Political Lens Colors Fictional World

“Wherever You Go” by Joan Leegant (Norton, $23.95) is a fluently written, insightful story whose major characters come gradually into focus as the pages turn. Initially, the distinct strands seem confusing, but gradually the interconnections become apparent. All becomes clear. The background of Jerusalem is lovingly rendered; the strains and tensions in Israeli society are spoken through the characters without dominating the story. It is a story, not a political manifesto or a diatribe. With all that, I was left uneasy. 

My unease goes to the heart of what it means to write a novel. For all that writers claim to be pristine in intention, there are political valences to most novels — and certainly to one set in the Middle East. So when one reads a novel about extremism in the Middle East and the extremists are American Jews from Brooklyn, what is the right attitude? I suggest three possibilities:

1. This is a case of what critic and essayist Gilbert K. Chesterton described: “A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying: ‘Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.’ “In other words, objecting to a writer’s subject and preferring another is simply expressing that one’s own taste should have been followed. How dare she write about something that I would not have written about! Such an approach, he rightly says, is bunk. 

2. The existence of extremists who hail from New York and influence the political process in Israel is genuine and disturbing. So a good cause is served by such a novel. It illuminates a reality that is powerful and painful in Israel today.

3. For a Jewish writer to tackle extremism in the Middle East, and to localize it among American transplants, feeds into invidious stereotypes about the deepest problems in the region. Particularly as the characters are so uniformly unappealing, driven by the cause with minimal shared human feeling. For a Jewish novelist to depict such Jewish ideologues cannot be simply chalked up to the caprices of art. It is a political act. 

How one reacts to Leegant’s book will depend on which of these characterizations seems most apt. I recall the rallies I observed when I lived in Israel in which Meir Kahane would reel off scores of biblical and talmudic allusions to demonstrate the superiority of an ethnically pure Israel. To the extent I remembered his rhetoric, I was sympathetic to Leegant’s aims. There is some truly despicable stuff that gets corralled under the noble banner of Jewish nationhood. 

But I was saddened that this was the story of Israel she chose to tell in her first novel. Almost uniformly, the less religious the characters, the more human they are in their bearing toward the world. Even those who become religious and lapse are somehow humanized by the ebbing of religious attachment. 

Leegant is a skilled writer. Her first book, a collection of stories titled “An Hour in Paradise,” won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction as well as a PEN award. From the opening sentences, there is no question that it will be an intelligent and thoughtful read. So can one let it go at that? 

The conflict with the Arabs forms a necessary but little-heard background to this story. And while it is not the responsibility of a writer to present a balanced picture, there are a few places in the world where one cannot write without a political echo trailing through the book. You cannot write about Kashmir, or the Balkans, and protest when someone takes your work to have political implications. Leegant has chosen to place her characters in a fraught, riven place in the world. I wish she had done so with a wider lens; it would give us a truer, deeper picture.

David Wolpe is the rabbi of Sinai Temple. You can follow his teachings at facebook/RabbiWolpe.