What Jewish Book Changed Your Life?

Jonathan Rosen:

My mother, Norma Rosen, is a writer and I grew up in a house peopled by her writer friends — Cynthia Ozick and Lore Segal and Johanna Kaplan and many others. (I sometimes felt as if my childhood were a novel written by a group of Jewish novelists.) I knew their books but I knew their conversation as well, which formed a kind of commentary on their books.

I learned early that there was the written word and the spoken illumination of the word, just as there is Torah and Oral Law. And so it wasn’t so much a book that changed my life, but an idea about books: The discovery that books are attached to people and to actual lives and words that flow around books and keep them afloat. Books have to swim away from their creators, of course, but then it is other people’s lives and words that keep them going. In that sense, the very notion of “a book” — especially a Jewish one — is a kind of illusion.

Jonathan Rosen’s most recent novel is Joy Comes in the Morning. He is the editorial director of Nextbook.org.


Allegra Goodman:

What is a Jewish book? A book by a Jewish author? A work with Jewish subject matter? A book in Hebrew or in Yiddish? When it comes to Jewish books I have rather catholic taste. My three favorites are Sholem Aleichem’s Tales of Kasrilivke, Philip Birnbaum’s classic Daily Prayer Book, and George Eliot’s Victorian masterwork Daniel Deronda. Sholem Aleichem’s tales were written in Yiddish; they sparkle with humor. Birnbaum’s Daily Prayer Book is in Hebrew and English on facing pages. The volume presents the canonical Shabbat liturgy along with a crystalline translation uncluttered by commentary or editorial  intrusions. And Daniel Deronda is a work of tremendous imaginative and intellectual sympathy in which a non-Jewish novelist enters into Jewish character and culture. Eliot’s novel is a profound meditation on the nature of assimilation,  identity and Zionism. George Eliot is not Jewish, but she is, arguably, a great Jewish writer. Each of these three books is essential to me in my own work. Sholem Aleichem’s has always been my ideal humorist and short story writer.  Birnbaum’s elegant presentation of sacred texts serves as the touchstone for every quotation I’ve ever used in my fiction. And George Eliot is my hero for her rigor, her wisdom, and, above all, her courage as she looks outside of herself and beyond her own experience to create art. 

Allegra Goodman is the author of Total Immersion, The Family Markowitz, Kaaterskill Falls and Paradise Park. Her most recent novel, Intuition, was recently published by Dial Press.


Tova Mirvis:

Sitting across the Seder table from The Fourth Son — the one who doesn’t know how to ask — is another child, he who can’t stop asking. This child is Phillip Roth’s Ozzie, from the short story, The Conversion of The Jews. “If God can do anything, can’t he make a child without intercourse?” Ozzie wants to know. In response, his rabbi and his mother slap him on the face. “You don’t know,” Ozzie screams at his rabbi and soon he’s on the synagogue roof, threatening to jump unless everyone admits that God can make such a child, unless everyone says they believe in Jesus.

When I first read this story, I had to laugh. But it was an anxious laugh. He’s not really going to make the Rabbi say he believes in Jesus, I worried. My own loyalties seemed under attack. Come down from there right now, I wanted to call out. But stay where you are, I whispered. I was only a year out of yeshiva high school, when we had asked questions to waste class time. How do we know God exists? we’d call out. But I really did want to know. I felt the rumbling of questions that went unasked or unanswered. There was no roof accessible, but the classrooms were lined with windows. I sometimes wanted to hike up that yeshiva-sanctioned jean skirt and make my escape. Ozzie comes safely down from the roof, but the questions remain long after the story is over. I still hear his howl against questions that are treated falsely or fearfully. I still feel his desire for teachers, parents, all of us, to admit sometimes that we don’t know.

Tova Mirvis is the author of The Ladies Auxiliary and The Outside World.


Dara Horn:

When I first read Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, I was astounded. Fiddler on the Roof has unfortunately led people to believe that this masterpiece is actually a kitschy feel-good story about a poor-but-happy family living a “traditional” “shtetl” life. To my shock, I discovered that Tevye doesn’t even live in a shtetl, but rather in a village so far from any Jewish community that he only travels to the  nearest synagogue once a year for his parents’ yahrzeit. I discovered that Tevye is no learned man, but an ignoramus whose knowledge of Jewish texts is minimal at best, and whose errors are part of the novel’s extremely complex  layering of language and meaning — as well as part of the novel’s greatest joke. I discovered that his daughters’ disastrous marriages weren’t amusing “challenges to tradition,” but devastatingly tragic personal choices under any circumstances, leading to abandonment, premature death, bankruptcy, imprisonment, unwanted pregnancy, and in one case, suicide. But most of all, I discovered the most painfully beautiful work I have ever read about the unfathomable horror of being a parent, of having pieces of your mind and soul and heart forever wandering away from you — and the even greater horror of being an artist, for the very same reason. 

Dara Horn is the author of two novels, In the Image and most recently, The World to Come.