The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction

For a non-Jew reading the story Sex On The Brain, it will probably be like watching a foreign movie. A Jewish-American stops off in Israel for vacation, and marvels at the country’s changes (cell phones everywhere, long before the Americans had them) and the lack of changes, which are even more unusual to an American. For starters, Israeli men will shamelessly proposition American women in public, without fear of getting slapped or arrested. I suppose the Israeli attitude towards life is “you could get blown up in the street, so what can it hurt to try?”) She also thinks of the Americans who show up for a two week immersion course, or a four month stay on a kibbutz, and go back to the USA, England, Canada, or France, thinking they’ve been in the army. She tells her Israeli ex-boyfriend that we call it “slumming.”

In The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones, a girl from a non-religious family stays with her religious relatives for the summer, experiencing both the nuisances and the happiness of their lives. The nuisances are that they have to wear long skirts and aren’t allowed to swim when men are watching, and for the average American teen, that ruins your summer. On the other hand, she finds that Friday night dinners are more enjoyable; everyone’s happy, the kids are having a good time, and they’re all thankful for what they have. Quite a contrast, she finds, to the dull, quiet, mannered mealtimes in her home. She’s not there because her parents have any interest in piety; on the contrary, they decorate their house on Christmas with pagan Yuletide chintz. She’s there because her mother’s in the hospital, her father’s absorbed in his work, and there’s nobody else to take care of her. It reminds me of the young adult novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond, in the way the urbane worldly girl ends up with her Puritan relatives. Unlike that novel, however, the protagonist here isn’t in danger of being killed for heresy. Everyone in this story is there by choice.

As a Jewish-American, I grew up seeing a lot of stereotypes in the media regarding Judaism. My non-Jewish friends were surprised to hear the truth about us; braided loaves of bread have nothing to with Judaism, only little children get presents on all eight nights of Chanukah, and despite what happens at Grossingers, we do not have a tradition of booking comedians on the “High Holidays.” They’re also shocked to hear that (a) Israelis don’t like Jewish-Americans, (b) the names Schwartz, Weiss, Goldstein, and Stein are NOT Jewish names, and (c) Sephardic Jewish customs, names, cooking, and clothing are like nothing they’ve ever seen.

Maybe we need to let US high school students read stories like these. I remember reading books about foreign lives; Things Fall Apart, Nectar in a Sieve, All Quiet on the Western Front. These were required reading back in school, and they really open your eyes to how people live. I once read The House On the Roof to some Christian fifth graders at a Catholic school, and it clearly left an impression. What they’d learned about Judaism from their textbook was shallow, nothing about all the other holidays.