Book Review: “To All Who Call In Truth” by Michael Oren

Michael Oren is a celebrated and accomplished Israeli historian, diplomat and combat veteran.  As it happens, he was born and raised in in New Jersey, and now he returns to the scene of his own American adolescence in a compelling novel, “To All Who Call in Truth” (Wicked Son).

Appleton, the suburb in which the novel is set, “was roughly divided between Italians and Jews with a few pale WASPS thrown in.” The cultural markers of the Jewish community can be observed at the local deli where the counterman “served tubs of whitefish to customers carrying newspapers from Wexler’s Drugs next door or a babka from Hershkey’s Bakery. A Manischewitz calendar on the walls, the miniature vats of mustard, relish, and chrain. A fan, frozen as an old clock, on the ceiling.”

“Someday, this world will disappear,” says Sandy Cooper, a coach and guidance counselor at the local junior high school.

“Yeah, well, they all do,” responds his best friend, a police sergeant named Arnold Saperstein.

Oren opens the story in tight focus on an unfortunate high school student named Howard Weintraub. “Overweight and ungainly, with glasses, braces, and zits, he was shunned by classmates who called him fatso and pizza face and, worst of all, faggot.” And yet, ironically, Howard has joined the drama club and participates in a skit for the amusement of a school assembly. But the boy flees from the stage when his physical ardor for a female cast mate manifests itself unmistakably and the derisive laughter is directed at him alone.

But the boy flees from the stage when his physical ardor for a female cast mate manifests itself unmistakably and the derisive laughter is directed at him alone.

To his emotional rescue comes Sandy Cooper. Yet we quickly discover that Sandy, too, is caught up in his own emotional maelstrom. “Sometimes he felt like a phony, prescribing tips that could just as easily hurt as help, pointing kids in directions that he, himself, would never tread.”  The point is powerfully made when Howard, misapplying Sandy’s advice to toughen up, is first the victim of a vicious beating by another student, Arthur Warhaftig, and then, in retaliation, beats up his attacker.

“If pubescents ran the world,” Sandy realizes, “atrocities would be commonplace.”

Sandy has problems of his own—an old football injury that continues to hobble him, a heartbreaking loss that casts a shadow over his marriage, an estrangement from his own aging and disappointed father. And then there is Jeanne Pagonis, a fellow teacher who has taken to flirting with Sandy in the teacher’s lounge. Sandy wants to do right by his wife, Esta, but Jeanne starts showing up in his highly erotic dreams. “There was something about this young woman’s attraction to him—for that’s what it was, not merely deference—that awakened a power he had long thought extinguished. Not since his glory days on the gridiron, when Esta practically had to shove the other girls away, had Sandy so sensed his potency.”

When Sandy narrows avoid a collision with a garbage truck, it is a moment of dark and ironic comedy: “Giddily, he laughed. How fitting it would have been, given the mess his life was in, to be killed by moving trash?”

Thus does Oren expertly set up the mid-life crisis that afflicts Sandy Cooper, but the novel quickly escalates into a murder mystery and a distinctly noirish one at that. Sandy starts asking questions about Arthur Warhaftig, who is both the perpetrator and the victim of violence.  “[T]trouble seemed drawn to Arthur. As if his cavalier manner, the eyes vibrating behind his spindly hair, the clothes that said at once ‘I’m rich’ and “F–k it,’ were all intended to provoke.” And Sandy suspects that an abusive home life is to blame.

When he meets the boy’s memorable mother, Liz, she is presented as a femme fatale, icy but alluring: “A dangerous woman, possibly even unhinged,” we are told, “but clearly smarter than he was, and alluring.” Her wealthy husband, a collector of samurai swords and a practitioner of martial arts, has died a violent death, but she was cleared of the charge. His mission to rescue her son is overwhelmed by his passion for Liz: “What had begun as an indulgence had decayed into an obsession and then descended into something darker.”

Cooper and Saperstein, an unlikely pair of detectives, are drawn ever deeper into the mysteries that abound in Appleton. Who is spray-painting racist and antisemitic graffiti around town?  Who set fire to the synagogue? Was an apparent suicide in the basement of the junior high actually a murder? And are these acts of violence and hatefulness somehow connected to the strange death of Arthur Warhaftig’s father?

The title of the book is an allusion to a line of scripture that is displayed on the wall of the synagogue to which Sandy and Esta belong: “The Lord is Near to All Who Call on Him,” it said, “To All Who Call on Him in Truth.” Mindful of the Holocaust, the psalm is a provocation to Sandy Cooper: “How many people called but remained unanswered?” he muses. “How many called and died?” As Oren puts it, the biblical quote “could’ve concluded with a question mark.”

To his credit, both as a storyteller and as an observer of the human condition, Oren’s unsettling suspenseful and ultimately heart-shaking story ends, quite literally, with a question mark. To be sure, the mysteries at the core of his book are revealed in full and with the kind of shock ending that befits a thriller. But the author’s closing passage rings with the deeper moral concerns that give the novel such richness and resonance. Indeed, it is a crime story that sheds light on the culture, politics and strife of America in the 1970s.

To his credit, both as a storyteller and as an observer of the human condition, Oren’s unsettling suspenseful and ultimately heart-shaking story ends, quite literally, with a question mark.

“He once more pictured himself unshackled, but uncertain now who was unleashed,” Oren writes of Sandy Cooper. “A monster or a sufferer, a victim or a saint? Or maybe just a typical man trapped in his time, weighed down by the past and pinned by fallibility, deciding whether to run.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.