Flutterings

The times are strange and evil, round us and within us we may see without searching all the signs that hitherto have preceded great revolutions in human history. . . . To those who hope for and work towrads human progress, whether or not they call themselves by the name of Socialists, the outward aspect of the time is full of profound discouragement. . . . Cinder heaps smoulder where there once were beacon fires. Everywhere is re-action triumphant.

-- J. W. Mackail (1900, on William Morris); quoted in Edwardian Occasions (Samuel Hynes, 1972)

It's partially the idea of shifting identity that drew me, all these years later, to a character who is American but Israeli, who is both patriot and traitor, who inhabits more than one self, by virtue of being a spy.

That's what I latch onto when thinking about contemporary American Jewish novels engaging with Israel, the ideas revolving around fluidity, of borders drawn and redrawn, of changing landscapes and altered realities. As for my initial discomfort with being labeled, I don't know if it's age that has changed me as much as the current climate here, in America, my home. But I'm telling you, with white supremacists resurgent and wielding power, this pulled-pork-loving, drive-on-Saturdays secular Jew has never been happier to be called a Jewish-American Novelist. One yarmulke isn't even good enough for me, these days. I'm writing this with a half-dozen stacked, like pancakes, on top of my head.

As Israeli artists, inventors and youth claimed [Tel Aviv], the culture they began to pump out was the antithesis of the one at large that grew out of a diasporic, Ashkenazi, religious, post-Holocaust idea. Instead, it was a modern, secular, Middle Eastern reality without cultural precedent. For the first time in the country's history, there was new Israeli music, food, art and humor that reflected the physical and emotional reality of a fraught and urgent Jewish existence whose context is Arabic rather than European. It's no coincidence that Israeli society hijacked the narrative of itself around the time that modern Hebrew, also forcibly willed into fresh existence, fully caught up with the complex conditions of the lives of its native speakers: For language itself is generative, and to be able to describe is to be in the possession of creative power.

So it is that diaspora Jews find, for the first time in 2,000 years, that they can’t claim Israel as their idea, or its reality as an extension of their own. However related, it is something authentically other now, and the Jews of America and Europe, most of whom don't speak Hebrew, have only narrow access to the inner conversation of Israeli being, and can only look upon it from the uneasy position of being neither inside, nor yet entirely outside, beyond the range of its consequences. Israel, which is making sense of itself, has confused our own sense of being, and the novel goes straight toward that confusion, just as it will always go toward heat, toward what is still undecided and so most alive.

Jews in America are always being called upon to declare their loyalties--which of our identifiers do we put before the hyphen, and which do we put after: "Jewish" or "American"? This recurrent query--which Jews in America ask themselves with all the breeziness of an online test, and anti-Semites in America ask with all the gravity of an Ellis Island examination--is inevitable but pointless. Jews are more secure in contemporary America than they have been in any other country in Jewish history. This is because America is a country in which the citizens define the ideologies, not the other way around. This, ultimately, is what the fundamentalists hate: America’s constitutive capacity for change, which they regard as the evil face of self-determination. Nazis, Klansmen, ISIS--all fundamentalists resent the mutability of human life and the fact that, in a technologized world, no manner of racial or ethnic or religious or cultural purity can ever be guaranteed, as if an "inalienable" right.

The country I dream of is a place in which all humans are free to take their indoor voices out into the streets, both as proud members of families — however myriad, however defined — and as their own liberated individual selves. America has been this country only rarely; Israel has been this country almost never. The one country I've ever lived in that's consistently fulfilled this dream has been the Novel.

"When I can see problems and solutions others can't, it makes other people angry. I realize that it's not enough to identify the difficulties and know what must be done. One must convey the proper course to those who have the problem, so they might see the way as if they had discovered it themselves. [My sister] Jenny explained it to me, but I lack the ability to accomplish her ends, try though I might."

He gentled his hold, because she'd guessed correctly: he was angry, but not at her. "And if you cannot defer to those of lesser insight, Wife? Are you to keep silent and do nothing?"

Another sigh followed by a silence. Silence at least suggested Louisa was considering Joseph's question, and it meant he could hold her a while longer.

"I used to wish I would wake up one day and be less intelligent," she said, sounding very weary. "That is, of course, blasphemy, but I don't like making people feel angry and stupid, and I like even less when they must try to impose those emotions on me in retaliation."

The immediate impression of the trio [Ottolenghi, NOPI head chef Ramael Scully, and recipe developer Esme Howarth] made was of friendliness -- how well suited to one another they were, and how soft-spoken and solicitous Ottolenghi was.

"Would you like some tea and cookies?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer he went rummaging to retrieve some. I'd been served so much Ottolenghi food by others, and now Ottolenghi himself was serving me cookies. This seemed to be the opposite of Gordon Ramsay. This was the opposite of the matador chefs and their brash opining. In fact, if you could say anything about Yotam Ottolenghi, you might say he contained multitudes: a sweet temperament and fierce intensity, iron discipline and wild creativity.

I have an unofficial contest going with some writer friends, to see who can ask the stupidest question EVER without meaning to, and I think I recently won. I was interviewing the chef Yotam Ottolenghi in London, and at the risk of never being asked to go on assignment again, I'm going to quote my question, verbatim:

So I'm just--butternut! Butternut squash, broccoli polenta, pearled lemon, that idea of, and sometimes this happens at the ridiculous high-end restaurant, the prawn did this, eat the whole flower, or whatever, just get that marrow, or whatever it is, up here, on the plate, all foamy, and this is what you’re doing without having to turn it into some sort of ridiculous cooky thing in these restaurants, like, maybe you could tell me: Why are we doing this!?

Seriously, how can you answer a question like this? And you know you're in trouble when the response is, as it was in Ottolenghi's case, a very long silence, a polite but quizzical expression usually reserved for the platypus tank at the zoo, and then, with pity: I think I know what you're trying to say...

My poems are supposed now to come out in the early spring, I think, but Houghton Mifflin and I don't seem to be getting along too well. I am sending them the sections from this translation, because I said I would mostly, but I haven't heard yet whether they are interested or not. I sent them all my stories to date, and they dropped them like a hot potato, so if you ever go by 2 Park Street you can throw stones at their windows for me, if you want to.

But the real hurdle facing "Londongrad," one I didn't expect, wasn't that it was too Western. It was that it was too Russian. A common stance among educated Russians -- the ones I imagined would enjoy "Londongrad" the most -- is to refuse to watch a series or a film simply because it's Russian. The first Twitter reactions to "Londongrad" sounded the same note, over and over: "It's watchable, probably because it wasn't filmed in Russia." "As much as I hate everything Russian, I might give this one a try." "God help me, I can't believe I am watching a Russian TV series." "I might watch it later. I'm in no mood to see my compatriots." On a site devoted to romantic fan fiction, an author expressed her shock after combining two of the lead characters' names into one, as is the custom among fanfic writers (Misha + Alisa = Milisa): It was the first time in her memory that the names were Russian.

Sarah: We had no religion at all, but we were Jews in New Hampshire, and my sister--who is now a rabbi--said it best: We were, like, the only Jews in Bedford, New Hampshire, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of associated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor.

Judd [Apatow]: How does your sister talk about Judaism?

Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get cunty with her, and I'll be like, "Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?" And she'll go, "Well, I like to live my life as though there is one." And I'm just like, "Oh, you're beautiful."


Judd: I wish I could convince myself to believe the way your sister believes because I'm so exhausted from not believing.

Sarah: I actually don't think that she believes in God, necessarily. I think she just loves the ritual of religion and finding meaning in every little thing. She loves living her life that way.

Judd: She doesn't believe in a God that is actively involved in people's lives, making choices?

Sarah: She doesn't believe that God is rooting for the Giants and not the Patriots. She's not fucking ridiculous.

Even when Ms. Nash would eat at her desk, another former colleague, Sharon R. Boone, recalled, she would first put down a china place setting and silverware on a small tablecloth. Taste matters, she explained in her cookbook.

"Even more than specific dishes or ingredients, soul food represents a certain spirit, an attitude, a flamboyance, a kind of loving that one brings to the kitchen and stirs into the pots," she wrote. "In essence, it's a flava."

In rehearsals, Ms. Sims's intensity is the opposite of her playful offstage persona; you get the feeling that she could dance through a tornado. Her focus helps her stay open, she explained. "As dancers, we are selfish, we are insecure, we are sometimes a bit conceited, and that clogs your arteries," she said. "You clog yourself to the point where you can't breathe, and you can't bring life into anything."

Later, she added: "I was never a hater. I got a lot of hate, but you can't be a hater."

In her early days with the company, she faced jealousy from some of the other women. "But I'm from the Bronx," Ms. Sims said with a smile. "That means if you have a problem with me, that's your issue. I got a lot of that, but what I ended up doing was creating a shell: When I was at work, I was at work."

We can see in the letters how the split in her desire to be fully a writer and fully a woman shaped her daily life and career. As a writer, she explained to [Lawrence Clark] Powell in 1947: ''I want to be good, but I also want children and love and stress and panic and in the end I am too tired to write with the nunlike ascetic self-denial and concentration it takes. If I live to be 50 . . . ah, that is my song . . . if I live to 50 I'll know how to write a good book.'' As decade followed decade, she changed the number but not the tune. At 55 she wrote, ''I have now raised the ante to the fairly imminent goal of SIXTY.''

Betty Fussell, the 87-year-old food writer, never took the main road anywhere. If there was a beautiful, sensual, messy path, Betty took it, even if it meant getting lost along the way. Which is just what happened to me in that oak grove one morning last spring.

When I finally found my way out, I saw her, leaning on a walker. It had been years since we had last seen each other in New York, and I was struck by the change.

"Oh, did you fall?" I asked gently.

"You betcha I fell," she said. "I was coyote hunting in Montana with my son."