Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard learns about the novel in June, from Marla Feig, who has a cousin in publishing and who calls the house at 7:40 in the morning to say that a man from the Barn has sold a book and that the rabbi is in it.
He is delighted. He is delighted for eleven weeks.
He tells the Wednesday class. He tells the board. He tells the men at the early minyan and he tells the periodontist and he tells his mother, who says a book isn’t a cardiologist. He tells the story about Stanley Fish (b. 1938), the literary critic, who got turned into a character named Morris Zapp by the novelist David Lodge (1935-2025), a loud brilliant American who takes over every scene he enters, and who was so pleased about it that he started behaving more like Zapp afterward.
“The character improved the man,” Grossbard says. “That’s the dream. You spend thirty years building a persona out of spare parts and then a professional comes along and does it properly and hands it back to you, and after that all you have to do is show up and match the description.”
He announces from the bimah in July that he expects to be the villain and asks the congregation to remember that a good villain does more for a book than a good rabbi does for a shul. He preemptively forgives the author. He does this three Shabbosim running.
He orders sixty copies in August, before he has read a word.
The author is Gideon Sonnenfeld, forty seven, fourth row of the men’s section for nine years, aisle side, always with a sefer he doesn’t open. He wrote for a procedural that ran three seasons and did punch-up on two pilots that died. He has written from five to seven in the morning at the Coffee Bean on Pico for six years and nobody at the Barn knew, including his wife’s book club, including Grossbard, who has said perhaps four hundred words to the man since 2017 and could not have told you what he does.
The book is called In Loving Memory Of. Three hundred and forty pages. Nine rejections, then a serious house, then a starred review, then nine hundred words in the Times. It sells about six thousand in hardcover, which is a great deal and also nothing.
The hero is Zalman Fried, seventy three, who is not called Zalman Fried in the book but who is Zalman Fried, and who has been the gabbai at the Barn since before it was the Barn, when the minyan met in the social hall of a defunct Conservative shul on Robertson. In the novel he assigns the aliyos. That is the plot. Three hundred and forty pages about a man with a spiral notebook deciding who gets called to the Torah, and about the yahrzeit list, and about the little brass plates.
The box comes on a Tuesday. Grossbard opens it in the kitchen at nine at night, takes the top copy, sits down, and finds himself on page 44.
He is late to a funeral. He has no name. Sonnenfeld calls him the rabbi. He arrives eight minutes late and Zalman has held the room for eight minutes by starting a conversation with the deceased’s brother about a hardware store that closed in 1978.
Page 112. Grossbard gives a drasha. It runs above the scene for eleven minutes while Zalman works out whether to give shlishi to a man whose own brother died in March or to the son in law of the family that paid for the sound system. Sonnenfeld gives the drasha one clause. Grossbard checks the date in the book and works out that it is his Chayei Sarah drasha from three years ago, which he considers the best thing he has ever written, and which appears in the novel as weather in another man’s head.
Then page 261.
Two families want the same aliyah on the same Shabbos and the fight has been coming since Pesach. Zalman fixes it three days early with two phone calls and a small lie about a chiyuv. Neither family knows. Nothing happens. And at the kiddush, when the older of the two men claps the rabbi on the shoulder and says whatever you did, thank you, the rabbi says, I had a feeling about it, and takes a piece of herring.
Grossbard remembers the day. He remembers taking the credit and he remembers knowing he was taking it while he took it.
He closes the book at 1:20 in the morning. Dina is asleep. He sits there.
Three pages. Unnamed. A man who is late, a sound in the background, and a piece of herring.
The community reads the wound in every direction except the one it goes in. Josh Adelman calls to say the herring thing is defamatory and that he has a friend at a firm. The rabbi in Teaneck writes eight paragraphs about the vulgarity of a shul so consumed with its own celebrity that its members write novels about it, and he has read the review and not the novel. Adina Reiss reads it in four days, says it is the best book about a shul she has ever read, and gives Grossbard a look he has not seen from her before, which is pity. Ezra Malik, seventeen now, with an agent since March, does forty seconds of the rabbi reading the novel and getting to page 261, and this is the first thing Ezra has ever done that nobody watches, because the joke needs the book.
Grossbard hosts the launch at the Barn in October. Two hundred and forty people, folding chairs in rows, wine from the good place on Pico. He interviews Sonnenfeld on stage for fifty minutes and he is superb. He is funny about himself, he is serious about the book, he gets Sonnenfeld to say two things Sonnenfeld has never said in an interview, and he closes by holding the book over his head and telling the room that a man who sat in the fourth row for nine years and said nothing has written a better account of this community than the rabbi has managed in nine years of talking. They sell a hundred and sixty copies. The line for signing goes out past the coat racks.
At 10:40 the room is empty and the two of them are stacking chairs, because Sonnenfeld will not leave without stacking chairs.
“Ask me,” Sonnenfeld says.
“Ask you what.”
“You’ve been sitting on it all night. You did fifty minutes on stage and you never asked.”
Grossbard sets down a chair.
“Why am I minor.”
Sonnenfeld nods, like a man who has had the answer ready for a while.
“You want the version I do at the Q and A or the other one.”
“The other one.”
“I tried you at the center. Two years. Four hundred pages that don’t exist anymore.” He stacks another chair. “It died every time.”
“Why.”
“Because you explain yourself. You come into a room pre-explained. You do it before anyone else can, and you do it better than anyone else could, and there’s nothing left over. A novel needs a man who can’t say what he’s doing. You’ve never had that day in your life.”
“That’s a compliment.”
“It’s a diagnosis.”
“Give me both.”
“You take the air,” Sonnenfeld says. “Nothing grows under you. Zalman has never explained himself to one human being. Not to me, not to his wife, not to God on Yom Kippur. So there’s room in there. That’s all a hero is. Room.”
Grossbard takes this standing up.
“Page 261 is accurate,” he says.
“I know.”
“I remember the day. I knew I was doing it while I was doing it.”
“I know,” Sonnenfeld says. “That’s why it’s in.”
The coat room behind the sanctuary has a rack, a mop sink, and forty one copies of In Loving Memory Of in a box that will still be there in three years. Zalman Fried comes in on a Thursday afternoon in November to get the folding table for the sisterhood and finds the rabbi sitting on the box.
“Zalman.”
“Rabbi.”
“Sit down a minute.”
Zalman does not sit down. Zalman stands with his hand on the table.
“I’ve been here nine years,” Grossbard says. “I want to ask you something and I want you to answer it and I’m not going to do anything with it.”
“Okay.”
“What do you do on Thursdays.”
Zalman looks at him.
“You leave at two every Thursday and you’re back by six and you’ve done it for nine years and I have never once asked you where you go.”
For a while Zalman says nothing at all. Then he takes his hand off the table.
“Chevra kadisha,” he says. “Since ninety four.”
Grossbard does not move.
“How many.”
“I don’t say the number.”
“You know the number.”
“I know the number.” Zalman looks at the mop sink. “Four hundred and some. It’s in a book at home. Not the same book as the aliyos.”
“Thirty two years.”
“Thirty two years.”
“Zalman, why did you never.”
“It’s not a thing you say,” Zalman says.
Grossbard sits on the box of forty one novels in the coat room of his own shul and has nothing to offer. This has happened to him twice in his adult life. He does not make a joke, which he thinks about doing, and which he decides against, and the deciding takes him four seconds and costs him something.
“Can I use it,” he says.
“Without my name.”
“Without your name.”
“Then use it,” Zalman says, and takes the table.
He gives it Shabbos morning. The men who wash the dead. The ones who do the work with nobody watching and no receipt and no thank you and no one to tell. Six hundred people and the room does not make a sound for nineteen minutes and grown men cry at the back by the loading door, and it is the best thing he has done in four years, and he knows that while he is doing it too.
He hates himself for about four minutes afterward, standing at the kiddush with a plate in his hand. Then it passes and he takes a piece of herring.
Ezra Malik does the drasha that night in his father’s gray sport coat. He has the pauses. It does a million and a half and it runs on a morning show in Israel and a kiruv outfit in Jerusalem that put Grossbard’s face on a cracked graphic in May posts it now without comment.
Zalman Fried watches it twice on his phone in the parking lot behind the funeral home on Venice, with the engine running. Then he goes inside and does the work and tells nobody.
