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98 The Romance Reader (1995)
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seven of the Ten Commandments,” she announces with pride. It is astonishing that, though, this young woman remains faithful in odd, inconsistent, and revealing ways. For one thing, she loathes Germans unconditionally and vehemently (so vehement is this prejudice that she refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein as an example of “Aryan intellectualism”); for another, she eats only vegetarian food and refuses the osso buco the hit man prepares as part of one of the Italian feasts he whips up. She may not know it, but her culinary practices signal something more profound than taste: in the fight that emerges from her refusal, she screams at the proud Sicilian, “This heritage of yours eats people, swallows them whole. . . . Do you know what I want? I want a fucking grilled cheese sandwich on Wonderbread.” She wants, in other words, to be American. Her greatest loyalty, meanwhile, is to “the love of her life,” who not incidentally happens to be a Holocaust survivor who does not requite her devotion. The pulse of the novel is sex, throbbing and passionate and dispassionate and everyday and kinky: Kirshenbaum describes, in more detail than Erica Jong, with more variety than Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the wild specifics of her characters’ sexual practices and history, ranging from childhood discoveries to adult explorations. Not many writers can wring out a compliment from Norman Mailer on the topic of frank treatment of sex, but Kirshenbaum did. Might this obsession with sex in and of itself be a component of the Jewish affiliation Kirshenbaum is invested in documenting? Sexy, mordant, and cynical, A Disturbance in One Place manages, with its string of unusually short chapters and its tense, disorienting flashbacks, to provide glimpses into the dangerous, sometimes depressing, often frightening world of the 1990s’ cutthroat sexual politics that Sex in the City, some years later, would treat as good clean fun. Further reading: Similar motifs recur in many of Kirshenbaum’s various fictions; Hester among the Ruins (2002), for example, presses harder on her feelings for Germans. Reading guides to most of her books can be found at the author’s personal website, http://www.binniekirshenbaum.com. Though it is unclear, as yet, how influential her writing will be, Kirshenbaum is making a definite impact as a teacher: through her position at Columbia’s M.F.A. program in creative writing, she has shepherded many young writers—including Tova Mirvis, Aaron Hamburger, and Elisa Albert—into print. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98pThe Romance Reader By Pearl Abraham RIVERHEAD, 1995. 296 PAGES. Atype of Judaism that developed in the 18th century in Eastern and Central Europe, Hasidism involves extreme piety and ecstatic prayer; while one Hasidic sect, Lubavitch, seeks out non-Hasidic Jews (they’re the ones who will find you on a street corner, ask you if you’re Jewish, and sweetly request that you 135 Titles perform a religious ritual), many strenuously resist modern life and secular society. The Satmar sect is particularly cloistered; unlike the Amish they do not shun technology, but Satmarers speak Yiddish rather than English in order to guard themselves and their children from the social temptations of the nonJewish world. (Yiddish students often enjoy a round of Handl Erlikh—“Deal Honestly”—a Yiddish-language version of Monopoly, marketed to Satmar families.) One might suspect that such a position is difficult to maintain, but it is estimated that more than 100,000 Satmarers live in either New York or Israel. Pearl Abraham’s debut novel, The Romance Reader, details the challenges faced by a teenage girl growing up in a Satmar family in the 1970s. Rachel Benjamin is the oldest of seven children (Abraham herself was the third of nine), and her childhood environment is even more intense than the average ultra-Orthodox home. Her father, an aspiring scholar and rabbi, has the family living in a rural summer hotel that has fallen into disuse, rather than in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—where they would at least have a community of people like them. The good news for Rachel is that because there aren’t other Satmarers around, she can slip away to the public library to check out English-language books, which are forbidden as secular foolishness by her father. Rachel’s taste runs to romances like Victoria Holt’s, though she also enjoys English classics; on a couple of occasions Abraham’s otherwise straightforward narrative follows along as Rachel’s fantasies of love, based on what she has been reading, unfurl. Throughout the book, Rachel struggles to compromise with her...