Halachic Spouse Swapping, a Haredi Rabbi Lover, and Five-Star Mishloach Manot: A Review of “Olive Days” by Jessica Elisheva Emerson

The premise is salacious enough: One day, Rina’s husband, David—a bit of an a-hole, it should be said—convinces impossibly perfect, beautiful, selfless Modern Orthodox Los Angeles wife and mother Rina Kirsch that spouse swapping is completely acceptable under Jewish law. Rina is, of course, unconvinced. She is the more knowledgeable of the pair (Rina falls under the category “frum from birth” while David is a ba’al teshuva, coming to Orthodoxy later in life), but frankly, one need not venture further than the seventh commandment to be apprised of the fact that adultery, with or without consent, is forbidden by the Torah.

So maybe Rina is just a good sport. It seems she does everything she feels is demanded of her on some level. On Purim, for instance, makes an elaborate feast for the se’udah: “lentil-and-tomato soup, stuffed turkey breast, butternut-squash-and-mushroom pot pie, green beans with pistachios and date syrup, and three varieties of triangle-shaped hamantaschen pastries” as well as homemade slivovitz. She puts together mishloach manot in the theme of s’mores (kosher graham crackers, kosher marshmallows, chocolate) wrapped in a fake fire of yellow and orange cellophane, “each hot glued to a pile of sticks she’d scavenged on four straight morning outings to Griffith Park, each with a personal, handwritten note.” She sews the kids’ Purim costumes. She reconstructs the mishloach manot she let her children make. She delivers the gifts door to door.

She’s definitely a good sport.

But the wife swapping incident sets Rina on a path of seeming self-destruction, landing her in the arms, early on in the novel, of the kindly ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Anshel. Anshel falls madly in love with Rina, willing to do anything for her; Rina remains unfulfilled. Then, she listens to her husband, again, and signs up for a community college painting class, painting being her passion. Here she meets Will Ochoa, a Mexican-American man with a wife and daughter, a penchant for storytelling, and an ability to see Rina for who she is: more than a Modern Orthodox wife and mother, and yet also that.

The rest of the novel is taken up with Rina and Will’s affair and its impact on her journey to self-knowledge. All her years of doing what has been asked of her, of being a good sport, of playing her part, we realize, severely restricted her ability to know what she wanted, to even ask herself what made her happy. She had been unwilling to question what she believed, what mattered to her. Her relationship with Will enables, above all else, a relationship with herself.

“Olive Days” can easily be classified as an “off-the-derech” story, a story of leaving Orthodoxy and (the two seem to go hand-in-hand) diving straight into the pursuit of sexual thrills. Certainly, we can see echoes of Deborah Feldman’s “Unorthodox” and Riva Mann’s “The Rabbi’s Daughter” here (if in the American Modern Orthodox, not Haredi, world). But “Olive Days” is more than that.

“Olive Days” is a brilliant exploration of the lasting power of Jewishness, of Jewishness that’s not dependent on belief (honestly, I want to share this book with those who tell me that the hatred against Jews that’s rife on university campuses right now is not against my “religion” and thus not “antisemitic”). Every thought that Rina has, every move that Rina makes, from seeing cutout snowflakes in December (in Southern California, where it doesn’t snow) as irredeemably Christmassy (not secular and for all, as surely intended) to walking into a hotel room and immediately stripping the comforter off of the bed (most Jewish gesture ever, adultery aspect aside) reveals her to be Jewish in every molecule of her constitution.

I am reminded of a line by Hannah Arendt, which admittedly had a very different context (the racialization of the Jews in Nazi Europe) and yet has truth in it nonetheless: “Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion,” she wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” adding, “From Jewishness there was no escape.”

Rina tries to resist the thoroughness of her upbringing, to gulp down hechsher-free Spaghetti-Os and Velveeta (she vomits) and commit to a life with a non-Jewish man. But she doesn’t get there because Will, who is both lover and inner guide, knows better. He loves her as she is.

On the whole, Emerson is an incredibly acute observer. Not only is Modern Orthodoxy painted in the most vivid detail, but the city of Los Angeles is as well. And Orthodox LA? Her insightful depiction of Pico Boulevard, “lined with the shops of the community, everything packed tight … like the Jews were afraid of taking up too much space” rivals Tova Mirvis’s Memphis in “The Ladies Auxiliary”—or Mirvis’s Brooklyn in “The Outside World.”

I can’t deny that I was a bit skeptical when I read the description of “Olive Days”; at a certain point, a reader tires of the repetitiveness (or worse, the need to one-up literary predecessors) of sex-filled “off-the-derech” tales. But mea culpa. Emerson took the genre and did great things with it. “Olive Days” is a fantastic debut novel.