Suburban Kitsch
Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife.
by Silvia Tennenbaum.
Morrow. 395 pp. $9.95.
I believe it was Gypsy Rose Lee who said, “You gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get ahead.” The story of the frustrated housewife whose personal and professional development is being thwarted by an unfeeling husband and an unfashionable suburb has become a tiresome cliché. But apparently with a twist the formula remains workable. A middle-class frustrated rabbi’s wife whose personal and professional development is being thwarted, etc., is still good for a lucrative turn.
Rachel, the rabbi’s wife, heroine of this first novel by Silvia Tennenbaum, resents the demands made upon her as a rebbetsin of her husband’s community in Gateshead, Long Island, particularly as they interfere with her artistic inclination. She goes to New York City to look at art, has an abbreviated affair with a former lover who taught her art, and finally rents a room and produces art. Coincidentally, her husband becomes increasingly unpopular with his flock, enjoys a hearty affair with one of his congregational supporters, and loses his job. In a final paragraph the couple is reconciled, the rebbetsin looks forward to her first show, and the rabbi to a new job with a “Jewish cultural foundation.” Readers should note that this is not a parody of the book but a précis.
In general the writing runs strongly to platitude and stereotype, with some fine moments of unintentional humor. Here is Rachel studying the face of Truscott Boothby, the local Episcopal priest:
The handsome, craggy features contained no trace of Jewish angst. Even without his collar he would have appeared out of place. He looked innocent. He looked simple. Among the gross and vulgar Jews in that room he was an anachronism.
Does Boothby represent an earlier phase of Christian purity, or did the author mean that he is an anomaly? Is Jewish angst as distinguishable as the “curly Jewish hair” and the “circumcised Jewish prick” that appear elsewhere in this book? Is it the angst that makes the Jews in the room “gross and vulgar” or are their grossness and vulgarity the cause of their angst?
The sensitive heroine’s point of view is meant to expose the crude consumerism and selfishness of Long Island suburbia, in particular of its Jews. Rachel suffers through the predictably crass bar mitzvah and country-club wedding, through sisterhood meetings at which no one is interested in Kafka, art shows that are mere occasions for fund raising, a convention of salesmen—or is it rabbis? The role of a rabbi’s wife is presented as paradigmatic of woman’s fate, making functional demands without recognizing the “real person” beneath. Subjected by the author to a succession of uniformly distasteful Jewish events, the rebbetsin broods, dons purple stockings as a sign of her defiant inner rebellion, or says things like “shit,” “old fart,” and “fuck,” to express her moral and intellectual outrage.
Unfortunately, whether as rabbi’s wife or would-be artist, Rachel is herself a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas and a mirror image of the crudity she rejects. By a simple inversion of prejudices, she concludes that the owners of Lincoln Continentals are inferior to the owners of Plymouths. She is “proud” to be excluded by the rich and socially prominent, but finds it “painful” to be an outcast among the interesting people of Wellfleet—writers, painters, and intellectuals, “an elite you admired.” Color TV is a confirmation of moral decay, while support for a day-care center is proof of enlarged social conscience. A genuine provincial snob, Rachel wears her pseudo-artistic and pseudo-liberal biases with such smashing conviction that she might have been used (on the model of Emma) as the heroine who is brought to a measure of humbling self-awareness. But for all her invocation of Jane Austen’s “scalpel,” Mrs. Tennenbaum fully shares her heroine’s perspective; far from being a Jewish Jane Austen, she is a Jewish Emma, offering up her uninformed judgments and unexamined passions as worthy social criticism. The result is a novel at least as vulgar as the community it purports to describe.
“Shit! They want me for the minyan. Federbush has Yahrzeit,” says Seymour the rabbi to his Rachel. Since it is easier to pick out bar-mitzvah gifts by the dozen, Rachel the rabbi’s wife “always kept a single face in mind when she bought that season’s supply” (usually the face of a child named Spencer Gewirtz who Rachel suspects will grow up to be gay). Occasionally there is a wedding, important for Seymour to attend because “my contract is coming up for renewal.” “I’ll send a book,” says the rabbi’s wife on one such occasion. “The History of Post-Impressionism.” “Don’t be funny, Rachel. They barely read,” answers the rabbi. “They can look at the pictures then,” says Rachel.
It is hard to know what the author or her heroine considers a valid basis for this silly sense of superiority. Certainly the standard is not Judaism itself, which appears in the book as an outmoded set of rites. Nor can the standard be the modern religion of self-realization through art, of which Rachel imagines herself a leading devotee. At the very least, the religion of art demands of its postulants a strenuous regimen of self-questioning, a strong intelligence, and an undeviating commitment to the values of high culture; poor Rachel, however, is a complacent self-accepter, not especially bright, and in her tastes and aesthetic judgments a relentless middlebrow. Perhaps, then, ridiculous as it sounds, the standard is baseball? The sport, in fact, plays a major role in this novel, not unlike the role it plays in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, offering subtle assurance of the all-American credentials of the characters despite their Jewish trappings. Here, however, the comparison is invidious. Readers are treated to a big-league baseball game at which Rachel observes: “Every stance and every gesture was timed-honored [sic], like the steps of a ritual dance. It was absolutely necessary, in watching the game of baseball, to be on intimate terms with it. Only intimacy prevented moments such as these from being dull.” This, from a heroine who candidly admits that she has never even bothered to learn the grace after meals. Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife may be the first American Jewish novel to expose Judaism to the noble standards of baseball and find it wanting.
The book’s single remarkable feature is the reception it has had at the hands of some reviewers who are apparently prepared to treat with high dignity anything that baits the Jews. It has been likened to the writings of Philip Roth—a comparison that may be, in Roth’s long martyrdom at the hands of some of his critics, the unkindest cut of all. Roth’s satire, informed by real wit and artistic intelligence, often hits the mark, but this book, though it sets out to indict contemporary Jewish life, does a job on itself alone. In the years since World War II, American Jewish writing has at last traversed the whole road from avant-garde to kitsch; that so blatant an example of the latter can still find critics to praise it only proves that some people have never learned to tell the difference.
