American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction

5. Four Questions for Allegra Goodman

INTRODUCTION As a crossover best-selling success Allegra Goodman is a leading voice on nearly every major issue confronting modern Judaism in the diaspora . For almost twenty years Goodman has been writing fiction that covers the full spectrum of diasporic Jewish life in America, from Orthodoxy and feminism to Holocaust representation and liberal ideology . Goodman is as comfortable writing an uproarious academic satire as she is precise in skewering Chasidic communities and expatriate Orthodox Honolulu Jews. Earlier in American Talmud we discussed first- and second-generational witnessing to the Holocaust; this chapter explores Goodman’s important third-generational representation of the Holocaust, before turning to her groundbreaking fictional representation of Orthodoxy. Writing about the biblical matriarch Rachel, Allegra Goodman observes: “It does not matter how much commentary has been written; questioning and speculation are a part of reading this text. The questions cannot end, because gaps are integral to the story; the text will never be exhausted, because it can never be filled” (“The Story of Rachel” 174). Although Goodman is referring to the troubling episode of Rachel’s theft of her father’s idols, she might just as easily be speculating on her own representation of the Holocaust within her fiction. Goodman is a writer who is concerned with asking the right questions if only to remind her readers of the tremendous gap that the Nazi era has left not only within Judaism, but also within contemporary culture. Goodman is a discriminating observer of social mores and a chronicler of domesticity in the tradition of George Eliot. A satirical writer who relies on her readers to cut through layers of social nuance to glimpse the kernel of wisdom embedded within each of her stories and novels, Goodman is also, despite her Victorian roots, a writer with a decidedly postmodern and feminist sensibility. Her fictional universe is 119 CHAPTER 5 Four Questions for Allegra Goodman peopled with seekers; her characters are inevitably engaged in a cultural conflict in their attempt to transcend the quotidian of contemporary American society and connect to some deeper theological meaning. This quest often ends ambiguously because Goodman is more interested in setting up a problem than in seeking a solution. Thus, much of Goodman’s work focuses on the religious conflicts, alienation, and displacement of the second and third generations of assimilated Jewish Americans, many of whom are descended from Holocaust survivors. This displacement, either as a result of the Holocaust for Andras and his children in Kaaterskill Falls, or the crippling effects of American assimilation for Ed and Sarah in The Family Markowitz, sends Goodman ’s characters in a search for higher spirituality. Though Goodman has never dealt with the Holocaust head-on in her fiction, she alludes to it in a troubling way, allowing her readers to view how her characters , whether they are assimilated or Orthodox, are disturbed by their personal and historical legacies. Goodman was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1967, but grew up in a small Jewish community in Hawaii where her parents taught at the University of Hawaii. Goodman remembers having worn a traditional floral muumuu at her bat mitzvah. She began publishing and also gained recognition for her writing at a remarkably young age—her first story appeared in Commentary when she was a freshman at Harvard University, while her first book of short stories was published before her graduation at the age of twenty-one. Goodman would go on to earn a Ph.D. in English Literature from Stanford University. Much of Goodman’s writing is semiautobiographical and draws upon the exoticism of her upbringing. At the end of her first story collection Total Immersion, for example, Goodman appends a glossary of words, not only for the Yiddish and Hebrew phrases, but also for the Hawaiian words and phrases that trickle into her prose. SATIRICAL REPRESENTATION Goodman’s first book Total Immersion is a collection of stories that satirize Jewish American mores and assimilation. Goodman’s sharp, witty writing showcases her remarkable penchant at cutting through layers of socialization to expose the unvarnished truth of her characters’ lives. The Holocaust pervades this collection perhaps more for its absence than by its presence. One of the few references to the war in Total 120 AMERICAN TALMUD Immersion occurs when a Jewish American who served during World War II remembers the letters he wrote home while in the Navy. Although he weeps as he remembers that...