Tova Mirvis (b. 1972) does not think of herself as a true-crime reader. Then, in the summer of 2014, a man her ex-husband knows is shot to death outside his home in Tallahassee, and she cannot stop reading about it. The dead man is Dan Markel (1972-2014), a law professor at Florida State. He and his former wife, both lawyers from close Jewish families, had fought over custody of their two boys. A court had barred her from carrying the children five hundred miles south to her parents. Soon after, someone killed him. Over the next eight years the police charge the former wife’s brother and three other men. The former mother-in-law goes to trial years after that.
Mirvis reads each article as it appears. She does this at the hours when she should be working. She has a memoir in progress, the hardest thing she has tried to write, an account of leaving her marriage and the Orthodox Judaism she was raised in, and the murder gives her somewhere to put her attention that is not her own life. She tells one interviewer the case became her form of procrastination. It does not stay procrastination. She finishes the memoir, starts a novel, sets that novel aside, and writes the murder instead.
This is the spot she has stood on for a quarter century. A family looks settled from the street. Inside, the order cracks. She watches the crack open and writes down what comes through.
She is born in Bethesda, Maryland, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, in a Modern Orthodox family whose Memphis roots reach back into the nineteenth century. The Jewish community there is small and close and Southern, a place where the women know each other’s kitchens and each other’s children and each other’s failings. That community gives her both her first material and her ear. She will spend years rendering the texture of it: the casseroles, the gossip traded as care, the hierarchy of the synagogue’s women’s section, the affection that doubles as surveillance.
After high school she goes to Israel for a year, as the daughters of such families do, and immerses herself in the study of sacred texts. She arrives wanting to be remade. She had thought of herself as a little bad, she writes later, and in Jerusalem she set out to become good. She prays to be forgiven her own willfulness. The willful self does not leave. It goes quiet and waits.
She enters Columbia, takes her degree from Columbia College in 1995, and stays for a Master of Fine Arts in fiction at the School of the Arts, finishing in 1998. At Columbia she makes few friends outside the Orthodox world. By the end of her senior year she marries a man from inside it, a man without the hard edges of the boys she had once been drawn to. She means to be a model Orthodox wife. She keeps a kosher home, keeps Shabbat, covers her hair. She also begins writing characters who doubt and stray, and the writing turns out to be the place the waiting self speaks.
Her first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, appears in 1999 and becomes a national bestseller. She sets it among the Orthodox women of Memphis and tells it in a first-person plural, a chorus of “we” that judges and absorbs and finally cannot hold its own line. A young widow and convert arrives in the community, beautiful and ungoverned, and the women’s certainties bend around her. Mirvis does not present Orthodoxy as a prison or as a paradise. She presents it as a place where people live, governed by love and obligation and the fear of being talked about. Critics praise the warmth and the wit.
The Outside World follows in 2004. It moves among Memphis, New York, and Jerusalem and turns on arranged courtship, family expectation, and the gap between two households that both call themselves observant. Some characters reach toward stricter practice. Others quiet their questions and stay. She writes faith as a thing lived rather than a thing argued.
That year a critic comes at her. Wendy Shalit (b. 1975) argues in a widely read essay that novelists raised Orthodox, Mirvis among them, write the community from the outside, as hostile witnesses dressed as insiders. The charge stings because it asks for papers. Mirvis answers it in an interview in Los Angeles on January 30, 2005, and the transcript catches a woman whose doubt is already twelve years ahead of her public account of it.
The interviewer asks whether she believes God gave the Torah. She says she does, then complicates it at once. She does not hold the literalist notion of a text handed down word for word, she says; she holds to an evolving chain of tradition that has shaped her life.
He presses. He asks about the eighth of Maimonides‘s (1138-1204) thirteen principles, the one that calls every word of the Torah divine and puts anyone who denies a single word outside permitted belief.
“Remind me,” she says.
He recites it.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “That’s a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don’t have to know all the answers. I don’t know. It’s a good question.”
He tries another door. Would it be truer, he asks, to call her Orthoprax than Orthodox, correct in practice rather than in belief.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” she says, and then she takes the terms apart. The man who drives to an Orthodox synagogue, the man who prays three times a day and eats in non-kosher restaurants, which of them is Orthodox. She does not know. She does not think the words carry the weight he wants them to carry. What does any of it have to do with her right to write fiction, she asks. To live in the Orthodox world is to wrestle with these questions and stay inside the conversation. It is not to have the answers. She does not believe anyone has them.
Hours after the interview she writes to him, still arguing. She asks whether his questions about the principles of faith were meant for thought or meant to test whether she is the insider she claims to be. If the first, she is glad of the conversation. If the second, she resents it, the way she resents the critic. She reaches for Philip Roth (1933-2018) and The Ghost Writer, for Judge Wapter’s demand to know what qualifies a Jew to write about Jews for the national magazines. She feels too much of Wapter in the air.
He asks her later, by email, why she has stayed. Her answer is the most exact thing in the exchange. She has stayed because it is who she is, her childhood and her parents and her children and all her memories. She loves the ritual and the texts and the chain of ideas passed down with one more link added each generation. She loves that the week’s chaos goes still for the hours of Shabbat. A cantorial line catches her off guard and moves her toward something higher. She has stayed even though much of it angers her and feels unresolvable. She stays because the Orthodox world is wider than outsiders think, wide enough to hold one who doubts and wrestles and observes and believes, all at once.
She holds that position for seven more years. Around the time she turns forty it gives way. The doubt grows louder than the faith, and the marriage and the religion come apart together, each making the other impossible. She has said she could not leave Orthodoxy while staying in a marriage built on it. Leaving the marriage opened the room for other ways to be.
Visible City arrives in 2014, written across the years of the break, and the move shows on the page. She leaves the Orthodox setting and crosses Manhattan to the Upper West Side. A young mother watches her neighbors through their lit windows and builds lives for them out of what she can see, and the watching exposes the distance between the surface of a marriage and its floor. The subject holds even when the religion drops away. She still writes the gap between what a home shows and what it contains.
The memoir comes in 2017. She calls it The Book of Separation, after the bill of divorce, the sefer kritut, the book of rending, and she knows the title from the first page, which she rarely does. The book opens on a Rosh Hashanah, the first after she has left, and she sits among the congregation and looks at the faces and wonders how many of them carry the same fire of doubt she does. She writes the loss without pretending it is only freedom. She loses friends, a community, the certainty of belonging, a share of her family. The community mostly turns from her. She keeps raising her three children in Judaism. She marries again, a secular Jewish man. She knows that belonging without believing is a thing many people in the Orthodox world and far past it understand, and she knows what it costs to walk out of the belonging once the believing is gone.
The reviews are strong and the comparisons quick, to Shulem Deen and Leah Vincent and the run of departure memoirs out of the strict communities. Mirvis sits apart from most of them. She did not come out of a sealed ultra-Orthodox world where the outside was forbidden. She came out of a Modern Orthodoxy that had told her the worlds could be one, and her leaving is the long failure of that promise, not a jailbreak. She declines to indict. She lets a reader see why a woman might love a community and still have to go. There is a detail she shares about the writing of the book that holds the whole method: she had a scene of climbing Monument Mountain in the Berkshires, and her editor cut it, telling her enough with the Berkshires, we understand. She works by accumulation, by the small recurring pressure, not by the grand gesture, and she trusts an editor to tell her when the pressure has done its work.
Then the murder she could not stop reading about becomes the book she could not stop writing. We Would Never appears on February 11, 2025. She moves the real Tallahassee case to a secular Jewish family in Florida and changes the names, the jobs, the inner lives. A contentious divorce, a custody fight, a court order against the move, a husband shot, a family that closes ranks around the words everyone offers the police: no one I know would do such a thing. She alternates the wrecked present with the marriage’s slow collapse and works through the mother, the father sidelined by Parkinson’s, the dutiful eldest son, the estranged one. She sets herself the hard task of making the murderers people a reader can feel for, and she runs the whole thing past the Jewish question she has carried since Memphis. At Yom Kippur the matriarch searches the liturgy. Can a good person kill. Can a killer be forgiven, by man or by God. Critics call it a whydunit more than a whodunit and credit her with keeping the suspense from swamping the people. She guards the line between the real victim and her invention, and she keeps it.
She names her models when asked, and they are Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Like them she writes the novel of manners, the unwritten rules and the soft hierarchies of a tight community, the cost of stepping wrong. Her prose holds back. She builds character through observation and dialogue and the ordinary furniture of holiday and synagogue and family table, and she lets those gatherings carry the shifting loyalties. She revises for years, chasing the precision she wants before she lets a book go. She has taught at GrubStreet in Boston and spoken at universities and synagogues and festivals about fiction and memoir and the work of remaking a life. She held a scholar’s post at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 2009 and took a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in 2010. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.
More than twenty-five years past her debut, the arc holds its shape. She began inside the Orthodox community, writing its inner life with affection and a clear eye. She wrote her way out of it. Now she writes secular families who break in the same places the Orthodox ones did, over loyalty and custody and the lengths love reaches when it turns. The community changes across the books. The subject does not. Mirvis writes the moment the ordered life cracks, and she writes it from inside the crack, where the person standing there still loves the order she can no longer keep.
Set Apart: The Hero System of Tova Mirvis
On the first Rosh Hashanah after she leaves, Tova Mirvis comes back to a synagogue she no longer belongs to. She knows the room. She knows the women’s section, the hats and the hairpieces, the machzor open to the right page before the page is called, the small choreography of when to rise and when to sit that a body learns before it learns the words. She stands when they stand. She looks down the row at the faces she has prayed beside for years, and she wonders how many of them carry the fire she carries, the doubt that does not put itself out. Surely, she thinks, inside some of these minds burns this same strange fire. She is a woman attending her own funeral and finding the mourners distracted.
That morning holds both of the terrors her life runs on, and they pull against each other. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built a whole psychology on the claim that a man cannot live with the plain fact of his own death, so he builds a hero system, a scheme of rules by which he earns the sense that his life counts for something that outlasts him. The Denial of Death names the general dread. Mirvis gives it a local shape. Her first terror is not the grave. It is the living death of staying, the years she spent keeping a faith she had stopped holding, until, as she puts it, the soul goes calloused and a hole opens where belief used to sit. Her second terror is the social death of leaving, the shunning, the loss of friends and family and the ready-made belonging, the mapless country on the far side of the door. To escape the first death she has to walk into the second. That is the engine. Every choice she makes turns on it.
Her hero system before the door is the one she was born into, and it denies death by continuity. You do not live forever as yourself. You live forever as a link. The chain of tradition runs from Sinai through your grandparents through you to your children, and your part is to receive the practice intact and hand it on intact, one more link added, the metal sound. To be a good Orthodox woman is to be a faithful conductor of something that does not end. She wanted this. She has said so plainly. She loved the texts and the ritual and the quieting of the week’s chaos into the stillness of Shabbat, loved a cantorial line that caught her off guard and moved her toward something higher. The system gave her a way to count. It asked one price, and for a long time she paid it. To observe was to be accepted, she writes, and to be accepted was to be loved.
The price was subtraction. Becker’s hero is not assembled by addition; he is carved, made by what gets cut away. Mirvis was carved early. At eighteen she went to Israel for the year that the daughters of such families give, and she went to be remade. She had thought of herself as a little bad. In Jerusalem she set out to become good, and becoming good meant removing the willful self, the one that asked the wrong questions, the one that wanted. She prayed to be forgiven her own wanting. The self did not leave. It went under and waited. The rest of the subtraction came later and in the other direction, and this is the strange shape of her life. First she subtracted the self to keep the belonging. Then, at forty, she subtracted the belonging to recover the self. She took off the hairpiece. She took off the hat. She took off the marriage. She took off the community, or the community took itself off her, which from the inside feels the same. A life lived as a long removal, first of one death and then of the other, with no year in the middle when both terrors slept.
Now look at the word she chose for the book that tells it. She called the memoir The Book of Separation, after the sefer kritut, the bill of cutting that a Jewish divorce requires, the document that severs a marriage with a clean legal stroke. She knew the title from the first page, which she says rarely happens. She knew it because separation is the word her whole world is built on, and she had been speaking it her entire life without hearing how much weight it carried.
Holiness, in the tradition that made her, is separation. Kadosh, the word for holy, means set apart. The week is profane and the Sabbath is holy, and the line between them gets drawn each Saturday night by havdalah, the rite of separation, a candle and a cup and a box of spices, a blessing that thanks God for dividing the sacred from the ordinary. Meat is separated from milk. The clean is separated from the unclean. A married woman is separated from other men by the rules of her hair and her body. Even the marriage that began it all is an act of separation: kiddushin, betrothal, from the same root as kadosh, the bride set apart for this man and no other, sanctified by being reserved. To be holy is to be cut out from the common stock and kept. Mirvis learned the grammar of separation in the cradle. She learned that the way you make a thing sacred is to set it apart.
So when she finally saves her own soul, she does it with the community’s own instrument. She separates. The get, the bill of divorce, is the most Orthodox act in her story. She does not smash the system. She conjugates it. She takes the verb the tradition gave her for making things holy and she turns it on her own life, and the community reads the same act as the opposite of holiness, as profanation, as a woman cutting herself off from the source of meaning. One word, one root, and it splits down the middle. To her it is the path back to a self worth keeping. To them it is abandonment.
This is where the word goes strange, because it does not split only two ways. It splits across every hero system that uses it, and each system means something different by it, and each meaning denies a different death.
Stand the mohel at the eighth-day bris. For him separation is entry. The cut is how the boy joins the covenant. A blade removes a small thing and a child becomes a link in the chain, and the family weeps with joy at a wound. Separation here is not loss. It is membership purchased in blood, the oldest dues in the world.
Move to the operating theater where a surgeon parts conjoined twins. For her separation is salvation bought at terrible risk. She has studied the shared vessels for a year. She knows that to leave the two joined is to let one drag the other down, and she knows that the cut might kill them both. Separation is the only road to two whole lives and the road runs past the grave. “We give them a chance to be themselves,” she tells the parents, and she means a chance that could end in a single coffin.
Move to the border station at dawn. For the officer there, separation is procedure. A mother goes through one door and a child through another, and a stamp does the cutting. He does not hate them. He is denying a different death, the death of the orderly nation, the fear that without the line drawn hard the thing he serves dissolves. To him the word means the integrity of the system. To the mother on the far side of the door it means the end of the world.
Move to the launch pad. For the flight engineer separation is the only way up. The first stage burns out and falls into the sea, and the spacecraft cannot reach orbit until it sheds the very thing that lifted it. “Stage separation confirmed,” the voice says, and the room exhales, because the discarded booster is not a tragedy, it is the price of altitude. You cannot rise while you carry what raised you.
Now bring the word home to the case that haunts her, the one she could not stop reading about while she wrote the memoir, the murder of a law professor in Tallahassee whose marriage had ended and whose custody fight had not. There, separation is the thing worth killing over. He won a court order against his former wife’s plan to move the boys five hundred miles south, an order that fixed the geography of the separation, who keeps the children and on whose street they sleep. Someone answered the order with a gun. In We Would Never she moves the story to a secular Florida family and asks the question at Yom Kippur, the day of separation between the inscribed and the blotted out: can a good man kill, and can a killer be forgiven, by man or by God. The novel turns the word inside out. Mirvis separated and survived it. She builds a family that would rather commit murder than let the separation stand, a family for whom the cut is unthinkable and the corpse is not. The woman who walked out of her belonging writes people who would burn down the earth before they would walk out of theirs, and she gives them enough inner life that the reader, against his will, understands.
She did not arrive at this by accident. She had been writing the gap for twenty years before she lived it. In The Ladies Auxiliary the Memphis women narrate as a single voice, a chorus that sets itself apart from the unconventional widow who unsettles them, and the chorus cannot hold its line. In Visible City a woman on the Upper West Side watches her neighbors through lit windows and builds whole lives from what she can see, separated from them by glass and joined to them by longing. The subject was always the membrane between belonging and the self, the thin wall that the holy is supposed to keep standing and that keeps coming down.
What did she trade her old immortality for. This is the part the door opens onto, and it is not free. The chain offered her one kind of forever: you vanish as a person and persist as a link, carried by the people, who outlive any of their members. She gave that up. In its place she took the immortality the novel offers, which runs the other way. You do not vanish into the people. You persist as yourself, your name on a spine, the made thing standing after you. She has said that fiction is freedom, that a character faces no world she must accept and no answer she must reach, while religion has an outcome it wants and the wanting kills the exploration. The novel denies death by the permanence of the true thing said once and kept. That is a hero system too. It has its own dues. She named them when she named the cost of leaving: the belonging does not come ready-made on the far side, you build it by hand, out of a children’s school and a writers’ group, and it is thinner and it takes more work and some nights it does not keep out the cold.
Three fixes, then, on where she stands.
She kept the grammar and changed the God. She still makes things holy the only way her tradition taught her, by setting them apart, and the separations have only grown more total, from the hairpiece to the marriage to the people. The most religious thing about her is the act that put her outside religion.
She swapped a collective forever for a private one, the link in the chain for the name on the book, and she paid the exchange rate in loneliness and in the labor of building belonging from nothing. She knows the price. She does not pretend the new system is free, which is the one move her old community could never make about its own.
And she writes from inside the crack, because it is the last honest place for a woman who loves an order she can no longer keep. Her old congregation could not hold her. The new one is the reader, anyone in any hero system who has stood in a room he no longer believes in and felt the strange fire and looked down the row to see who else was burning. To them she is legible, across every scheme of meaning, for one reason. She no longer belongs to a single one.
Reading in Community: The Social World of Tova Mirvis
Every other month a group gathers at Hummingbird Books in Newton, Massachusetts, and Tova Mirvis runs the room. The club has a name, Nu Reads, and a sponsor, the Jewish Book Council, which made her its writer-in-residence and built the series around her taste. She picks new and new-ish Jewish fiction. People come, buy the book, drink the wine, and talk. She has said she wanted a PJ Library for grown-ups, a way to put a Jewish book in the hands of adults the way the children’s program puts one in a crib. This is the habitat. To map her social world, start in that bookstore and widen the lens.
The innermost ring is Greater Boston, the suburbs west of the city where literary Jews of a certain education settle. Newton, Brookline, Chestnut Hill, Cambridge. She belongs to a writing group there that The Boston Globe once profiled. She has shared a stage with the novelist Elizabeth Graver (b. 1964), whose Kantika mines Sephardic family history, and with Anita Diamant (b. 1951), whose The Red Tent sold by the millions and who founded the Newton mikveh where Mirvis once spoke alongside the feminist rabbi Haviva Ner-David. She taught at GrubStreet, the Boston writing center that trains much of the region’s literary class. She has led discussions for parents at Gann Academy, the pluralist Jewish high school, working through Philip Roth‘s “Eli, the Fanatic” until the talk turned from Roth to what it costs to be visibly Jewish now. The bookstores recur in the record like stations of a route: Newtonville Books, Brookline Booksmith, the JCCs from La Jolla to Beachwood.
The second ring is the national world of American Jewish letters, the writers a reviewer reaches for when placing her. Dani Shapiro (b. 1962), whose own memoirs of family secret and religious searching run parallel to hers, blurbed The Book of Separation, as did Ann Hood, Joanna Rakoff, Jessica Shattuck, and Heidi Pitlor, Boston-adjacent novelists who trade endorsements the way neighbors trade casseroles. Critics file her beside Allegra Goodman (b. 1967), Nicole Krauss (b. 1974), Nathan Englander (b. 1970), and Dara Horn (b. 1977), the cohort that writes Jewishness as literary fiction rather than ethnic memorabilia. She has appeared in conversation with Marjorie Ingall, Alyson Richman, and Lara Vapnyar (b. 1971). The reviewer Adam Rovner places her in the Jewish Book Council’s pages. The institutions that host and consecrate her are a circuit unto themselves: Hadassah and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Jewish Women’s Archive under Judith Rosenbaum, the Boston Book Festival, Hebrew College, the Sisterhood pages of The Forward, the desks at Tablet, Lilith, Moment, and Hadassah Magazine, and above them the New York Times Book Review, whose notice still ranks as the coin of the realm.
A third ring stands at an angle to the others, the writers who left strict Jewish worlds and wrote the leaving: Shulem Deen (b. 1974), Deborah Feldman (b. 1986), Leah Vincent, Angela Himsel, who came out of an apocalyptic Christian sect into Modern Orthodoxy and shared a platform with Mirvis. The reviewers shelve her with them, and she resists the shelving. She did not flee a sealed world that forbade the outside. She left a Modern Orthodoxy that promised the outside and the inside could be one. She keeps a foot in the Jewish world her children still inhabit. The departure writers interest her and do not contain her, and the distance she keeps from them is one of the truest things about her position.
What does this world value. It values the well-made sentence and the refusal of the easy answer. It prizes complexity, doubt, and restraint, and it distrusts the writer who arrives at the page already certain. Mirvis says she does not think writing from certainty makes for good fiction, and the room nods, because the room agrees. It values empathy raised nearly to a creed, the capacity to inhabit a character you might despise and make a reader feel for him. The praise her last novel drew named this directly, the feat of building murderers a reader pities. It values story as the way into hard things. She tells people that if she had begun a discussion by asking them to share their feelings, they would have closed up, and that the Roth story gave them a door. The book is the door. Reading together is the room behind it. The whole set holds that fiction does work that argument cannot, that it carries truth past the guard that argument trips.
Their hero system, the scheme by which a member earns the sense that her life counts and leaves a mark that outlasts her, runs on the made book and the honest self. You matter here by writing something true and durable, and by living in accordance with the voice inside even when the cost is high. The departure is not a fall in this world. It is a credential. To leave a marriage and a religion and to write the loss without flinching is the heroic act the set was built to honor, the proof that you chose the real over the comfortable. Where her old world offered immortality through the chain, the people carried forward by their children and their observance, this world offers immortality through the spine on the shelf and the reader who feels less alone. Both are ways of not vanishing. She traded one for the other and her set applauds the trade, because making that trade is the form of heroism they recognize.
The status games follow from this. The highest rank goes to literary seriousness, and the deepest anxiety is the suspicion of being merely commercial. When her publisher framed her last novel as a thriller, with the hope of a streaming deal in the air, the reviewers in her own world worried at the label, insisting the book was a steady-pulse novel wearing a thriller’s coat. The bestseller list is prized and never quite admitted as a prize. A second game runs along the line between particular and universal. To be called a Jewish writer can shelve you in a smaller room, and the move up is to be read as a writer who happens to be Jewish, the way the culture reads the canonical men. Mirvis played this when she wrote Visible City and told an interviewer she had not set out to leave Jewish subjects behind, the questions she was chasing simply did not arrive in a Jewish form. The credentialing tokens are the familiar ones: the Columbia degree, the residencies, the fellowship from the state arts council, the festival invitation, the blurb from the right name, the review in the right paper. The currency moves in endorsements, and the endorsements bind the set together.
This world had a heretic once, and the episode shows the boundary. In 2005 Wendy Shalit charged in the New York Times Book Review that novelists raised Orthodox, Mirvis among them, wrote the community as hostile outsiders dressed in insider clothes. Mirvis answered that the charge was a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check, a demand to see a writer’s credentials of belief before granting her the right to write. She refused the audit. The set closed around her, because the principle she defended, that no test of faith may gate the freedom to imagine, is the article on which the whole guild stands. Shalit asked for orthodoxy. Mirvis answered with autonomy, and autonomy won, because in this world it always does.
Now the claims they treat as simply true. The normative ones, the oughts, sit close to the surface. One ought to tell the truth about one’s own life. One ought to render the other person’s humanity even when it is inconvenient. One ought to respect difference, and Mirvis is praised for modeling respect across intra-Jewish lines, for treating her ex-husband’s continuing Orthodoxy with care in front of their children. One ought not to coerce belief, and one ought not to shun. The cardinal virtue is empathy and the cardinal sin is judgment, and here the grammar strains, because the set judges hard. It judges the community that shuns. It judges the enforcer who demands the credential. The non-judgment is real toward the doubter and the leaver and thins toward the gatekeeper. The truth worth stating plainly is that this is a morality of non-judgment that keeps one strong judgment in reserve, against those who judge.
The essentialist claims, the things treated as fixed in the nature of a person, cluster around two ideas. The first is the authentic self. This world holds that a true self lives inside a man or a woman, that it can be silenced but not erased, and that a life lived against it becomes a lie that calluses the soul. Mirvis’s whole account turns on a voice she could not quiet, a self that went under in Jerusalem and waited and rose at forty. The set does not argue for this self. It assumes it, the way the Orthodox world assumes the soul. The second fixed thing is Jewishness as a substrate that survives the loss of belief and practice. You can stop keeping Shabbat and stop believing God gave the Torah and remain, without strain, a Jewish writer at a Jewish book club sponsored by a Jewish council. Mirvis raises her children in the faith she left. The identity persists under the lapsed observance like a watermark, and the set treats this persistence as a fact of nature rather than a choice remade each morning.
Their moral grammar, the deep structure under the particular judgments, keeps the old religious forms and pours new content into them. The vocabulary is covenantal. Separation, the bill of divorce, atonement, return, forgiveness, the Day of Judgment. The authority has moved. In the tradition that raised them, the court sits with God and the community. In this world it has shifted inward, toward conscience, with the community demoted to a thing one builds by hand and may outgrow. Sin becomes self-betrayal. Atonement becomes honesty. Teshuva, return, stops meaning return to observance and starts meaning return to the self. When Mirvis sets the climax of her last novel at Yom Kippur and asks whether a killer can be forgiven by man or by God, she keeps the ancient question whole and leaves the bench half empty, because in her world the human heart now shares the seat that once held only the divine. The forms are Sinai. The content is the examined life. The set lives in the space between, fluent in a liturgy it no longer takes on the old terms, and it has made that fluency, the love of the texts without the submission to them, into a way of staying Jewish that the texts never named and the community cannot quite forgive.
Covered and Exposed: The Voice and Rhetoric of Tova Mirvis
The memoir opens on a sentence with no fat on it. “I stood before a panel of rabbis.” Then she dresses the scene before she dresses the argument: a navy skirt below the knee, a cardigan buttoned over a short-sleeved shirt that without the sweater the community counts as immodest. The clothing is the whole case. “But no matter how covered I was, I felt exposed.” Tova Mirvis builds her voice on that antithesis and works it for three hundred pages. The more she follows the rules, the more naked she feels. She states the contradiction and declines to solve it, and the refusal to solve it is the engine of her prose.
Her manner begins there, in a comfort with contradiction that other writers reach for and rarely hold. Asked in 2005 whether a Jew can be at once modern and Orthodox, she says yes, then spends the next minutes taking apart the words the question used. The terms do not mean what the questioner wants them to mean. She lives with the complication every day and says so without strain. This is the temperament under the technique. She distrusts the clean answer in the pew and on the page, and she has trained a voice to keep two opposed things alive at once. The gift that let her stay in a marriage and a faith past her own belief is the same gift that makes the leaving honest, because she grants the world she left its beauty in the act of walking out of it.
The voice is first person and close, a woman watching herself from a half step back, and the watching is her oldest habit. At her own wedding she stands inside the ceremony and outside it at the same time, naming the younger self both bridled and bridal, the pun carrying the trap, and she borrows a Sharon Olds poem about a doomed marriage to plead with that girl across twenty years. Please, she says to her, you know so little of yourself. She narrates a life the way her novels watch their people, through glass. Visible City made the watching its subject, a woman at the window assembling the lives of her neighbors out of what she can see, and Mirvis has said the novelist and the voyeur work the same nerve. The eye that judges her own past is the eye she trained on her characters first.
Her diction runs plain and short at the floor, Anglo-Saxon and unshowy, and then three habits sit on top of it. She borrows the language of contracts and institutions for the things of the soul, so that belief shrinks to a line of fine print on a membership form, and faith becomes a clause one signs without reading. She takes the words that belong to God, all-seeing and all-knowing, and hands them to the neighbors, so the community becomes the deity that watches, and the prayer in her head reduces to a single refrain, what will they think. And she trusts the body to carry what the mind will not say. The conflict arrives as a headache that gathers along the line where the hat meets the head, a pain that lifts the moment she steps outside and lifts the hat. It arrives at the ritual bath as a comb, an attendant who sends her back to comb again, and something inside her that breaks open over a demand that small. The theology never announces itself. It hides in a hemline and a hairbrush, which is the close attention to status detail that a reporter brings to a room, turned inward on a life.
The syntax favors the short declarative that turns on a hinge, and it favors the linked chain where each clause hands the next its final word. To observe was to be good, and to be good was to be loved. The shape is a syllogism and the content is a snare, and she lets the tidy logic convict the world it describes. She runs the same figure to map the closed loop she grew up inside, where the text could not be wrong and the rabbis could not be wrong, so a reader who found sexism in the verse was reading it wrong or feeling it wrong, and the fault came home to her every time. Restraint governs the rest. She withholds. The reviewers keep reaching for the same three words, elegant, wry, unflinching, and they note what is absent, the self-pity and the saccharine she refuses. She trusts a detail to land the blow and declines to announce the bruise. When she wants a hard word she takes one and stops. The house empties of children and goes desiccated, and she leaves the adjective standing alone.
She has a gift for the cold irony that needs no comment. The rabbis who married her wish her mazel tov, and the rabbis who grant her the bill of divorce wish her mazel tov again, the same blessing at the building up and the tearing down, and she sets the two scenes side by side and says nothing. In her first novel she found the form for this watching before she had lived its full cost. The Ladies Auxiliary speaks in a first-person plural, a chorus of Memphis women who narrate as one body and cannot hold their own line against the stranger who unsettles them. The communal we that judges the outsider is the same we whose eyes she later calls all-seeing. She wrote the surveillance from inside the watchers before she wrote it from inside the watched.
Her rhetoric persuades by scene and not by argument, and she has explained the method out loud. Open a room by asking people to talk about their feelings and they shut. Hand them a story and they open. So she leads the book with the panel of rabbis and the navy skirt, withholds the thesis about women and authority, and lets the reader arrive at it alone and believe he found it himself. The body stands as her evidence, the headache and the held breath doing the work a polemic might botch. When she defends her right to write the Orthodox world, she refuses the terms of the attack rather than meeting them. The demand that a novelist prove her belief before she may imagine is a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check, and she will not sit for the audit. She reaches for Philip Roth and Judge Wapter and moves the fight onto literary ground, where she holds the higher cards. The persuasion runs quiet and sideways. A reviewer for the Jewish Book Council wanted freedom for her and then turned and wanted it for herself, which is the exact effect the prose is built to produce.
The concessive clause is the tell, the even though that lets her hold the love and the anger in one breath. In the letter where she once explained why she stayed, before she left, the reasons climb by repetition, because she loves the ritual, because she loves the texts, because she loves the chain of ideas with one link added each generation, and then a cantorial line catches her off guard and moves her toward something higher, and then the turn arrives, the even though, and the anger enters without canceling a word of the love. She can write the both-and as well as anyone in her cohort. The capacity is older than any craft she learned at Columbia.
What binds the voice is negative capability, the willingness to sit inside doubt without snatching at a fact to end it. She kept the cadence of the liturgy after she dropped its claims, the rhythm of a people who argue with God for sport, and the manner became the message. Here is a woman fluent in a faith she no longer holds, telling the truth in its own music. The risk in the voice is the risk in the life. Restraint can slide into a reluctance to render the verdict, and non-judgment can harden into its own evasion, a way of declining to say the community was wrong when she means that it was. Her strongest pages keep the tension taut and let the reader feel both the love and the indictment at full strength. Her weaker ones let it dissolve into a warm haze where everyone did his best and no one is to blame. She is at her height in the cold scenes, the rabbis and the comb and the doubled blessing, where she trusts the facts to speak and keeps her own thumb off the scale.
1/30/05
Wendy Shalit Says Authors Tova Mirvis, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Rosen Don't Get Orthodox Judaism
Wendy Shalit writes in The New York Times Book Review:
Authors who have renounced Orthodox Judaism — or those who were never really exposed to it to begin with — have often portrayed deeply observant Jews in an unflattering or ridiculous light. Admittedly, some of this has produced first-rate literature or, at the least, great entertainment, but it has left many people thinking traditional Jews actually live like Tevye in the musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'' or, at the opposite extreme, like the violent, vicious rabbi in Henry Roth's novel ''Call It Sleep.'' Not long ago, I did too.
Wendy implicitly says she understands Orthodox Judaism better than such authors as Tova Mirvis, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Rosen and that she sees Orthodox Judaism as something wonderful.
This is an interesting claim, one common with converts to a cause (I felt similarly during my early years in Judaism). I suspect that Englander and Mirvis have spent more years in Orthodox Judaism and have deeper learning in Jewish text than Wendy as they were raised in Orthodox Judaism and given a day-school education in that faith (and consequently must be literate in Hebrew). Mirvis still belongs to an Orthodox Judaism. I think she has been Orthodox all her life. Who is Wendy to say, on the basis of six years of observance and study of Orthodox Judaism, that she knows better than someone who has spent a lifetime in the faith?
Three generations ago, most Jews in the world were Orthodox. Now they are not. As soon as Jews had a choice to leave Orthodox Judaism, most of them did. They did so for rational reasons. They may have been wrong. They may have betrayed their God and their heritage. But they acted, in part, out of the reasons Shalit ridicules in her essay.
Forward literary editor Alana Newhouse replies to my email:
Ruchama King and Risa Miller are good writers, but, based on artistic merit alone, they are not in the same league as Englander, Rosen, Mirvis and Reich. So what Shalit is essentially asking us to do is to lower our artistic standards in order to accomodate a better message, which feels rather Soviet to me; as someone who values art, I simply can't countenance that. Moreover, Shalit criticizes those writers for not giving Orthodoxy its due but it is she who underestimates it, by presenting it as so fragile that it cannot withstand criticism. Those of us who truly know Orthodoxy — yes, even those of us who may have at one time or another strayed from it — understand that it is held up by a much stronger foundation than she allows, one based on intellectual, emotional and social legitimacy. What I think may be at work here is a bit of misplaced jeaolusy: Shalit, who came to Orthodoxy later in life and probably had to undergo a good deal of personal change and intellectual work to join it, is envious of those of us who had it all along. She cannot fathom how anyone could take for granted what she labored so hard to acquire; then, on top of "abandoning" it, these writers went and criticized it, which must feel like just too much ingratitude for her to tolerate. But, like your friend with the fabulous family that you would have given anything to trade for your own, these authors have the right to their experiences as well. That they could make from them art that is, by the highest standards, both good and important, is a blessing to readers and, dare I say, a gift from God.
From the Forward:
Judging a Book By Its Head Covering
By Tova Mirvis
February 4, 2005But the fact that we are insiders to the Orthodox world is irrelevant. Since when must a fiction writer actually have lived the life he or she writes about? Since when must one be a murderer to write "Crime and Punishment," a pedophile to write "Lolita," a hermaphrodite to write "Middlesex," a boy on a boat with a tiger to write "Life of Pi"? Yes, it seems, Shalit has outed the whole tawdry lot of us. She's revealed to the public the terrible truth: Fiction writers make up things.
What is true is that these portrayals apparently don't capture Shalit's experience of being a baal teshuvah, or to use her definition, "a deeply observant Jew who did not grow up as one," they aren't consistent with the personal fulfillment she's found recently. And this, I suspect, is what bothers Shalit most. But instead of being able to allow for that difference of experience, she labels these other portrayals as false. If someone doesn't see Orthodoxy as she does, then he or she must not really understand it. Englander has said that he experienced his upbringing as "anti-intellectual." But she doesn't think it was, so what right does he have to say this, least of all publicly? It's this discounting and de-legitimizing of any individual experience other than her own that is so troubling.
It's bad enough she does this to people. What's worse is that she does it to fictional characters. She attacks books for depicting characters who deviate from communal norms. Englander besmirches Judaism by depicting a fight in a synagogue. Rosen creates a character, an unmarried Orthodox man who sleeps with a female Reform rabbi. Reich imagines an overweight dietician who gorges on Yom Kippur. People like Shalit attack a story by saying, "But not everyone is like this." Of course not. But the fiction writer is saying, "Let's imagine one person who is."
I call Tova Mirvis Tuesday morning, February 1, 2005: "Could you tell me about your background in Orthodox Judaism?"
Tova: "Contrary to what Wendy Shalit might believe, I am an Orthodox Jew. I've been part of a Modern Orthodox community my entire life. I went to [Jewish] day school, yeshiva high school [Orthodox], spent a year studying in a yeshiva in Israel. I've davened every week in an Orthodox shul and I send my kids to an Orthodox day school."
Luke: "Do you read Hebrew?"
Tova: "I read Hebrew. I can read Jewish texts. I have studied Talmud. Credentials? I keep kosher. I don't turn the light switch on [on Shabbat and festivals]."
Luke: "Where did you go to college?"
Tova: "Columbia [with a degree in English literature]. Then I went to the Columbia MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) program."
Tova studied seven years at Columbia.
Luke: "You spent your entire life in Orthodox Judaism."
Tova: "Right. It's funny to find out from The Times that apparently I didn't. I thought I did."
Luke: "Have you ever spoken to Wendy Shalit?"
Tova: "No. I must confess to firing off a pissed-off email in the middle of the night."
Luke: "Did you have any inkling that this article was coming down mentioning you?"
Tova: "No, not at all. It was surprising, to say the least. I was home in a crazy Boston blizzard [Tova lived in New York for 13 years until moving to Newton, Massachusetts in the summer of 2004] with my children and some neighborhood children and my agent called me…"
Luke: "Were you a rebel vis-à-vis Orthodox Judaism in your childhood or college?"
Tova: "I wish I was. No. I was the quintessential good girl. My big rebellion was to go to Columbia.
"My relationship to Orthodox Judaism is not uncomplicated. I struggle with issues of feminism and egalitarianism in the Orthodox world. I observe but I question. Questioning is part of what it means to belong to the community. The notion that one is either in or out of a community is not true. Insiders of this world know it's not true. A little hug on a back porch is not outside the experience of day-to-day lived [Orthodox Judaism]."
Wendy Shalit writes in The NYT:
Another character, Bryan, is a 19-year-old who returns home from Israel as a deeply religious radical, renamed Baruch. Yet at his engagement party, he's suddenly starring in a Harlequin romance: out on the porch, Baruch embraces his fiancee and she leans ''in close, their bodies gently pressing against each other.'' It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse. Yet Baruch's younger sister isn't surprised: ''They who pretended to be so holy in public were just like everyone else in private. It confirmed what she had suspected: that it was all pretense.''
Here is the scene in question by Tova Mirvis. The young couple are alone, "as alone as they'd ever been," out back on a dark porch. They're engaged and have never touched each other before.
They sat next to each other, on chairs whose legs were touching. Tzippy's and Baruch's arms almost touched as well. She was scared of what she would feel and scared of how he would react, scared that he would pull away in horror and scared that he wouldn't. But she couldn't stop herself. She leaned toward him and grazed his hand with two of his fingers. It was so ligght, so soft, that it could have been imagined or wished. she did it again, to be sure it had really happened. She ran her fingers across his hand, and her body tingled with the shock and pleasure of actually touching. Too thrileld and scared to move her hand, she waited to see what would happen next.
He held her hand. He gently stroked her fingers. he wantged to touch her face which he had stared at these past few months. He wanted to kiss her mouth, which had distracted him when he learned, when he davened, when he slept. He put his arms around her and she leaned in clsoe, their bodies gently pressing against each other.
Just as his lips were about to find hers, a looming figure appeared in Baruch's head. It was the face of his rabbi who whispered in his ear, "So you haven't changed at all." If he leaned any closer to Tzippy, these words would come true. One kiss and he would disappear. Guilt outpaced desire and he pulled away. He was surpised at her and surprised at himself. His married friends had warned him of the pitfalls of engagement. The knowledge of what you would one day be able to do threatened to overepower even the strongest self-control. It was dangerous to walk the edges. That was where people got lost. Baruch stood up and turned around. They both tried to pretend that it hadn't happened.
As they went inside though, the initial touch replayed itself in their heads, mirrored back from every angle. A hundred hands reached for each other. A thousand fingers intertwined.
Luke: "What about the hug being at a party and in front of people and that that is unlikely?"
Tova: "That is not uncommon. I went back and looked at that section [and asked herself], did they hug? It's a debatable point. It was a slight hug. It was not in front of people. [Wendy] doesn't mention that the hug was immediately ended because Baruch feels intense guilt about it. He has Wendy Shalit's mindset."
Tova repeatedly pronounces Wendy's last name as "SHALL-it," though I believe she knows the correct pronunciation is "Shuh-LEET."
Tova: "The scene is about the struggle between [divine ideals] and physical desire. To say that no unmarried people [of the opposite sex not related to each other] in the Orthodox world touch each other is a stretch, to put it mildly. Her comment afterwards: "It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse." That misses the experience of being in that moment, which fiction does. Fiction is not shaking your finger at someone and saying, 'Naughty!' It's about what does it feel like to want this hug, to touch somebody you want to touch."
Luke: "Have you spent a significant period of your life completely outside of Orthodox Judaism?"
Tova: "No. Maybe according to Wendy Shalit, I have, if mild transgressions put one outside."
Luke: "You haven't gone six months without going to shul?"
Tova: "No."
Luke: "Do you know anything about Haredi [fervent Orthodoxy] Judaism?"
Tova: "One of the weird things about the piece is the notion that Modern Orthodoxy is somehow invalid. She says that to be Modern Orthodox is to be familiar with 'some traditional customs.' That's an odd thing to say about Modern Orthodoxy. There are numerous differences between Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodoxy but they share a lot more than what separates them, certainly in the experience of day-to-day life, particularly in how human emotions reconcile with religious law.
"I do have a lot of experience with ultra-Orthodox Judaism with close family members who are part of the ultra-Orthodox world. I have family members who are part of the Haredi world."
Luke: "Do you hate the ultra-Orthodox world?"
Tova: "No."
She laughs. "I don't even think in those terms. How do you hate worlds? I'm so closely interwoven into it. I'm not sure my characters are ultra-Orthodox, maybe yeshivish or right-wing. I think my books are more about Modern Orthodoxy.
"That hug, which seems to have drawn her greatest irritation… Because a character succumbs to a moment of desire and therefore I hate the ultra-Orthodox world? It's outrageous. I disagree with her characterization of my novels as portraying the Orthodox world as 'contemptible.' I've heard a lot about my novels. I've never heard that before. I think it is not true."
Luke: "That charge has not appeared in reviews of your work?"
Tova: "Not once. I've been faulted for portraying it [Orthodox Judaism] with too much love…for not pushing my characters hard enough, for not having any of the characters leave Orthodoxy. At readings for The Ladies Auxiliary, I was asked if community was good or bad. Fiction doesn't deal with those terms. I don't even think in those terms."
Luke: "Are your novels good or bad for the Jews?"
Tova: "I don't even think about it."
We laugh.
Tova: "I've been on a Philip Roth reading binge. It brings to mind the questions Judge Leopold Wapter asks [of the Philip Roth character in the book The Ghost Writer]. I've just finished my piece for the Forward where I say that Wendy Shalit is a modern-day Leopold Wapter.
"I'll disagree with the premise of your question and answer it anyway. I don't know what we gain by presenting hagiography: 'We don't struggle. We don't question. Maybe we have a small moment of pettiness, but we are happy here. You might have issues in your life, but not here.' I'm not sure that benefits the Orthodox world."
Luke: "How accurate a reading of you and the things you struggle with and the things you observe are your novels?"
Tova: "They are not autobiographical but I'm in there all over the pages. The Ladies Auxiliary, ironically, is very much about what it means to be an insider or outsider. I am a sixth generation Memphian. I grew up as an insider in that world but at the same time feeling outside for not always agreeing with the community. There was the sense that if you deviated in the smallest way you would find yourself on the outside. I am certainly not Batsheva [the convert to Judaism in the novel]. I am not even any of the high school girls.
"I grew up with such a strong sense of being from somewhere, and I think about how you hold on to that desire without it becoming suffocating and requiring conformity. The Outside World is about how people wrestle with this question of tradition and modernity, how people make those tabulations in their life."
Wendy Shalit writes: "Mirvis hones in on hypocrisy…"
Tova: "I have no problem with hypocrisy [as Wendy defines it]. If Baruch believes in this strict interpretation of Orthodoxy yet he hugs his fiancee on the back porch, is he a hypocrite? Is that the best word we have for that? I think it's about human failings and the tension between divine ideals and human needs. The whole notion of hypocrisy is so baffling to me. I almost want to write against the idea that you are either this or that.
"I was interested in what happens to the dreams and desires that are not kosher. What happens when people belong to communities and their private feelings do not always match that. What is that individual's experience? In the Modern Orthodox family [in Tova's novel The Outside World], I wanted to write about the father Joel who describes himself as an observant agnostic. It's not about whether it is good to be that or bad to be that, but what does it feel like to be that. That's what fiction does. Her piece has nothing to do with fiction."
Luke: "I find it hard to believe that the things your characters saw and did are foreign to you. This all comes from a world of possibilities you are familiar with."
Tova: "Very much so. Their struggles are very much my own struggles. To hear that those are not authentic is, what polite word can I use, surprising."
Luke: "Do you known anyone in Orthodoxy who keeps shrimp in the freezer?"
Tova: "I had a friend in college who told me this story. I've always had this uncomfortable feeling that someone in Memphis thinks I am on to them, but I have no idea who it is.
"I think Shalit's piece loses any notion of humor. There's no possibility for humor in Wendy's worldview.
"Whether someone actually keeps shrimp salad in her fridge isn't important [in determining the veracity of a novel]… It's the metaphorical shrimp salad, the things that people do that don't fit in. Everyone has them. I suspect Wendy Shalit has her own metaphorical shrimp salads in her freezer and it doesn't make her hypocritical or an outsider. It just makes her a normal person."
Wendy criticizes you for writing that a group of neighbors smuggled televisions into their homes in airconditioner boxes.
Tova: "I'm guilty of the crime as a fiction writer of making something up."
Luke: "But this isn't unknown in the Orthodox world?"
Tova: "It's an urban legend in the Orthodox world. The air conditioner box has become a catch phrase. It signifies for insiders about what one is doing in private. If you go from door-to-door in Borough Park, will you find that all of them have done that? Of course not."
Luke: "Do you think your novels inform your reader why people would want to be part of Orthodox Judaism?"
Tova: "They might. It's certainly not what they set out to be. I've heard from a few people that they've had to read my novels in their conversion classes. That's nice and funny but not my goal. I hope that what they [Tova's novels] do is ask questions about what it means to live inside a world. What is the experience of living with rules?"
Wendy Shalit writes: "The novel's jacket copy announces that ''The Outside World'' is meant to explain ''the retreat into traditionalism that has become a worldwide phenomenon among young people,'' but the uninformed reader might wonder why any young person would want to be part of such a contemptible community."
Tova: "Her use of the word 'contemptible' is outrageous. Do shrimp salad, a hug and bride magazines add up to a contemptible portrayal, so that one would think, 'I could never live in that contemptible world.' I'm not sure what she is referring to.
"She used to think that Hasidim were all bad, all mean."
Wendy writes:
At 21, I was on the outside looking in, on my first trip to Israel with a friend who was, like me, a Reform Jew. One day, we wandered into a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, and suddenly there were black hats and side curls everywhere. My friend pointed out a group of men wearing odd fur hats. ''Those,'' he explained, ''are the really mean ones.'' I never questioned our snap judgment of these people until, a few years later, I returned to study at an all-girls seminary and was surprised to discover that my teachers, whom I adored, were men and women from this same community.
Tova: "Now they're all good. It's a black-and-white way of looking at the world on both counts.
"I don't feel that it is portrayed as contemptible. It's my world. I live in it every single day. Often there's this notion that Orthodoxy is swallowed whole. People will say, 'Oh, but she's Orthodox." As though I am not a thinking wrestling person. That, to me, is the biggest problem with her interpretation of Orthodoxy. There's no room to question. I hope that my books portray that tension.
"I remember from my book tour with The Ladies Auxiliary, one lady would raise her hand and say, I could just kill that Mrs. Levy. Those women were the most narrow petty bitches I've ever seen in my life. And another person would say, 'I love that book because it has such a warm sense of community. They care about one another.'
"Ultimately, that difference of opinion is not about the book. It's about the reader. It has to do with where they are coming from and what they want to see represented. Someone who wants to kill Mrs. Levy has her own experience of being inside or outside.
"I want to write books that press buttons. I'm not interested in writing parve [a kashrut term that refers to food that is neither meat nor dairy] fiction.
"I found with The Ladies Auxiliary, the farther someone was from Orthodoxy, the warmer they felt the portrayal was.
"I go home to Memphis all the time. I live in that world. I'm the one who wrote that book. I understand the feeling that I've aired the dirty laundry… 'Will people want to move to Memphis still?'"
Luke: "What have you had to deal with in the Memphis community?"
Tova: "It's a mixed reception. It divided along the lines of insiders versus outsiders. People who felt themselves deeply inside that world were very upset about the book. Either it was nothing like Memphis or it was exactly like Memphis. People told me that they didn't read the book but a copy of all the negative passages had been passed around. People were busy trying to play who's who. They wanted to crack my code.
"At the beginning, it was upsetting. It became funny. Apparently there were five candidates for Mrs. Levy including one man. People who did not feel like insiders loved the book. One person said that it felt like I had explained her life to her. She always wondered why she hadn't felt accepted here.
"When I go back there, I watch my back."
Luke: "But it's not so bad you can't go back."
Tova: "It's also the Southern thing. People will never say anything to your face. People will give me this smile and say, 'I read your book.' That's it."
Luke: "How did your parents feel about the book?"
Tova: "They were great despite that my mom heard a comment about it every day, every time she left her house. They loved the book and felt like it spoke to a truth for them and their experiences. When I was writing the book, my mom would say, 'You're not really going to do this, are you?' I had to promise that not only would I not use any Memphis names, they couldn't even sound anything like Memphis names."
Wendy Shalit writes: "But before there can be hypocrisy, there must be real idealism; in fiction that lacks idealistic characters, even the hypocrite's place can't be properly understood."
Tova: "My idea of idealistic characters is characters who hold ideals and struggle to realize them. I think Baruch is idealistic. He aspires to something higher than himself. He doesn't always reach it.
"What Shalit is really asking for is idealized characters. She praises books, not on whether the characters are fully realized, but do they promote ideals."
Luke: "Did you write or approve the jacket copy for The Outside World?"
Tova: "I approved it. Writers get very little say over book jackets. It's the publisher's job. But it was not my favorite line in the jacket copy."
Luke: "Yes. I would not think that The Outside World was primarily a way to explain a retreat into traditionalism."
Tova: "I agree."
Luke: "Do your novels indulge the baser instincts, such as the desire to eavesdrop on a closed world?"
Tova: "I don't know that eavesdropping is so base. All of our lives are closed to some degree. The act of reading is a form of eavesdropping on other people's lives."
Luke: "Did you consider when you were writing that you would be feeding a wanted belief among many of your readers that the ultra-Orthodox are crooked and hypocritical and lacking any competing claim to the truth?"
Tova: "No. I might be feeding the notion that they are also human."
Luke: "Have you read Ruchama King?"
Tova: "I blurbed her novel [Seven Blessings]. I think it has many nice things about it. I would praise her for the intimacy of her moments, her details, and the delicacy of her language."
Luke: "Eve Grubin?"
Tova: "I'm friendly with Eve Grubin as is Wendy Shalit. I haven't read Eve's book but will once it is published. I think she's a nice person. I think it's odd to have someone in The Times Book Review when their book hasn't been published. I think Eve was praised for becoming Orthodoxy, not for her poetry."
Luke: "Allegra Goodman?"
Tova: "I love her work. I love Kaaterskill Falls. Paradise Park is a riot. I would contest [Wendy's] characterization of Allegra as a 'sympathetic outsider.' It doesn't do her work justice. And it isn't so sympathetic. If you talked to people from the community that Kaaterskill Falls is based on, I don't think they would agree with Shalit that it was so sympathetic. And I don't mean that as a charge against Allegra. I mean it as a compliment. I think her work is funny, sharp, and pointed."
Luke: "I find it hard to believe that Allegra is an outsider to Orthodox Judaism."
Tova: "It depends on your definitions."
Luke: "I am sure Allegra has spent time in Orthodox Judaism."
Tova: "The whole notion of a classification system [of outsider/insider] is highly offensive. Who's deciding which of us is in or out? I would argue that Nathan Englander is an insider too. Wendy doesn't take into account that there are many ways to be insiders. When you grow up in a world, you know a world. Nathan knows this world deeply and fully. Just because he doesn't believe in it now doesn't remove that. It's a matter of knowing his stuff whether he practices it or not."
Luke: "Is it unbelievable to think that an Orthodox rabbi would write a dispensation for a man to see a prostitute?"
That is the key story in Englander's collection of short stories and also occurs at the beginning of the Israeli film The Holy Land.
Tova: "It's a Talmudic story. I bet that Wendy, with all her claims to be an insider, did not know that it's a Talmudic story. That's what is so disturbing about the way his work is treated [by Wendy].
"I think the single most outrageous line in the piece was: 'Englander's sketches were fictional, but did most people realize this?' Well, they're called fiction. It's not about whether it does happen in life. It's a story."
Luke: "Tova Reich?"
Tova: "I haven't read her. I know her brother is an Orthodox rabbi."
Luke: "If so, then it is hard to believe she's an outsider to Orthodox Judaism."
Tova: "Apparently one becomes an insider by feeling the way Wendy does about the world. By her logic, if you know the world, you must love it. And if you don't love it, you don't know it.
"Pearl Abraham is not mentioned in the piece because she disproves the thesis. Pearl Abraham grew up in the ultra-Orthodox community. The Romance Reader is about her rejection of that world. She certainly knows the world."
Luke: "Did you read Chaim Potok's novels?"
Tova: "I did growing up. I saw the movie The Chosen and read it. My Name is Asher Lev. Davita's Harp."
Luke: "I read all of Chaim Potok's novels when I was a kid and reread them during my conversion to Judaism. Now I gorge on Jewish fiction. I'm struck the difference in the intellectual caliber of the characters between Potok's characters who are obsessed with intellectual questions such as Biblical Criticism and other questions about texts, and the lack of that contemporary Jewish fiction."
Tova: "I disagree with that. For Baruch, it's a text-based struggle. In Orthodox Judaism, sociological details are not separate from theological ones. Halacha [Jewish law] is so minute. That characterizes that world. In the discussion of domestic details, there are large theological questions. It's the way ideology is lived through sociology. In a world where clothing and every gesture matter so much, The difference between seamed stockings and unseamed stockings can speak volumes about who a person is as an Orthodox woman."
Luke: "To me the primary question one would ask in determining whether or not to lead an Orthodox life is does one truly believe that God gave the Torah. That question does not seem to be present."
Tova: "Because it is taken for granted. It is taken as a given. If they are arguing about putting dish racks in a sink to make it kosher, God is implicit in that conversation."
Luke: "Do you believe in God?"
Tova: "Yes."
Luke: "Do you believe God gave the Torah?"
Tova: "I do. I think it's more complicated… I don't believe in the fundamentalist notion that he wrote it down and handed it off but I believe in an evolving dynamic chain of tradition. It has formed my life. It is complicated. I would guess that I don't believe in it in the same terms that Wendy Shalit does."
Luke: "How about in the terms that Maimonidies formulates in his eighth of thirteen required beliefs [the Jewish prayer Yigdal, which translated into English reads: 'I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.']"
Tova: "Remind me."
Luke: "That the Torah is divine. That every word of it is divine. And if a person was to say that a single word in the Torah is not divine, that that is outside permitted belief."
Tova: "I don't know. That's a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don't have to know all the answers. I don't know. It's a good question."
Luke: "This was a question that obsessed the characters of Chaim Potok novels and it obsesses me."
Tova: "What's interesting about Orthodoxy is does the term mean sameness of belief? There's little sameness of belief in Orthodoxy. There are basic tenets. I don't think one could articulate an Orthodox theology that would apply across the board. It's complicated and I live with that complication every day."
Luke: "Orthoprax means correct practice. Orthodox means correct belief. Sorry to hone in on this, but would it be more accurate to call you Orthoprax than Orthodox?"
Tova pauses: "I don't even know where to begin. No, I have no idea. I don't know what those words mean. Is someone who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue and drives there [on Shabbat and festivals], is he Orthodox? I don't know. Is one who davens three times a day but eats out [in non-kosher restaurants], is he Orthodox? I don't do that, before that gets tagged on to me, but I don't know. I don't know what these terms mean. I don't really think about them. I don't know that there's a need to define in that way.
"I am Modern Orthodox. I am liberal Orthodox. I am feminist Orthodox. But what does that have to do with my right to write fiction? The whole question of where writers are coming from is problematic and the least interesting way of looking at novels. I don't know what my own personal beliefs have to do with it. Is it a credential test?
"People ask [a prominent Jewish author] if he believes in God. They want a yes or no answer. He thinks it's not a yes-or-no answer but a discussion. To live in the Orthodox world is to be engaged in these questions and discussions and to wrestle with them and to be part of a conversation. It's not to have all the answers. I just don't believe that anyone does."
Luke: "Are you familiar with Louis Jacobs?"
Tova: "Vaguely."
Luke: "He was on the way to becoming Chief Rabbi of England in the early 1960s. They found a book he wrote in 1957 called We Have Reason To Believe where he accepted what is the universally held view in academic study of sacred text that the Torah is composed of different strands composed in different centuries and woven together over centuries. Because of that, he was thrown out of Orthodox Judaism.
"I bring that up because with your vast secular education, I am sure you are familiar with literary criticism and the asking of three basic questions: When was something written? Who wrote it? For what purpose was it written? If you apply those three basic questions to sacred text, you would come up with an answer completely different from that of traditional Judaism to its sacred texts. Do you wrestle with this?"
Tova, pauses: "Sometimes, but not to where I need to have the answer, to resolve it in my head. I think the same applies to issues of Orthodoxy and science."
Luke: "Is Jewish Orthodoxy compatible with Modernity?"
Tova: "Yes."
Luke: "So one can be authentically Orthodox and authentically Modern?"
Tova: "That's what the Modern Orthodox movement is about. Modern Orthodoxy was founded on the principle that one doesn't live in separate worlds where we do our Orthodox thing and then we do our Modern thing. We integrate them."
Luke: "Do you think it is true?"
Tova: "Do I think that it is true?"
Luke: "Ontologically, ultimately? That you can be authentically Modern and authentically Orthodox and integrated?"
Tova: "I do."
Luke: "I'm sure that much of what you learned at Columbia ran completely counter to your Orthodox Judaism?"
Tova: "I don't know. It didn't."
Luke: "Did you ever take a class in Bible?"
Tova: "I didn't. I regret that.
"I think these are interesting questions but they don't have to do with fiction, with my fiction.
"I think of Wendy Shalit's piece as a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check. What are your credentials for writing. As a writer, I don't pretend to have all the answers to the theological questions of Orthodoxy. I don't pretend it in my life and I don't pretend it in my fiction.
"I don't think that writing from a place of certainty makes for the best fiction.
"I can discuss with you my own doubts though I don't think that I need to. Orthodoxy is not always an easy package to hold together.
"I take issue with her argument that because characters struggle with communal norms and divine truths they are outsiders. I think she wants to do this to writers and to our characters. It is the second one that pisses me off more."
After the interview, I exchanged some emails with Tova.
Eighty minutes after the conclusion of our interview, Tova wrote me:
I must tell you as well, in hindsight, that I have an isssue with many of your questions. Upon thinking about it, I wondered whether questions such as whether I believe in the one of maimonides 13 principles of faith are intended for discussion and thought, or to determine whether I'm really the insider I claim to be. if the former, then I truly am interested in the conversation and the ongoing exploration. But if its the latter, then I'd make the same objection as I make to her piece. Must we believe in the 3rd principle of faith, for example, to write legitimately about the ortjodox world. What if someone only believed in numbers 1-11? Does that disqualify them? And since its so on point, I'd love to quote The Ghost Writer, which I mentioned: "Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what qualifies you to write about Judaism for national magazines?" I'm feeling a little too much of Judge Wapter in the air.
I replied:
That was my favorite section of the Ghostwriter. I do not believe that you need to believe in anything to write on Orthodox Judaism or any topic. My questions on your beliefs were to find out where you are coming from. I realize this is a very sensitive area for many people… I had a fascinating discussion along a similar line with Alana Newhouse…in my book on Jewish journalism.
Later, I emailed Tova: "Why have you stayed Orthodox?"
Tova wrote back: "I've stayed Orthodox because it's who I am, it's my childhood and its my family, my parents and my children, and it's part of all my memories. I'm Orthodox because I love ritual, because I love the texts, love the idea of a chain of ideas passed down from generation to generation, each one adding one more link. Because I love Shabbos, love that the chaos of my everyday life quiets down for those hours. Because sometimes when I least expect it, a cantorial tune, a word of a prayer will catch me off guard and move me, make me feel a longing for something deeper, fuller, higher. I've stayed Orthodox even though so many things about it anger me, so many things feel problematic and troubling and unresolvable. And I stay because the Orthodox world is so much wider than some people believe, because one can doubt and wrestle and observe and believe and that is all part of this tradition."
Letters to The New York Times Book Review take up a page of the Sunday 2/27/05 section:
In her essay ''The Observant Reader'' (Jan. 30), Wendy Shalit chastises several writers — myself included — for misrepresenting Orthodox Judaism and purporting to be insiders. But apparently the only true experience of Orthodoxy is her own — and any portrayal that doesn't confirm her newfound personal fulfillment is inauthentic. Shalit misrepresents my depiction of Orthodox Judaism, a world I know and live in every day. Evidently, in her divine scale of justice, one character's unhealthy obsession with bridal magazines and another character's forbidden hug add up to ''contemptible.''
The true sin seems to be portraying Orthodox Jews with any human failings, with having moments when they do not conform to the dictates of Jewish law. Shalit is not an observant reader but an ideological one. She's looking for public relations documents, kosher books by ''insiders' insiders'' that will ''convert'' even us ''outsider insiders.'' I didn't realize that despite spending my life as an Orthodox Jew, I'm in need of conversion. But then, I also didn't realize that novels were in the business of proselytizing.
TOVA MIRVIS
Newton, Mass.• To the Editor:
I do not know if Wendy Shalit's inability to read my novel as a work of fiction stems from her anxiety about Orthodox stereotypes or from a simple failure of imagination, but it is necessary to point out an inaccuracy in her representation of my views in my novel ''Joy Comes in the Morning.'' Shalit writes that ''Rosen dismisses modern Orthodox men as 'macho sissies' and depicts 'pencilnecked' Orthodox boys.'' I do not dismiss Orthodox men as anything. Deborah, a character in my novel who has had an affair with an Orthodox man about whom she is still conflicted, entertains the ''macho sissies'' thought (along with many other, often contradictory thoughts). Lev, a young man awkwardly entering into a relationship with Deborah, who is a Reform rabbi, has an anxious association with thin yeshiva boys as he himself is about to embark on a session of Talmud study. The boundaries of Judaism are fluid for these characters, as they are in real life. Judaism, to its glory, has so far managed to avoid breaking down into ''denominations,'' but Shalit writes as if no complex web exists linking secular and observant, ancient and modern.
In her treatment of other Jewish writers, Shalit gathers up a few biographical scraps to determine whether these writers are ''outsiders'' or ''insiders'' — as if the authority of a literary work were a matter of birthright and not imaginative power. This is a sad diversion from all the truly interesting questions there are to be raised about religion and the imagination, about traditional Judaism and works of new creation, about honest exploration and communal anxiety. One wonders what Shalit would make of the story about the cunning ancestor who robs his brother and cheats his father — but then the Bible doesn't specify whether Jacob is Reform, Conservative, Orthodox or haredi.
Shalit's attack on the way contemporary Jewish novelists do — or do not — write about the haredi community put me in mind of Oscar Wilde's observation that the 19th-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. Shalit's dislike seems to be for imaginative fiction itself — her prerogative, of course, but a strange attribute for someone writing seriously about it.
JONATHAN ROSEN
New York
