The whole creation looks tedious at best. Its garish cover designed, it seems, to attract the Nanny Diaries crowd. Repulsive hot pink and neon-blue graffiti lettering hovers over the curly heads of two impassive, identical young men in puffy white kippot. Seated on a chic, cream, art-deco couch, their backs to the reader, this duo stares blankly at the title emblazoned on an otherwise pristine wall: Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge.
“The edge”—a hackneyed phrase that’s anything but edgy. Clearly, the bright bulbs in marketing decided to distinguish this collection of stories from some “norm” of presumably blah Jewish fiction. “The edge” is meant to be some hip, cool place; the book’s readers upscale young Jews, intellectual young mothers, clever teens—the educated light readership. Just inside its cover, though, editor Paul Zakrzewski’s introduction reveals a far more compelling provenance.
As Zakrzewski enthusiastically explains, the germ of the book was a reading series at KGB bar, an East Village institution that “exudes the sort of well-worn authenticity that you associate with left-bank Parisian cafes or nineteenth century taverns.” Under the far less contrived title of “Bad Jews,” the series included writers who had never been spoken of as Jewish, though their fiction and background are unmistakably so. Zakrzewski finds spiritual forbears for his collection of writers among the Jewish intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the socialists, the yiddishists, Philip Roth—those “bad Jews” who told what writer Dorothy Allison calls “mean stories.” True stories.
The stories in Lost Tribe are good, and some are excellent. They are mean, fast, urgent, and well-told. Their authors use daring language to say strange and familiar things. Myla Goldberg allows the image of an “upper middle-aged woman” to wander across the opening paragraphs of her “Bee Season”—a strange syntactical dip that says everything half-unsaid. Alex, the Ukrainian narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “The Very Rigid Search,” wreaks linguistic havoc with his thesaurus:
“…all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. My mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. My father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He stopped dubbing me that because I ordered him to stop dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.”
Story after story strikes some hidden nerve, gets too familiar, and refuses to end predictably. Real danger replaces the after-school special “taboos” of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. What to do if your child embraces your Orthodoxy too zealously? If your grandparents didn’t die in Buchenwald? If you menstruate on the Chasidic rabbi’s office chair? If the Kabbalists prefer the shiksa? What then?
“What is the opposite of Alzheimer’s?” old man Kreutzer demands of his stricken rabbi in “The Argument” by Rachel Kadish. Adrift in neurological darkness, the rabbi stays silent. “Jewish!” Kreutzer shouts at him. And yet on the next page, Kreutzer dreams that “‘Never forget’ was a mistaken rallying cry,” that all guilt and memory can be erased to the point of innocence. The old man’s reverie leaves a sacred Jewish communal piety tottering in the breeze.
So how did the collection get from “Bad Jews” to Lost Tribe? These writers are lonely, troubled and conflicted even. But they’re not lost. And only a marketing department would product position them on the “edge.” Zakrzewski’s bad Jews are at the core of things—wondering, wandering, devout, secular, sexual, hopeless, and hopeful.
For Zakrzewski, a Jew searching for community he could reconcile with his artistic standards, the voices of these authors provided an exciting opportunity—writing that he could call Jewish and also be proud to call his own. He claimed them as Jewish authors because there is a community that wants them, because if it matters to be Jewish, they matter.
Rachel Kadish, creator of the fiercely argumentative Kreutzer, hears the old man’s voice in her head when trying to think about the “Jewishness” of her stories. “As if a story was a thing you circumcised” she hears him saying, “and then no matter what it did, it was still part of the tribe.” This thought, to Kreutzer, is intolerable. Faith is to be wrestled with, identity is to be created from action and thought. The wrestling, active, mean stories of Lost Tribe expose their marketing as a shallow hoax. This is Jewish writing. These are Jewish writers. Why not present them bravely?
