Recommended Reading for the High Holidays

My maternal grandparents, Granny and Buddy

I’m not saying I’m the token Jew around here, but when we were discussing this particlar blog idea, I couldn’t help but notice that Kim’s eye immediately fell on me.

Okay, there ARE only the two of us (well, there’s a third but he’s a silent partner, who does all of our computer stuff and won’t put his picture on the home page) and Kim HAS contributed way more than I have in recent weeks, so maybe that had something to do with her handing me this blog.  Especially since she told me the book I should recommend, saving me the huge effort of figuring out what it should be.

It was actually a weird coincidence.  Kim said she was thinking about what book we should recommend for the upcoming High Holidays and asked me if I had ever read As a Driven Leaf  by Milton Steinberg.  “Are you kidding?” I said.  “It was my grandmother’s favorite book.  I read it when I was pretty young and again when I was grown up.  That book means a lot to me.”  

And it did, mostly because my grandmother meant so much to me.  She was the main source of my love for books and writing, being a devoted reader and writer, herself.  (Although my dad introduced me to T.S. Eliot, so she doesn’t get ALL the credit for my nerdy love of literature.)

How to describe my Granny?   She loved to read, and when she was little, made a vow to read every book in her public library.  She never made it, but she was still astonishingly well-read for someone who didn’t go to college.  Her bedtime stories for us were truncated versions of classics like Jane Eyre and Great Expectations.   She wrote all her life–journals and letters–and when she was settled in an apartment in Jewish Housing for the Elderly, she became a beloved and admired correspondent for their weekly newsletter.

She was a skilled seamstress and, after World War II had ended, she volunteered to sew dresses for orphaned Jewish girls who were being sent to Israel.   The matching pieces of fabric to make a dozen or so dresses were sent to her but she had very little time left to sew them up.  One morning my mother (who was a young girl at the time) came down to find her mother had been up all night sewing.   But not just putting the dresses together–she had finished that a while earlier.  No, she was making each dress special, adding some pretty buttons on one, some braiding on another, even sewing a small rag doll she had made herself on a third and so on.   She told my mother she wanted each girl to have something special–just her own–to cling to in her new life.

I’d like to go on describing her for a while longer, but this post would get unwieldy and, frankly, writing about my Granny makes me cry and it’s hard to keep going when I can’t see the computer monitor.  Anyway, the point is she loved books, and she loved to learn new things, and she loved to write, and most of all she loved US, her grandchildren. 

And As a Driven Leaf was her favorite book.  It was written in 1939 but it’s still (or once again?) in print.   It’s set at “the end of the first century” and describes the struggles of Elisha, who is Jewish but educated in the classic Greek manner, to reconcile the different things he has been taught and exposed to.  After he’s forced into a loveless arranged marriage and tragedy strikes his closest friends, he loses his faith and begins to question his heritage.

In the foreword to the current edition, Chaim Potok writes: “its central drama [is] a conflict between religious and pagan ideas, between faith and reason, between postulates of creed and science.” 

My grandmother struggled with her own faith.  She had been brought up fairly religious, I think, but the horrors of the Holocaust made her question the existence of a greater power watching over us–and ultimately lean toward rejecting the likelihood.   It’s not surprising that this book spoke to her.   In many ways, it outlines the search many of us here in America go through as our education and cultural exposure clash with the traditions of our fathers.   It acknowledges the darkness of the world and the tragedies of our lives that make us doubt.  It asks the question–but doesn’t give us the answer.  It lets the reader, like Elisha, search for the answer for himself.

L’Shana Tovah, y’all.