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3.0 out of 5 stars
Waving AND Drowning,
By
This review is from: The slow mirror and other stories: New fiction by Jewish writers (Paperback)
In stories like these the Jewish voice has the advantage of not having to be translated, from Hebrew say, or Yiddish, but suffers from not having as broad a swathe of time and trial from which to choose the surviving words. These stories are at times weaker than even the piously, ideological duds which may lurk among a general Jewish fiction anthology's worthies, and its editors profess no particular agenda, letting their preface be a string of quotes from the avowed intentions of their accumulated authors. The spread is a considerable range and covers, one suspects, every possible suspect, or minority, rather than the usual suspects. A borderline pornographic story about a gay transvestite and his love-life, previously published in the American gay review "Evergreen Chronicles" (Shaun Levin's "Shoes"), has as its only "Jewish" content a fleeting reference to a Purim party which, perhaps, is central because it's the one place where the protagonist can wear his chosen mode of dress in public and without censure. Okay, maybe. Another, and utterly charming, end of this spectrum is Roseanne Rabinowitz's "Maza Softig" where a Yiddishist interviewer and a Serbo-Croat interviewee end up comparing terminologies for their breasts and thighs and other sweet parts in bed. This book is perhaps much more of a collage of Jewish life than literature, particularly in England, and the only conclusion is that, from this book at least, much of Jewish life isn't really all that Jewish, if by that you mean practising.Which leads to the question of what a Jewish voice is, what collective Jewish voices might be. Rabbi Steinsaltz, the great Talmudist and translator of that repository of Judaism speaks at the London Jewish Book Week recently about the Passover Haggadah's parable of the four sons - it was not intended, probably, he says, but the sons are in fact a metaphor for the declining generations of present day Judaism. The wise one is the good practising Jew of the past, the wicked one is his rebellious son, the foolish one is the son of that one (who can at least be guided by his grandfather), and the last is the one who does not even know how to ask. Of Herzl, Israel's founder, Steinsatz notes that it was said he was too unversed in Jewish matters to even be called ignorant, the term did not apply. Steinsaltz believes that we are living in the era not even of the fourth son, who knows not enough to ask, but of the fifth son - the son who does not have the occasion to fail to ask, he is not at the Seder table at all, he is out in the world, like the authors of the pieces in "The Slow Mirror", and his contact with Judaism is tenuous, like the fading rememberance of a mother's tooth.
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