he was her first. And as for Jeremy? The only fault she could come up with was that she's been transfixed by the miniseries ROOTS while she was pregnant." That's awfully good, insightful writing.

There are also funny digs at both the Jerusalem tourist industry as well as the tourists. Ms. Michaelson boards a tour bus named "Jacob and Leah & Rachel." Two other American tourists behind her on the bus are engaging in what she calls "Jewish Geography." ("'How about Delaware? Know anybody in Delaware?' 'I met a Friedman from Delaware once. What about Philadelphia?'") Julie, the well-organized tour guide, has everything the Michiganders [the name of the tour group] need, including a plastic fan that "declared your support for the Jewish state and opened up into an umbrella."

One minor quibble: Each chapter opens with a quotation or story or proverb, some of which work better than others. These stories/information sometimes get in the way of the narrative. This novel, nonetheless, is a very entertaining but thoughtful read.

Faith for Beginners involves a Michigander Jewish family (mother, father, gay son) on a package tour of Israel. The father, who had been a clinical psychologist, has terminal cancer. His wife and son have erotic/romantic adventures in Israel. Helen Michaelson's is with a very hirsute rabbi who migrated from the US and is leading the tour along with his mother.

Jeremy, a fifth-year Columbia undergrad who had recently nearly overdosed on drugs and liquor back in New York, attempts to pick up Noam, a Hassidic student, at the Wailing Wall, but gets shunted off to a strange Sabbath dinner with another group of tourists to Jerusalem, and later is picked up in Independence Park after dark by a deaf Arab who has taken the name "George."

The comedy between Anglophones abroad that was the specialty of E. M. Forster is transferred from pre-WWI Italy and India to Israel ca. 2000. About two-thirds of the way through, there seemed to be heavy influences of A Passage to India, though the Marabar Cave episode and the trial of an unjustly accused local in Hamburger's novel are split (but not entirely unrelated, not least in that Michaelsons are involved in both). I was disappointed at the lack of follow-through (Jeremy's more than Hamburger's) with the juridical proceedings against the local.

Nevertheless, the rich portrayal of characters of diverse backgrounds and the intricate plotting kept me entertained and turning the pages.

BTW, the book is NOT "pornographic," though Helen and Jeremy each has a major and a minor sex scene.

It is the year 2000 and the Millennium March has just begun. The Michaelson's, a decidedly middle-class Jewish family on holiday from Michigan, are approaching the March, and their impending sojourn in Israel, with a mixture of benign hesitation and traditional duty. The trip is fraught with concern, for Helen Michaelson worries about her husband, sick with lymphatic cancer, and her two grown sons, both of whom have turned out to be gay.

Whilst her eldest Richard, much to Helen's relief, has settled down with a nice Asian man, it is Jeremy, her youngest, who is the most cause for concern. Decidedly rebellious, abashedly promiscuous, and cynically ambivalent towards his Jewish heritage, Jeremy provides Helen with most of her headaches; he dyes his hair green, courts a safety pin in his nose, loves to drink and take drugs, and has just survived a lackadaisical suicide attempt by smattering thirty-two Valium over an ice cream sundae doused with vodka.

Inspired by a story she'd read in the Detroit Jewish News, about young people who find themselves while on "Missions to Israel," Helen hopes that on this trip, Jeremy will get a sense of piety, perhaps even obtain a sort of spiritual enlightenment, a natural high from all the "deep whiffs of holy air and hot sand." Helen, deep down, dreams of some sort of transformation for her son; it's not that he wishes he wasn't gay, it's just that she wants Jeremy to get a sense of his place in the universe, even "shed a tear or two, and then perhaps get on and finish his bachelor's degree."

Helen admits that she's frustrated with her husband's chronic illness and is tired of feeling lonely, but she confesses that there is no one she particularly wants to be near. Life for her hadn't been a tragedy, only a bit quiet for someone who had once dreamed of living boldly. The certainties that she'd counted on from religion, from marriage, from her husband, her house, and her children have all but failed her. All that is left is some kind of nebulous connection to her faith and a vague desire to reconnect with the land of her heritage.

Jeremy is undeniably modern and American. Deeply critical of old world values, he confesses that he doesn't really believe in God. He looks at orthodox men, and although he already knows many of their rules, he realizes he could never be like them - rather a "manic-depressive homo," than some sort of prophet, forever stuck in the ways of the past. Jeremy remains suspicious of this world, and suspects that deep down religious people hold the copyright on "being right," religion is fine in the abstract, but in practice, "it's just another tool people use to divide themselves from each other."

Throughout their holiday, neither Helen or Jeremy comes across god: Helen finds comfort in the arms of Rabbi Sherman, his "expert hands, and thick studly arms lined with dense fur," sexually exiting her beyond her wildest dreams, whilst Jeremy hooks up with George, a deaf Arab boy who takes him on an adventure into the Old Quarter's Palestinian section, seducing him with his apolitical naivety, his sexy ways, and his kindly eyes. The never boring Rabbi Sherman represents all the passionate yearnings Helen has suppressed, and for Jeremy, George represents a bridge to a people so often disenfranchised and misunderstood.

Author Aaron Hamburger's gift is his mordantly humorous descriptions of both the Jewish and Arab worlds as they live unsettlingly side-by-side, always on the frontlines of war, where time flows constantly from the past into the present and the future, and where every conversation inevitably turns to politics. This is a world where Orthodox Rabbis care more about two-thousand-year-old laws than about people, and where those in the Arab quarter, are forced to live in squalor, once dislocated from their homes.

The novel is full of eccentric characters: the overly zealous, pointy breasted tourist operator; the closeted young Rabbi, who yearns to dress in Western clothes; the head of a religious school who fiercely embraces the capitalistic West; the young Muslim mother, who refuses to eat anything other than Arab food, and the world famous Rabbi, orthodox preacher of biblical catastrophe.

The strength of the book lies in Helen and Jeremy's deeply ironic journey towards self-acceptance, and acceptance of each other, their familial dramas played out with much subtly and intuition on the part of the author. Helen and Jeremy are often stunned by what they see around them, paralyzed by the heat, shocked at the economic inequality, and puzzled by the strange amalgam of tradition and modernism; they are often left to their own devices, and throughout the course of their holiday, are forced to confront some difficult choices. Both undeniably Western, neither Helen nor Jeremy can ever quite come to terms with this strange and enigmatic country. Mike Leonard February 06.

A wonderful read - he is an excellent story teller and I didn't want it to end. I can not wait for his next book!

As one who has weak interest in reading about Arab-Israeli politics, finding one's fatih, or mother/son relationships, it took a lot for me to decide to settle down with this book. But I was redeemed with a refreshing read well outside of the typical gay-novel niche.

This is one journey to faith that is a lively excursion through Israel. The ways of Helen Nussbaum, her punkish son Jeremy and disabled husband bring an interestingly distinct contrast between settled American life and the very real turmoil of living in Israel.

The family is outside of their normal Michigan world and on a commercialized tour called the Michigan Miracle 2000. Helen is worried about Jeremy, her pierced, college-slacker son who has just survived a suicide attempt. But amid their travels through war-torn Israel, they take steps (sidesteps?) toward exploring their faith and achieving a sort of mutual acceptance. While her husband suffers from a slow but steady form of cancer, Helen explores intense sexual experiences with a young, hirsute rabbi. Jeremy has some fun of his own, meeting George, a deaf Palestinian. Politics of all types fill their lives (but in a captivating way) and as it turns out, Jeremy becomes the one who understands this strange, ancient land and its current climate the most.

Here are the ways Aaron Hamburger could have made this novel go wrong: making it solely a story about a mother who struggles with the fact that her only offspring, two sons, are both gay (not new); overloading the story with politics (he didn't); making Jeremy's rebellious nature the core of the story (again, not new); setting the story in Michigan (ho hum).

Instead, Faith for Beginners proves to be a rich blend of real, flawed characters, imbued with the easily-recognize (but often missed) humor of suburban family ennui.

Helen Nussbaum is the stereotypical matriarch of the household, who is concerned about her younger son Jeremy, in his fifth year of college (and still a junior) and having no apparent ambition other than a compulsion to rebel and "act out" with bizarre clothes, dying his hair green and wearing a safety pin through his nose. Jeremy is gay, but that isn't a problem for Helen; her older son Robert is also gay, but is in a stable monogamous relationship. She talks her husband, who is retired on disability, into the three of them joining a Michigan group on a mission to Israel, hoping a connection with his religious roots will make him settle down.

Their stay in Jerusalem is a shock to all of them, as they clash with the somewhat condescending tour guides, their fellow travelers, a young divorced rabbi whom Helen is attracted to, and the reality of the Arab presence in the divided city. Jeremy meets an young Arab who is deaf and gay, and challenges the other Jewish tourists' prejudice when he brings him to meet his mother. Before their trip is over, it becomes clear that Aaron Hamburger's first novel is not just about the physical journey of the family to Israel, but of the spiritual and emotional journey all three of them experience in learning that faith is more than a religious service.

Interesting insights into some rather colorful characters. I give it 4 stars out of 5.

Upon reading positive reviews of this book, my book club chose to read it. However, all of us were extremely disappointed with this book, and very few of us even managed to finish this book (that's how much we disliked it!)

I read a great deal, and I have a graduate degree in English (and have taught literature to college students). Accordingly, I believe I can discern poor writing when I see it.

My biggest problem with this book, of the many I have, is that you don't get to know the characters, and as a result, you don't care about them. Hamburger doesn't bother to have the reader feel they know the characters; he merely thrusts you in the middle of their lives when the story opens. Throughout, you get background on their lives (in fact, more details than you need to know), but the prose is not written in such a way that leads you to care about them, their problems, or their wasted lives.

Another issue I had with the story is that there are many loose ends at the end of the book (what happened with Jeremy's "boyfriend?" I read that part a few times and still don't know the answer). In addition, two of the main characters (Mrs. Michaelson and her son, Jeremy) suddenly conveniently have ephiphanies toward the conclusion of the novel, but it seems to forced and it does not follow from what happened previously to them. I think the author was trying to reach a "happy ending," but he failed, just like he did with the rest of the story.

By the way, this is NOT a funny book, like the reviews say, it is more depressing than anything.

I forced myself to finish this book because I was reading it for my bookclub; otherwise, I would have stopped at page ten. Please, save yourself the trouble! (And if you must read it, borrow it from the library, so you can return it when you can't get past page ten.)

The Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) instructs that there's nothing new under the sun.

That which has already happened, and that which promises to occur in the future is the equivalent of the cosmic broken record. That which humanity will one day seen as already taken place in that strip of territory straddling the continental elbow between the holy River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel is the Bible's stomping ground. The country most contested, that "promised land" of sanctified shangri-la that legions of admirers have shed gallons of corpuscles for over the centuries. Israel is the world's bone-dry dusty jewel, the brilliant garnet in the Levantine crown which everyone covets like New York State's lottery jackpot, before taxes, that is.

Okay, I'm ranting...

In short, it is in this very Israel that nothing new has happened under the sun.

Aaron Hamburger, in his novelistic debut FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, deals with this magical land of "play it again Sam."

It's a compelling yarn about a young misguided cultural tourist who arrives with his proverbial tail between his legs without a blimmin' clue about how to manage his angst-ridden life. Parachuting in on a jetplane after a half-day journey across the stormy Atlantic, our young twentysomething protagonist, Jeremy Michaelson, is a total trout out of water. He begins to, er..."come" of age at the turn of the 21st-century in the land of, um...milk and honey.

His mother, Ms. Michaelson, has brought her confused son to the Holy Land in the hopes that our young Jeremy will right himself. Master Michaelson is as yet unsettled with his homosexuality, not quite accepting his life's basic reality, having drunk once too often from society's chalice of "sexual rectitude." You know, the same one which tells the so-called "freaks" of society how to more properly behave. Ms. Michaelson feels that it's her duty to help Jeremy with what ails him, so a hastily-planned sojourn to Israel is what she feels will cure the kid of his troubles. Israel will right all wrongs, she believes. One deep inhale of its jasmine-scented air will be enough to get Jeremy back on the right path. Mama Michaelson hopes it will mark the end of his green-haired days, his safety-pin nasal piercings, his trainwreck-like habit of over-imbibing and overdosing on all manner of hallucigens. At least this is what the good Ms. Michaelson hopes for...

What happens to Jeremy, his mom, and the motley crew of extremely well-drawn characters like Jeremy's deaf Palestinian boyfriend George, his sycophantic haredi (ultra-Orthodox) admirer Noam--the same one who agrees to undergo a makeover for our anti-hero--and the lustful and very hirsuite Rabbi Rick Sherman who's been doing the horizontal lambada with Jeremy's mother while Jeremy shoots around Jerusalem in the act of "finding himself."

Author Hamburger's research is positively meticulous. Gadzooks.

He seems to have covered heaps of ground during his investigative trips to Israel, and the dialogues of the various personalities who populate his pages are so bang-on it gave me the butterflies.

For those of you who've spent a series of months and years in the Holy Land, the true-to-form realism of scenes like Ms. Michaelson's harrowing day trip to Hezekiah's Tunnel is a delight to the senses. For those who have never set foot in the contentious Holy City of Jerusalem, the delicate character beats will still resonate with you as you make your way through. As Hamburger intimates, human conflict is universal. Those same political battles over hearts and minds which has been ravaging the Land of Israel for over a century (and then some!) can be mirrored in other locales around the globe.

The human vice of hatred is a constant. Fear of the other is a growing feature in an increasingly globalized world.

Through the device of one of the world's more "marquee" tribal conflicts, Hamburger delivers his most masterful message of the entire story...jeez, can't we all just leave well enough alone and get along?! With the ancient hatreds simmering in the Land of Israel for as long as they have, Hamburger leaves us imagining just what things might be like if one group ceded control over their sacred stones and decided to look at the other person standing across from them for precisely what they are.

And this is best embodied by the relationship between George and Jeremy, two young men who want nothing more than to give pleasure and be pleasured.

Two youngsters who crave nothing loftier than the purity of the emotion love. For the other to just reach out and touch them, to reassure them that everything's going to be just fine. Indeed, Jeremy and George are gay, but that's entirely beside the point, folks.

While there are always exceptions to the rule, Hamburger has been keenly diligent in his efforts to encapsulate the basic gripes of this region: I lord over something that you can't have, and if you want it, then we can't both have it.

You having it means that I can't.

For you to take it away from me, I've got to do something tragic to you, which often boils down to bad blood.

Just thinking about the violent rows and tirades over today's Temple Mount Complex, and you'll readily see what I mean.

There have been dissident voices expressed in the reviewing community that Mr. Hamburger only took the very worst episodes of those on offer. Though after several years of residence in that part of the world I'd have to admit that his depictions are rather on the money. Indeed, there are times when the travesties which rend the societies in that part of the world are non-existent, still history has shown that these lulls are rarities for the most part.

And as for the gratuitousness of the sex scenes? Spurious accusations at best.

What's the big fuss about? What's to quibble over? People have sex, and what goes on behind closed bedroom doors--as a sage Fenian opponent of the European socialist "nanny state" once said, George Bernard Shaw--is frankly none of our business!

Men have sex with men. Women have sex with women. And, more commonly, opposite genders attract. Who cares? You're missing the point of this tale, folks.

All in all, FAITH FOR BEGINNNERS is a magnificently tremendous debut. An oeuvre of considerable depth, astoundingly unexpected from a first-time novelist, yet Aaron Hamburger has plainly rung the bell.

Turning that final page, I suddenly felt myself levitating. Well, not exactly levitating, but I certainly began to have more faith in the common man, more than ever before. At the end of the day, it all boils down the base passions of love, sex, and, well...eating the bones.

Master those concepts, and you're well on your way from the beginning stages and boldly onto our very next lesson, says Hamburger.

You know. I think he's right.


~~~~


Five stars? Another title isn't more deserving.

Hand on the heart,
ADM in Prague

After reading several reviews of "Faith for Beginners", my book club chose this as it's next book to read. The reviews used words like "funny", "insightful", "profoundly moving", & we were all looking forward to reading it. "Faith for Beginners" is NOT at all funny! It is quite the opposite in fact. It is a completely depressing novel with nothing interesting, powerful, memorable, meaningful or redeeming about it. The characters have no depth, with the exception of George, & therefore do not draw you in. The result...this reader didn't give a hoot what happened to any of the characters. It drags on & on, & you think that it's got to get better but it never does.

All in all, Hamburger's writing was not creative, interesting, profound or...ANYTHING. The only thing I felt at the end of the book was angry that I wasted my time reading it. This book does not work, & Aaron Hamburger hasn't got it.