She was sixteen the year she filled a brown notebook and titled it The Purple Book.<\/p>\n
The school was a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem, the kind where the creative work of a year amounted to a personal essay, a poem, and lyrics for the annual Jerusalem Day song competition. Naama Goldstein<\/a> (b. c. 1969) painted and drew through her childhood and thought of art as something you did with your hands and your eyes. Writing came late and came sideways. The story she set down in the brown notebook concerned a different book, a purple one, packed with wisdom. At first the people in the story tried to spread the wisdom in peace. By the end they had taken the book and beaten one another over the head with it, to death. She mailed a copy to a cousin who was studying for rabbinic ordination. No answer came back. The silence was the first reply her writing ever received, and she remembered it.<\/p>\n Then she put the pen down for years.<\/p>\n Goldstein was born in Boston around 1969 into an Orthodox Zionist home. At three her family moved to Israel, and she grew up there, in Hebrew, inside the religious schoolrooms and the radio songs and the liturgy that would later set the cadence of her English. At seventeen she returned to the United States. The arithmetic of those moves matters to everything she wrote. She did not live in two countries the way a tourist samples two countries. She lived all the way inside each one and then carried it intact into the other. The breakfast cereal, the prime-time program, the pattern of a tiled floor, these are the things her fiction would later use to measure the distance between Galilee and a suburban condominium, because these are the things a child notices and a transplanted adult cannot forget.<\/p>\n In St. Louis she enrolled at Washington University<\/a>. She had also attended Stern College for Women<\/a> at Yeshiva University<\/a>. At Washington University she walked into a series of writing workshops, and there two teachers, Robert Earleywine and the late Stanley Elkin<\/a> (1930-1995), gave her the honest encouragement that planted a seed of determination. The seed lay dormant about six years. She worked, in the meantime, the way many writers work before they are writers. She tended bar. She kept books as an accountant. She answered phones at a reception desk, taught language, shelved and fetched in a library, carried a caseload in social services. The r\u00e9sum\u00e9 reads like a Tom Wolfe<\/a> inventory of a life lived close to other people’s lives, and it gave her the receptionists and mothers and schoolgirls and broken men who would crowd her pages.<\/p>\n She took an MFA in fiction from Vermont College<\/a>. Then she returned to the work in earnest, and the seed germinated.<\/p>\n Her one book arrived in 2004. Scribner<\/a> published The Place Will Comfort You, a collection of eight interlocked stories. The title carries the weight of the book inside it. It comes from the blessing a Jew offers a mourner: may the Place comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. HaMakom, the Place, stands in Jewish tradition as one of the names of God. So the title names a geography and names God in the same breath, comfort and exile folded into a single phrase, and that doubling runs through every story. Goldstein split the collection along the two Hebrew verbs of Jewish migration. The first section gathers the stories of going up to Israel, aliyah. The second gathers the stories of coming down from it, yeridah. To ascend and to descend, the same ladder, depending which way you face.<\/p>\n Watch one of the stories happen.<\/p>\n In “A Pillar of a Cloud” a young American girl is babysitting her Israeli cousins. A roofer comes to do work on the house. He is an Arab. The American, easy and unthinking in her American hospitality, sets a sandwich in front of him, a Sloppy Joe, and invites him to sit and eat. The Israeli children watch. To them the gesture lands somewhere between scandal and trespass, a breaking of a rule they have never had to name because no one around them has ever broken it. The whole charged border between two peoples passes through one plate of food on one kitchen table, and Goldstein keeps the camera on the children’s faces and lets the adults’ politics stay offstage where children always find them.<\/p>\n This is her method. The conflict stays domestic. The nation enters through the kitchen, the schoolroom, the family car.<\/p>\n In “The Conduct for Consoling” the narrator is a bilingual third-grade girl, an immigrant child trying to perform the proper Hebrew rituals of consolation for a classmate whose mother has died. She wants to console correctly and she cannot find the country she is supposed to console from, and over it all hangs the strangeness of seeing her own land through a Jordanian television broadcast built to frighten her. In “Anatevka Tender” a mother blames herself for the breakdown of her elder son, a young man come home wrong from the Lebanon War, and she packs the family off to the safety of an East Coast condominium in Maryland, trading one set of dangers for the quieter danger of forgetting who they were. In “The Verse in the Margins” an Orthodox schoolteacher named Mr. Durchschlag turns the horror he carries from war into a campaign to guard his female students from their own waking sexuality, and the campaign curdles into something the reader sees and the teacher never will. In “The Roberto Touch” a rebellious girl named Shulee behaves badly on a school trip while two classmates pull toward opposite poles of the same culture, one toward the settlements, one toward rock and roll. In “The Worker Rests Under the Hero Trees” a young Israeli expatriate chases romance with a childhood hero who has become, of all things, a cranberry expert.<\/p>\n Eight stories, and the point of view sits almost always with the people who see least and feel most: the preadolescent girls, the teacher coming apart, the mothers of damaged sons. Goldstein trusts the unreliable witness. She trusts the child at the table to register the earthquake the adults are pretending not to feel.<\/p>\n The language is the thing reviewers reached for first, and they reached in two directions. Goldstein writes English the way a person thinks who dreams in Hebrew. She lets Hebrew rhythm and Hebrew syntax bend the English sentence rather than smoothing the seams flat, and she drops biblical allusion and Israeli idiom and Orthodox reference onto the page without stopping to explain them. To some readers this opened a door into a consciousness they had never occupied. Alice Munro<\/a> (1931-2024) called the stories a gift, strong and original and unpredictable. Anthony Doerr<\/a> (b. 1973) wrote of characters inching along tightropes between cultures, between safety and menace, with a distant political weather pressing on everything. Peter Ho Davies<\/a> (b. 1966) saw an art made out of alienation, built from immigrants who behave like expatriates and emigrants who feel like exiles. Publishers Weekly found the book funny and moving and said it captivates and provokes.<\/p>\n Other readers hit the same off-kilter syntax and felt shut out. Booklist called the collection discomfiting and the language difficult and off-putting, a hybrid that distances a reader not tuned to its frequency. Library Journal filed it under quirky, fit for those who like their fiction eccentric and off center. Plain readers on the open review sites said the prose crowded out the story, that the dialogue went stiff, that the characters stayed at arm’s length. The split is the honest record. Goldstein wrote a book that asks the reader to learn its language before the book will open, and a book like that wins a small devoted readership and loses the casual one. Kirkus<\/a> named the recurring subject under all the noise: the pull between a person’s freedom and the claims of religion and nation, felt mostly by girls and young women who did not choose either side.<\/p>\n She had arrived with credentials the small world notices. Saul Bellow<\/a> (1915-2005) selected her story “The Cat-Boy” for News from the Republic of Letters, the journal he helped edit, and the nod from Bellow carried her bilingual voice to readers who trust Bellow’s ear. Her story “The Ingathering of Exiles,” about an American family trying to build a life in Israel and counting the emotional cost, won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. The Pushcart committee nominated her in 2002. The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute gave her a senior research award in 2003. The collection finished as a finalist for the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her stories ran in Arts & Letters, Lilith, Crab Orchard Review, Pakn Treger, and the Scribner workshop anthology.<\/p>\n Ask Goldstein where the sound came from and she points back at the schoolroom she left. The strongest pull on her writing, she has said, comes from the Jewish liturgy and the biblical passages she absorbed young, and from the Israeli poems set to music and played over the radio of her childhood. She cares about the rhythm of a sentence more than almost anything, and she wants a speech that lives a little apart from daily speech, an incantatory register. She no longer keeps the religion. She holds instead to a conviction about the species: that human temperament is at bottom a prayerful thing, for good and for ill, and that her way of writing carries that conviction whether she wills it or not. This is the key to the whole body of work. A woman walks out of the faith and keeps the cadence. She stops praying and writes prose that prays.<\/p>\n After 2004 the public record goes quiet. One book, then years. Goldstein settled in the Boston area and kept writing without putting much before readers. Her own site has listed a forthcoming novel, The Truancy Bible, and her work in progress over the years has reached toward a pair of novels and a nonfiction manuscript she has shown in part under the title Mixed City. She has moved into translation as well, carrying the work of the Gazan poet Heba Al-Madhoun toward English readers, which returns her to the border she has worked her whole writing life, the line between Hebrew and the languages pressed against it.<\/p>\n So the output stays slim and the standing holds. Goldstein occupies a small permanent room in Jewish American letters, kept there by one book that refused to make Israel and America into easy opposites and refused to translate itself into comfort. She writes from inside the hyphen, a woman of one place and another and not at all the same, and she names the condition in the title she chose. The Place will comfort you. It is a blessing for the grieving and a name for God and a promise to the exile, and in her hands it is also a question she never closes: which place, and comfort from what, and at what cost to the self that has to keep moving up the ladder and down.<\/p>\n The Word for Comfort: A Hero System for Naama Goldstein<\/strong><\/p>\n She took the words said over the dead and made them the door into her book.<\/p>\n The Place Will Comfort You. The phrase comes from the blessing a Jew speaks to a mourner, may the Place comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and HaMakom, the Place, stands as one of the names of God. So Naama Goldstein (b. c. 1969) titled her one collection with a promise of comfort, and then she wrote eight stories whose sentences hand the reader no comfort at all. The English bends under Hebrew weight. The idiom goes untranslated. The reader who wants the smooth ride finds the door shut and calls the prose off-putting and goes home. The reader who stays learns a bent tongue and is consoled by something other than ease. The blessing and the book disagree about the word, and the disagreement is the whole career.<\/p>\n Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives a way to see why a single word can split like that. Man knows he will die, and the knowledge is unlivable, so he builds a project that will outlast the body and lets him feel he counts in the order of things. Becker called these projects hero systems. A hero system tells a man what counts as brave, what counts as shameful, what counts as a life well spent, and it hands him a set of sacred words to carry, and the words are the tokens that prove he belongs to the project that will not die. Two terrors drive the building. The first is death, the rot in the meat. The second is the terror under the first, that the death will mean nothing, that the man was a smear of appetite on a rock spinning in the dark and no one will keep him. The hero system answers both at once. It promises the body’s end will be redeemed by the project’s endurance, and it promises the man mattered because he served the thing that endures.<\/p>\n Sacred words travel between hero systems and change their meaning at the border. Take comfort. We treat it as a thing everyone wants the same way, like water. It is not. Comfort names whatever the fortress was built to give, and every fortress was built against a different fear, so the word means a different thing inside each wall.<\/p>\n Walk it through some rooms.<\/p>\n A hospice nurse stands at the foot of a bed in a house in the valley, late, the syringe driver ticking under the blanket, a chux pad folded on the chair. The daughter waits in the doorway with the car keys still in her fist. The nurse has done this a thousand times and she says the sentence she always says. We keep her comfortable now. The daughter hears the word and her stomach drops, because she has learned what it means here. It means the cure is over. It means no one will pull her mother back. Comfort in this room is the dignity of the downhill road, the morphine that loosens the jaw, the permission to stop fighting the body. The nurse has made her peace with death by tending it, hour by hour, and her hero system is the steady hand. To her, comfort and surrender are the same mercy.<\/p>\n Cross the country to a barracks before dawn. A sergeant walks the line of cots and a recruit has rolled his sleeves and put foot powder in his boots and laid his rifle wrong. You comfortable, son. The recruit does not answer because there is no right answer. In this fortress comfort is the soft thing that gets men killed, the inch of give that the enemy walks through, the warmth that dulls the edge a soldier keeps his life on. The sergeant serves a project older than any of the boys in front of him, the unit that survives its dead, the name carried on the colors, and his sacred word for the good life is hard. Comfort to him is the first symptom of the rot. He despises the very thing the nurse offers, and both of them are right inside their own walls.<\/p>\n Now a lobby with a marble floor and a doorman in a frock coat and a concierge with a small brass pin on his lapel. A guest checks in, tired, and the concierge folds the request into the practiced line. We’ll make you comfortable, sir. Here comfort is a product with a price, the robe and the slippers and the turndown chocolate on the pillow, the temperature set to seventy-one, the second pillow firm and the third pillow soft. The hero system of the great hotel is service raised to a kind of priesthood, and the man at the desk feels he counts because he can read a stranger’s wants before the stranger speaks them. His comfort flatters the body and asks nothing of the soul. It is the opposite of the nurse’s comfort, which asks the soul to let the body go, and the opposite of the sergeant’s, who would burn the robe.<\/p>\n Then a kitchen that smells of onions and chicken fat, foil over every dish, the freezer packed to the door against a hunger no one in the room has felt in fifty years but the old woman at the stove remembers in her hands. Eat, she says. Eat something. To her comfort is the full plate set in front of the living, the body fed against the memory of the body starved, and the project she serves is the line itself, the family that did not end when it was meant to end. She buries her terror under brisket. The plate is her prayer.<\/p>\n Four rooms, one word, four fortresses, and not one of the four would recognize the comfort of the others as comfort at all.<\/p>\n This is the ground Goldstein writes on, and her own fortress stands apart from all four. Her hero system is art built out of the ruins of faith. She grew up religious in Jerusalem, inside the liturgy and the biblical cadence and the Israeli songs that came over the radio, and she left the faith and kept the music. She has said the strongest pull on her writing comes from the prayers and the verses she took in before she could weigh them, and that she no longer keeps the religion but holds that human temperament runs prayerful at the root, for good and for ill. Subtract the God and the covenant and the Sabbath and the law, and what stays standing is the cadence, the incantatory register, the sentence that lives a little apart from daily speech. That residue is the project. She relocated transcendence from the synagogue into prose. A woman walks out of the faith and writes sentences that pray.<\/p>\n Two terrors drive her too, and you can find both on her pages. The first is death, plain and recurring. A mother dies and a third-grade girl in “The Conduct for Consoling” cannot find the country she is meant to console from. A son comes home broken from the Lebanon War in “Anatevka Tender” and his mother carries the guilt across an ocean and buries it in a Maryland condominium. Mourning fills the collection the way light fills a room. The second terror is subtler and it is hers in a way it belongs to few writers. It is the annihilation of a self that no single language can hold. A consciousness formed in Hebrew and made to live in English does not translate, and the untranslated remainder is the part most afraid of vanishing, because if it cannot be said it cannot be kept. Her hero system answers that second terror head on. She refuses to smooth the remainder away. She writes English bent by Hebrew so that the divided self survives on the page in its own shape, and the bent sentence becomes the vehicle that carries the unsayable past the death of the body.<\/p>\n So the word comfort means a fifth thing for her, and the fifth thing inverts the first four. For the nurse comfort is surrender, for the sergeant a danger, for the concierge a product, for the grandmother a full plate. For Goldstein comfort is the sentence that refuses to lie to you. The mourner does not want the smooth word that skates over the loss. The mourner wants the loss named in its true and difficult shape, and the naming, hard as it is, is the only consolation that holds. So she gives the reader the bent and the strange and the untranslated, and she trusts that accuracy consoles where ease only insults. Her comfort comes with friction built in. It is the comfort of not being managed.<\/p>\n Picture the figure her own work most resembles, the one craftsman whose fidelity rhymes with hers. A scribe sits over a sheet of parchment with a goose quill and a small glass, copying a Torah by hand, and the law is strict, one letter malformed and the whole scroll is void. He cannot improve the text. He cannot smooth a hard passage for the reader. His comfort is the letter set down exactly as commanded, the form kept faithful whatever the cost in labor, and his soul rests in the fidelity itself. Goldstein keeps faith with the bent letter the way the scribe keeps faith with the perfect one. She will not correct her English into the comfortable standard, because the bend is the truth of the thing, and to straighten it would void the scroll.<\/p>\n Watch the same splitting happen to a second of her sacred words, home.<\/p>\n A man in a rented apartment keeps a heavy iron key in a drawer though the lock it opened is gone and the house it opened was bulldozed before his children were born. He takes it out sometimes and holds it. To him home is one fixed place on the earth, lost and unrecoverable, and the key is the proof that the place was real and that he is owed it. His hero system is return, the long memory that will not let the claim die, and home for him can never be portable because a portable home would betray the one true address.<\/p>\n A girl raised in seven countries by a diplomat father packs in an afternoon and feels nothing leave her. Home to her is the duffel and the people in it, the family that reassembles in each new posting like a tent struck and pitched again. She would find the man’s key a kind of prison. Her hero system is adaptation, the self that survives by traveling light, and her sacred word for the good life is open. Fixed is the thing she fears.<\/p>\n A settler builds with cinderblock on a hilltop the deed to which he reads out of scripture, and home for him is a redemptive claim, theology poured into a foundation, the land itself the body of the promise. He would find the diplomat’s daughter rootless and the refugee’s grief a mirror he cannot bear to look into, because the house he raises stands where the house in the drawer once stood.<\/p>\n Goldstein takes none of these and takes all of them. Home for her is double and cannot be made single, the hyphen that will not close, the ladder you climb up toward Israel and down toward the diaspora and up again, ascent and descent the same rungs depending which way you face. She built the collection on that ladder, the stories of going up and the stories of coming down, and she named the whole of it with the name that is God and Place and exile at once. HaMakom comforts and HaMakom is where you are not. She will not pick a country because the truth of her self lives in the refusal to pick, and the refusal is the heroic act inside her fortress. The man with the key and the girl with the duffel and the settler on the hill each solved the problem she keeps open on purpose, because closing it would kill the part of her she writes to keep alive.<\/p>\n Here is the engine of the whole life, stated plain. She stopped praying and the temperament stayed prayerful. The God left and the cadence stayed. The immortality project outlived the thing it was first built to serve, the way a cathedral keeps its acoustics after the congregation stops coming, and the empty resonance turns out to be the point. The bent sentence is the surviving prayer. It carries the divided self past the rot of the body, and it asks the reader to be consoled the hard way or not at all.<\/p>\n Three things follow, and they are where to watch the cost.<\/p>\n The first is that her hero system buys her a small permanent readership and forecloses the large one, and the bargain is not an accident of luck but the price written into the project. Alice Munro and Anthony Doerr and Saul Bellow read the bent sentence and were consoled by its accuracy. The general reader hit the same sentence and felt managed out of the room and left. A fortress built to console the few who can read the difficult truth will always lock the door against the many who came for the smooth word, and Goldstein chose that door when she chose the bend. The near silence after 2004, the one book and the decades of work mostly unpublished, reads from inside the frame as the project holding its shape rather than failing. A man does not betray his hero system to be loved more widely. He would rather be kept by the few who keep the thing he serves.<\/p>\n The second is that the title was never a promise of ease and we misread it if we hear one. The Place will comfort you, but the comfort on offer is the comfort the mourner needs, the loss named true, not the loss smoothed over, and the friction in her prose is not a flaw in the comfort but the form of it. The reader who wants the pillow plumped should go to the concierge. The reader at the graveside, who cannot be lied to without injury, is the reader she wrote for, and to that reader the bent sentence is the kindest thing on the shelf.<\/p>\n The third is the wager under all of it, that accuracy outlasts ease, that the self set down in its true bent shape will be kept while the smoothed self dissolves. Becker would say every hero system is a denial of death dressed as a way of life, and that the denial is both the saving thing and the trap. Goldstein’s wager saves the divided self on the page and traps the work in a room most readers will not enter. Whether the wager pays is not a question the writer gets to answer. It is the question the long quiet after the book leaves open, the way her own ladder stays open, going up and going down, the Place comforting and the Place withheld, the same rungs either way.<\/p>\n The Competence You Cannot Hand Over: Naama Goldstein and the Limits of Tacit Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n Two readers open the same page.<\/p>\n The first is a woman in her fifties who grew up speaking Hebrew at the dinner table and English at school, who heard the cantor before she heard the radio, who can still feel the meter of a psalm in her jaw. She reads a sentence of Naama Goldstein (b. c. 1969), one of the bent ones where the English carries a Hebrew weight and the word order tilts, and she slides into it without a snag. The tilt feels right to her. It feels like home talking. She finishes the story and tells her book club the prose is a gift.<\/p>\n The second reader is a man who reviews fiction for a living, fluent, well read, generous by habit. He hits the same sentence and stops. He reads it again. The word order fights him. He cannot find the handle. He writes that the language is off-putting and difficult, that it holds the reader at arm’s length, and he means it as a fair report of his own experience, because it is one.<\/p>\n Same page, opposite outcome. The standard account of the split is a story about a code. Goldstein, the account runs, carries an Israeli and Orthodox and bilingual sensibility, and she encodes it in her prose, and the reader who shares the code decodes it and the reader who lacks it does not. The first reader had the key. The second did not. The critic in literary studies has a name ready for the group that holds the key. He calls it an interpretive community, a body of readers who share the competence to read a text a certain way, after Stanley Fish (b. 1938), and he files Goldstein’s divided reception under the heading of a sensibility shared by some and missing in others.<\/p>\n Stephen Turner<\/a> (b. 1951) spent a book taking that story apart, and his argument, turned on Goldstein, dissolves the code and leaves something stranger and truer in its place.<\/p>\n Turner’s book is The Social Theory of Practices<\/em><\/a> (1994). Its target is the idea that runs under half the human sciences, that a group shares a hidden possession, a practice, a tradition, a tacit knowledge, the same in each head, and that this shared thing gets handed down from person to person and accounts for why people of a culture coordinate and resemble one another. Turner asks the question the picture skips. By what route does the same hidden content get from one nervous system into another. Polanyi (1891-1976), who coined tacit knowledge<\/a>, defined it as the part of skill a man cannot state, the feel of the thing that escapes every rule he could write down. Turner grants the feel is real. He denies it can travel. You cannot teach what you cannot state. You cannot copy into a second head a content the first head cannot read out. Bourdieu reached for the word reproduced, the practice reproduced across bodies, and Turner answers that no one has shown how the reproduction happens, and that without it the shared object falls apart. Strip away the assumption that the thing is the same in everyone, and the practice collapses into the plain old habit of an individual, built up in one body by that body’s own history of exposure and correction. What looks like a shared possession is a set of separate habits that happen to produce similar performances. The sameness was never there to begin with. It was inferred from the overlap and then mistaken for a cause.<\/p>\n Hold that against the facts of how Goldstein came to write the way she writes.<\/p>\n She grew up religious in Jerusalem in the years a child’s ear sets. The liturgy went into her before she could weigh it, the biblical cadence, the call and response of prayer, the Israeli poems set to music and played over the radio across the long afternoons. She has said the strongest pull on her writing comes from those prayers and verses absorbed young, that she cannot will the rhythm, that it lives in her below the level of choice, and that she holds human temperament to run prayerful at the root whether or not a man keeps the faith. Read that testimony with Turner in hand and notice what it admits. The competence formed by exposure, in one body, in a particular decade, through a particular sequence of schoolrooms and broadcasts and Sabbaths. It is hers. It is individual. It is the residue of her own causal history and no one else’s.<\/p>\n The romantic reading wants the bent sentence to be the voice of a people, the Israeli sensibility made audible, a shared thing she carries out of the group and sets on the page. Turner’s reading denies the group ever held a single thing to carry. Put two Israelis of her exact cohort at two desks, raised on the same prayers and the same radio, and they will not write her sentence, because the wiring that produced it ran through her body alone, through her particular ear and her particular six years of silence and her particular workshops in St. Louis. The prose is not the expression of a collective competence. It is the output of one habituated nervous system that no other history reproduced. The sensibility readers think they hear transmitted is a folk theory laid over a single case.<\/p>\n Look closer at the prose and the point sharpens, because her sentences carry two different cargoes and only one of them can travel. The untranslated Hebrew idiom, the biblical allusion dropped without a note, the Orthodox reference left bare, these are explicit things. A reader can look them up. A footnote conveys them. They pass from her to anyone with a dictionary and an hour, which is to say they are the part of her difficulty that transmits. The other cargo is the rhythm, the tilt of the syntax, the placement that makes a clause land like a verse rather than a report. No glossary carries that. It cannot be stated, so it cannot be taught, so it cannot be the shared code the standard account needs. And here is the turn. The part of her prose that divides her readers is not the lookupable part. The first reader and the hostile critic could both consult the same footnote. What separates them is the felt cadence, the very cargo that does not travel. The thing that splits the readership is the thing no one could have transmitted to either of them.<\/p>\n So what happened between Goldstein and the woman who slid into the sentence. Nothing passed. The writer did not hand the reader a competence. The reader brought her own, built decades earlier at her own dinner table, by her own ear, through a history that overlapped Goldstein’s enough that the two sets of habits met on the page and turned the same way. The match is the meeting of two separate formations, each assembled in its own body, neither copied from the other. The woman did not receive Goldstein’s tacit knowledge. She arrived already holding a tacit knowledge of her own that happened to fit. And the critic who stalled did not fail to receive a transmission either. He simply never built, in his own history, the habit that would let his reading lock onto her writing. He was not missing a key to a shared lock. He was a different lock, and her sentence was a key cut for a third one, and the two did not turn.<\/p>\n The interpretive community, in Turner’s account, is the overlap renamed as a thing. Fish points at a crowd of readers who read alike and says they share a competence. Turner points at the same crowd and says he sees a crowd of separate competences that resemble one another because their owners passed through overlapping histories, and that the resemblance gets policed and tightened after the fact by public correction, the review that tells you how to read, the prize that certifies a way of reading, the blurb from Munro or Doerr that tells you the difficulty is worth your trouble. The community is not the cause of the shared reading. It is the name we give the shared reading once feedback has herded the separate habits close enough to look like one.<\/p>\n The workshop fits the same picture, and it undoes a piece of creative-writing folklore on the way. The folklore says craft is a tacit possession passed master to apprentice, the teacher’s feel for the sentence handed down to the student across the seminar table. Goldstein studied with the late Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) and with Robert Earleywine, and she credits them with honest encouragement. Notice the word. Encouragement is feedback. It is correction and permission applied to a habit already forming in the student’s own body. Elkin could not pour his ear into her. No teacher can. What the workshop did was shape, by response, the competence she was building for herself, and the proof is in the gap that followed. The encouragement landed and then nothing happened for about six years. A possession handed over arrives whole and ready. A habit shaped by feedback incubates on its own clock, in its own body, and surfaces when it surfaces. Hers surfaced six years late, which is what habituation looks like and what transmission does not.<\/p>\n Now the cost of seeing her this way, and the gain.<\/p>\n The critical world wants Goldstein as a bridge, a carrier, the writer who brings the bilingual Jewish American condition across to readers who lack it, the representative voice of the country between two countries. Every word of that depends on the picture Turner denies. A bridge transmits. A carrier carries a shared thing from one shore to another. Take away the shared thing and the bridge has nothing to carry and no second shore that lacks it. What stands in place of the representative is a single woman with a singular history who built, in one body, a competence that resembles no one’s and that she cannot will or explain or hand to a student or a reader. The art the blurbs praised as an art of alienation reads, in Turner’s terms, as the visible mark of a competence that cannot be shared. That is why it wins the few and loses the many, and why no amount of explanation will ever close the gap. The footnotes can be supplied. The cadence cannot. The reader who lacks the prior habit cannot be talked into the feel, because the feel was never the sort of thing that travels by talk.<\/p>\n This is the contribution, and it cuts against the grain of the praise and the grain of the complaint at once. The admirers say she transmits a world. The detractors say she fails to transmit it. Both assume a world is the kind of thing that gets transmitted. Turner says it is not, that a tradition is not a parcel and a sensibility is not a download, that what we call her Hebrew-bent English is one nervous system’s habit wearing the costume of a shared inheritance. She is not legible to the few because she shares their code. She is legible to the few because their separate histories happened to overlap hers, and unreadable to the rest because theirs did not, and there is no key, and there never was, only the meeting or the missing of habits built far apart and brought by accident to the same page.<\/p>\n Go back to the two readers. It looked like the woman held a key the critic had lost. She held no key. She held a lock of her own, cut long before she ever heard the name Goldstein, and the sentence happened to fit it, and the fit felt like recognition because recognition is what a fit feels like from the inside. The critic held a different lock, honestly reported, and his report was true of him. Nothing failed to pass between the writer and the man, because nothing was ever the kind of thing that could pass. Two strangers stood at the same page with competences assembled in two separate lives, and for one of them the tumblers fell, and for the other they did not, and the page itself transmitted nothing at all.<\/p>\n The Voice<\/strong><\/p>\n Start with diction, because that is where the strangeness lives. Goldstein reaches for the cool, abstract, Latinate word and sets it against warm material. A couple leaning over dessert in “Pomegranate” do not share a taste, they “experience food in committee.” A woman pushed past her conscience suffers “the temper of derealization, abysmal.” A line from the forthcoming The Truancy Bible runs, “The reticent person of a curious bent appreciates the semi-isolation in an open container.” That is a sentence about wanting a little privacy on a bus or a plane, dressed in the vocabulary of a clinical report. She prefers the bureaucratic register, the job title carried whole (“a senior environmental, health and safety specialist”), the noun that holds people at a slight distance. The chill is the point. She cools the prose so the heat underneath reads truer. December 10, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n Last night I interviewed Naama Goldstein<\/a>, author of the short story collection "The Place Will Comfort You."<\/p>\n The book has the despiriting quality of real life. It’s chock-filled with disappointment, pettiness, derangement, greed and other qualities that I see in myself every day.<\/p>\n The interview is part of my series on American-Jewish literature<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a child, Naama dreamed of becoming "a painter or illustrator."<\/p>\n Luke: "And how did you realize that writing was your art?"<\/p>\n Naama: "It was kinda accidental. We didn’t have much in the way of creative writing in elementary school or high school, but toward the end of elementary school, probably sixth grade, a teacher assigned a personal essay, which was really novel. I wrote a silly but lively thing about being a fresh big sister to a baby and the tussle between the urge to go comfort him in the middle of the night and the urge to run away. I read it in front of the class. It caused a shift in my personality. I was very introverted, but reading this, I became quite the performer and enjoyed that transformation and the attention from the teacher. That planted the seed."<\/p>\n Luke: "Tell me how the flame developed from there."<\/p>\n Naama: "It was not a steady thing. I did not write for myself or anyone else until much later. As I became more disaffected as an adolescent, I wrote some parables against conformity and fundamentalism, very bad but very righteous. Then I started writing some terrible poetry. That sealed it (late high school).<\/p>\n "Even though I started in Israel, I was writing in English."<\/p>\n "I was raised by American parents in Israel. I was born in the States, but now most of the time I speak in English. When I write in Hebrew, I’m kinda rusty."<\/p>\n "My writing path was pretty erratic. I didn’t stick around any one place long enough to form long-term relationships with any mentors."<\/p>\n Luke: "What were the most interesting reactions you’ve received to your book?"<\/p>\n Naama: "To the texture of the prose. I never expected people to react so much to my voice. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. It’s a natural thing. At times it got pretty hard to take when the what of the stories got overlooked in favor of how I write and how the language sounds odd to some people."<\/p>\n Luke: "Did you suffer much doubt that you had a book inside of you worthy of coming out?"<\/p>\n Naama: "Sure, and still do."<\/p>\n Luke: "Nobody seems to find any comfort in this book."<\/p>\n Naama: "Let me think. Let me do a quick run through. Let’s see, who’s happy? No, no, you’re probably right. It is a salutation to the grieving so what do you expect? Israel is a painful place. It was founded on top of a bleeding wound and it continues to bleed in all kinds of directions, people turn to it for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. It’s not meant to be a Hallmark Hall of Fame production. That it’s not a comforting read does not bother me much."<\/p>\n Luke: "Why do you choose to live in the United States?"<\/p>\n Naama: "This is where I am. We owe it to every place, to every life, to try to form a bond where you are. My life was marked by so much back-and-forthing, I feel that I want to try settling. To say that after 20-something years of being here tells you something about the viability of that desire. I have a fear of being addicted to wanting to be elsewhere."<\/p>\n Luke: "A major reason I live here is because it is easier. What role does ease play in your decision to live in the United States?"<\/p>\n Naama: "That’s a tough one to answer because I’ve never experienced living in Israel as an adult. I’m told it is not easy living there and not for the obvious reasons of security. Right now the economy is so crushing here…"<\/p>\n Luke: "Are there any transcendent non-rational things you believe in?"<\/p>\n Naama: "I’m totally irrational. I believe in the evil eye. It’s something I picked up growing up in Israel. I hate tempting fate. I’m afraid of saying things are going well."<\/p>\n Luke: "From your first-hand experience, what have you loved and hated about Orthodox Judaism?"<\/p>\n Naama: "I loved the absolute reliability of the experience of elevation. It’s like clockwork. Every Shabbat, every chag (Jewish holiday). For the observant, with every practice. There are so many during the day. Then you go back to the same thing, that can be so terribly constricting. The requirements to conform to these delineated guidelines that are so intricate that it is staggering… There are specifications for every behavior, it can become like madness after a while."<\/p>\n Luke: "Perhaps my primary motivation for writing is my frustration with real life. I’m curious, where does your urge to write and create come from?"<\/p>\n Naama: "I think that’s very well put. It’s a similar thing, a restlessness. Things that stick to you like burrs, things you wish you could change or understand or wish you could resolve more satisfyingly. You can make that happen, at least aesthetically, in writing. You take an incident and imbue it with meaning."<\/p>\n Luke: "Under what emotional states do you do your best work?"<\/p>\n Naama: "I write a lot better when I’m happy. I write best when I come in contact with self-acceptance. As an example, an approach that seems, well, here comes the evil eye thing again, I’m afraid to say it because it won’t work out, what seems to be working is to recognize that I have the attention span of a squirrel, and so to work on three or four things in parallel and that keeps me happier. If I don’t accept that, I try to work on one thing and I don’t do anything all day and that just breeds further frustration."<\/p>\n Luke: "What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?"<\/p>\n Naama: "I’ll start with weaknesses. That’s a lot easier. Discipline. Imagination. I feel that my imagination is lacking. I depend on what happens, on what I’ve seen, and I can’t make things up. I’ll put things together. All my stories are total Frankensteins. None of them are autobiographical.<\/p>\n "I’ve never gotten around to strengths. That’s too dangerous."<\/p>\n Luke: "Out of all the jobs you’ve held, which have you enjoyed the most? Accountant?"<\/p>\n Naama: "No, that was terrible. I liked bartending. I liked being around a lot of people… I liked working with the mentally ill though at times it was unbearably difficult.<\/p>\n "I can’t call it a job, but in the last few years, I began doing a little community organizing. I started this initiative and it’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had. I wish I could get paid for it… I started up a tiny mothers group of Israelis and it’s turned into a hundred families that meet regularly. Like most writers, I’m an observer. I prefer to be on the sidelines, but at the same time I crave social settings, so it’s the perfect setting to be in where you bring everyone together."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She was sixteen the year she filled a brown notebook and titled it The Purple Book. The school was a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem, the kind where the creative work of a year amounted to a personal essay, a … Continue reading
\nThe syntax tilts the way Hebrew tilts. She builds with “of” the way Hebrew builds construct chains, a person of a curious bent, the temper of derealization, and she hangs the verdict off the end of the noun rather than in front of it, so “abysmal” arrives late, alone, like a stamp pressed after the fact. Her sentences often land as proverbs. She lifts a scene into a law in one move. Two diners become a committee, a small ordeal becomes a category we have all been tested in. That gnomic gear comes from the liturgy and the prayer she has named as her root, the scripture habit of stating the particular as if it were ancient and general. It also explains the early fiction. The third-grade narrator in “The Conduct for Consoling” announces that you can be “of one place and another, not at all the same,” a child speaking in maxims because her author thinks in them.
\nThe rhetoric is homiletic. She slides from she to we to you inside a paragraph, the pronouns of the pulpit. “Everyone present can access a related ordeal. We have all dealt with tests of this category. You are admonished to split from your wisdom and conscience.” That second-person “admonished” is a sermon’s grammar, the congregation addressed and instructed. Her manner, the persona doing the watching, is a reader of signs. In “Pomegranate” she seats diners at her table and reads omens into their cake, “I read that as auspicious,” then catches herself, “But do I remember or am I imagining.” She is an augur who audits her own augury in the same breath. The voice presents itself as reliable and then declines to fully trust itself, and that self-interruption is a deliberate rhetorical figure, not a lapse.
\nThe comedy works by collision, which is why Grace Paley and the Publishers Weekly reviewer both called her funny while other readers called her hard. She deadpans the institutional word over the intimate act. Calling a couple’s sensual life a “broadening turf” she is “rooting for” runs sport and real estate across a dinner date, and the wit sits in the register clash rather than in any joke. Dry, structural, easy to miss if you came for warmth. The same move reads as wit to one reader and as coldness to the next, which is the whole story of her reception.
\nShe characterizes by provenance and occupation, “the Wisconsinite oboist,” the full job title as a soul, the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 doing the work other writers give to interior monologue. And she keeps the temperature low over hot material on purpose. The Mixed City pieces circle complicity and the denial of atrocity. The essay “Green Birds in Jerusalem” describes her translating a Gazan poet’s manuscript she cannot read, an Israeli never taught the Arabic alphabet carrying a dead woman’s poems at the request of the widower. The subject screams and the prose does not. The restraint is the argument.
\nHer great asset and her great liability are the same trait. The abstraction and the proverb estrange the familiar so you see it again, the almond cake “jeweled with pomegranate arils” set beside a clinical noun, and the freshness is real. The cost is that characters can thin into instances of a category, which is what readers mean when they call the people remote and the prose too dense to enter. The early Mr. Durchschlag sentence shows both at once, an Orthodox teacher’s mania rendered as cosmic bookkeeping, “the proper ratio of this to that restored,” brilliant and airless in the same clause.
\nThe voice is liturgical comedy in a clinical register. She writes English bent toward Hebrew, generalizes like scripture, jokes by diction rather than by joke, and keeps the verdict hung off the end of the sentence where it cools before it lands. <\/p>\n