What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction (review)

Reviews Philip Roth Studies 181 Victoria Aarons. What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. 181 pp. $37.50. What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction by Victoria Aarons provides an insightful analysis of contemporary American Jewish writing that seeks to reconcile issues of modernity with the meaning and impact of the ancient covenant between God and Abraham. Aarons focuses on what she describes as “the moment of covenantal ambiguity” to argue that we find “a self-fashioned return to the covenant, to the claims of Jewish law and the ethical complexities it evokes” in the fiction of contemporary American Jewish writers (14–15). The tensions and dilemmas Aarons explores are provocative and compelling . Aarons looks first to older and more established authors—Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow—before turning her attention to more contemporary authors such as Ethan Canin, Allegra Goodman, and Thane Rosenbaum. Second-generation writers such as Rosenbaum, Aarons argues, “look ‘back’ to what their characters perceive as a fragmented covenant distorted by the Holocaust” (30). She offers a sympathetic reading of Rosenbaum , delineating his focus on the inheritance of loss and the challenges it poses with regard to modern Jewish identity. Aarons argues persuasively “that contemporary American Jewish fiction is engaged in an ongoing and often antagonistic dialogue with the conditions, assumptions, and thematic preoccupations of the Hebrew Bible” (25). Aarons begins with a focus on Bernard Malamud—notably, The Assistant. She argues that Malamud, perhaps more than his contemporaries, “sets the stage for a reconstruction of the possibilities for living with ancient Jewish law in contemporary liberal society” (27). She continues: The covenant is, for Malamud, and for some of the American Jewish writers who follow him, a negotiated arrangement not between a commanding voice of the divine and the chosen, but rather among human beings, whose self-invention, although at times self-delusional, begins with an “original story,” if only in “memory” of some measure of loss, kaddish as the primal scene of sustaining Jewish myth. (28) This “memory” and the need for sustaining Jewish myths continue to haunt many of us who self-identify as second generation. I do not want to deny my father’s Hasidic upbringing or my Jewish inheritance, but these have been mitigated by a secular, almost generic, upbringing in the American Southwest and by my father’s embracing of the Enlightenment (and determined agnosticism) after World War II. I have a desire to reclaim my Jewish heritage, but I cannot quite imagine myself taking my panties to the rav. I can relate to the ineffectual fumbling and ambivalence of Thane Rosenbaum’s Adam Posner in Elijah Visible when it comes to leading a Passover Seder or lighting a Yorzheit candle. But I also would like to know more about Posner’s survivor parents and the 182 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2005 world from which they came—in Rosenbaum’s universe, survivors are broken and they traumatize their children at will. Five thousand years of history hardly seem to enter into the equation and, most disturbingly, children are not simply traumatized by the fact that their parents are survivors—the survivor parents set out to deliberately traumatize their children. In “The Little Blue Snowman of Washington Heights,” for example, Adam’s parents refuse to pick him up from kindergarten because they want to hone his survival abilities by trying to make his own way home—they try to turn him into a literal survivor. This is something that should be addressed. Aarons does, however, provide an insightful reading of Rosenbaum’s psychological complexities. She points out, “Increasingly in the literature of contemporary American Jews there arises a conspicuous shift from community to the isolated individual, from a communal sense of shared identity, shared past—if only an imagined one—to a disconcerting sense of isolation and fragmentation” (121). The roots of Rosenbaum, so to speak, are to be found in Philip Roth. Aarons argues that, “[f]or Roth, the topos of the law of the covenant is clearly a figure of neurosis, the master trope of psychoanalysis. [. . .] The breach of the covenant is a substitution...