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91pThe Great Letter E By Sandra Schor NORTH POINT PRESS, 1990. 204 PAGES. If being Jewish were simply a matter of practicing Judaism, there would be a lot less to say about it. Modern Jewish literature had tended to focus on the outsiders, the rebels, and the eccentrics. Perhaps this explains why so many literary works have been inspired, like Sandra Schor’s The Great Letter E, by the apostate philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Schor’s protagonist, Barry Glassman, practices optometry, and his work with lenses is one of the many ways in which his life, at least as he sees it, runs parallel to Spinoza’s. Like his hero, Barry is something of a luftmensch: he neglects his shop, his wife, and his son in favor of pondering the Ethics and toiling away at an essay on rainbows, pollution, and the retention of contact lenses, hoping finally to recover from the B+ he received in a college seminar on Spinoza. He annoys his rabbi and synagogue president with his rationalist version of Judaism: on his son’s bar mitzvah invitation, he explains that “the Torah does not represent revelation but the high thought of reasonable people.” As the novel progresses, Glassman’s life disintegrates: he separates from his wife, moves to Brooklyn, and loses touch with his son—who starts getting into, of all things, religious Judaism. Imagining his marital separation as a version of the herem, or excommunication, placed on Spinoza, Barry befriends a blind man, reconnects (rather intensely) with his brainy cousin Enid, and learns as his horizons shrink that “life is compromise, not paradise.” Bitter ironies abound: among other things, his shop suddenly starts turning a profit after a tragic accident kills many of Barry’s colleagues en route to an optometry conference. Schor establishes in Glassman an intricate psychology—he is a faithful, unorthodox believer, and an inconsistently good person overall—and interweaves his story with quotations from and musings on Spinoza that reflect the wider influence of this figure in contemporary Jewish life: a legacy of stubbornness and intellectual courage borne proudly by many contemporary Jews. Philosophic, slapstick, and weird, The Great Letter E offers a touching portrait of the philosopher manqué and of a Jew, unsatisfied both by the traditional denominations and the new spiritualism, who desires a theological but reasonable way to remain Jewish. Further reading: The Great Letter E appeared in 1990—the same year that Schor died, at the age of 58—and won Hadassah’s Harold U. Ribalow Award. Schor also published short stories, poetry, and guide books in the field of English composition, much of which can be found, along with biographical materials, on a website created by the author’s daughter, Esther Schor (herself a distinguished poet, professor, and biographer of Emma Lazarus). See http://www.princeton.edu/~eschor/sandra. Other works inspired by Spinoza include a German novel of 1837 by Berthold Auerbach (translated into English 127 Titles American Jewish Fiction in 1882), stories by Israel Zangwill (“The Lens Grinder”) and I. B. Singer (“The Spinoza of Market Street”), and Goce Smilevski’s Macedonian novel, Conversations with Spinoza (2002, translated in 2006). Those desiring a lively nonfictional approach to the iconoclastic thinker can seek out Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza (2006), while others interested in Jewish rebellion and heresy more broadly should consult Isaac Deutscher’s provocative essay, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in a collection of the same name (1968). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92pHe, She, and It By Marge Piercy KNOPF, 1991. 429 PAGES. Jewish communities have endured for millennia despite extraordinary challenges. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to find them persisting in the futures imagined by science fiction authors (especially considering that some of the giants in the field of sci-fi, like Isaac Asimov, were themselves Jewish). In Marge Piercy’s dystopic He, She, and It—also published under the title Body of Glass outside the United States—Israel and the rest of the Middle East have been obliterated by a nuclear holocaust, and by 2059 the planet’s governing bodies are corporations and roving gangs, not nations. Yet fragile Jewish communities manage to endure, like Tikva, a settlement somewhere on the Atlantic coast of what used to be the United States, not far, one suspects, from Piercy’s adopted home of Cape Cod. While the world around it crumbles, Tikva is Piercy’s utopia: Jewish, democratic, feminist, and individualistic, it offers a counterpoint to the corporate blandness imposed outside and survives by selling homegrown technologies and...

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