Gaiety on Tisha B’Av: Sexuality, Subjectivity, and Narrative Closure in the Work of Lev Raphael

Canadian Review of American Snid,es/ RPVuecmradtenned'etudes amhrcames Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 163-176 Gaiety on Tisha B'Av: Sexuality, Subjectivity, and Narrative Closure in the Work of Lev Raphael David Buchbinder 163 Lev Raphael, a Wharton scholar, is familiar with the idea of taboos and their violation. The very title of his short story collection, Dancing on Tisha B'Av, signals this in connection with religion, specifically Judaism, since Tisha B'Av, in the Jewish Calendar, is a solemn fast day commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Accordingly, any festive activity, such as dancing, on such a day would be regarded as inappropriate and offensive, if not, indeed, sacrilegious. I want to begin with two vignettes proffered by Lev Raphael himself.1 The first is that of a Jew's re(dis)covery of his faith. The son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael remarks that he "was culturally Jewish, or more accurately , the son of parents who were culturally Jewish. So I could feel superior, with my father, to the Reform rabbi of the synagogue down the street ... " (Raphael 1996, 9). Yet religious observance in Raphael's home seems to have been sporadic and idiosyncratic: We lit Chanukah candles (except on days we forgot), and if my father did it, he said a prayer under his breath. My brother and I got the traditional Chanukah coins made out of chocolate. My parents each lit a yorzeit licht, a memorial candle, on Yorn Kippur and on the anniversary of their parents' deaths. We ate "holiday dinners" somewhat 164 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes americames fancier than the usual fare-to which dinners my father was invariably late from the store. But we never had a Passover Seder. ... I had no sense of Jewish holidays marking spiritual as well as historical time. ("To Be a Jew," ]A, 9) He admits that, Until I was well into my twenties, I had no Jewish pride at all; I was ashamed of being Jewish. I was mortified by my parents' accents when they spoke English (though they spoke a dozen languages between them) and by their use of Yiddish in public because it seemed to stamp us as alien, different, inferior. When I was young I even imagined having a non-Jewish name. Like Tom Danbury, a name I had heard in an Abbott and Costello movie. Think of it: Tom Sawyer crossed with the name of a New England town-what could be more American? ("To Be a Jew," ]A, 5) However, at the age of twenty-three, fearful of the crisis which his brother's intention to marry a non-Jewish woman was likely to provoke, Raphael attended Yorn Kippur services-the first time he had done so-and found himself "roused and transfixed without understanding how or why, or what it all meant" ("To Be aJew," ]A, 14). From this point on, Raphael developed a greater interest in Judaism and began to identify more strongly as a Jew, even changing his name, though not to the assimilationist "Tom Danford," as he had fantasised: Twice, I've named myself. Once to wrestle free, to be myself. I chose my uncle's name, the one who died at Stalingrad. And Lev meant many things. Heart in Hebrew. Lion in Yiddish. Two pieces of my life. And then again, five years along, I dropped my father's name and chose one that means "God will heal" to mark my new connection to my faith. ("Losing My Mother: Scenes from a Memoir," ]A, 74) The transition from a domestic background that was culturally but not ritually Jewish to the embracing of Judaism as an act of faith is comple- David Buchbinder I 165 mented by the second vignette, in which Raphael, a PhD student at Michigan State University, meets someone with whom he falls in love, "not a child of survivors ... but of Eastern European immigrants, and we share a cultural landscape through which we move with ease and recognition together" ('To Be a Jew," ]A, 27). Finding love, Raphael also finds parenthood-of his new partner's two sons by a previous marriage, whom...