The Days of Awe - Hugh Nissenson

Hugh Nissenson’s The Days of Awe is a novel of great scope, juggling many topics around a central theme of the nature of religion in human life.  Generally, the novel handles these topics well, although it offers no really new insights into the problem of evil in the world, or offers any bold vision of religion and its discontents. 

Rather, Nissenson presents  normal people struggling with the big questions of life and death.  The result is prosaic, and the novel’s narration, never really escaping the character’s voices, suffers as a result.  Reading the novel we get the sense we have heard and read this before, which I suspect is Nissenson’s point.

I was also disappointed to find this is a “9-11” novel.  Of course, that event is fair game , but in this novel, it comes off as distraction.  Nissenson builds tension in the novel by steadily adding layer upon layer of small, daily events that come to destroy people.  9-11 arrives as a shock to the system of the novel, and detracts from the sense of the ordinary horror of life events. 

Yet The Days of Awe is still a novel worth reading.  Nissenson creates a contemporary novel which commands our respect.  It is a serious attempt to get at the roots of this thing called human life.  It succeeds even when it fails.

Snapshot 1965-1967

Hugh Nissenson’s Notes from the Frontier provides a very clear, firsthand account of life on a kibbutz near the Syrian border in 1965, and then in 1967 after the Six Day’s War.

Of course, most of what Nissenson writes about is no longer applicable.  At the time, infiltration was the major security concern in the State of Israel.  Arabs from Jordan and Syria would sneak into Israel at night, and cause mayhem.  Nissenson’s kibbutz, in the Hula Valley, a stone’s throw from Syria, was particularly vulnerable to attacks; this paranoia fills his accounts of life on the kibbutz.

The narrator then returns during the Six Days War, and see the colossal destruction and changes.  With a kibbutz member he drives up the Golan Heights, and sees the view of the Syrians had long had of the Hula Valley since 1948.   

And the book ends there, on note that does not really end.  Because even in 1967, Nissenson is perspicacious  enough to realize that the conflict is far from over.  That really, it has just begun.

Fountain of Youth - Eric Maroney

This morning song

A slushy bit of mud

Wedged between

Your legs

The magic of yesteryear

Spent well, a prism

Of spreading light

Gurgling like the

Fountain of youth

The Strange Laugh - Eric Maroney

Nothing new

The strange laugh

Of that lady down

The hall, the yelp          

Of a dog, sickened

By degrees, strangled

By love

We live here on thin air

Up here, the clouds conceal

Your pain, in this ether

All this is for you

The touch of you

And it is real

There is the touch of you

More solid than stone

Getting Things His Own Way

  

David Weiss Halivni’s The Book and the Sword holds great promise as a memoir, but in the end, it fails to live up to its promise.

Weiss was a child prodigy in Talmud in a small Hungarian town.  The Holocaust stripped him of his Hasidic orientation, but not is love of Talmud.  He leads us through his reorientation toward the critical reconstruction of texts, which became his major calling at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

But he runs afoul of the new administration, mainly for innovations introduced into the JTS, including ordaining women rabbis.  This, Weiss believes, goes against halakah.  Weiss eventually decides to leave the JTS, an institution that he has left him behind, and takes job at Columbia University (where halakah is followed?)

Weiss has an interesting story to tell, and does it with some skill.  But unfortunately, he leaves the aftertaste of a man who is accustomed to getting what he wants, and not so gracious when he does not.  Perhaps he is not really like this at all, but this memoir certainly paints him in such hues.