Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Ruined House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.rubynamdar.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: Israeli
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Jerusalem, Israel; married; children: two daughters.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Jewish literature teacher and author.
AWARDS:Israel Ministry of Culture Award, for Haviv; Sapir Prize, for The Ruined House.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Ruby Namdar, also known as Reuven Namdar, is most well known for his contributions to the Hebrew literature world. He hails from the country of Jerusalem, and his experiences with his Jewish faith shape and inform much of his writing. His work has earned numerous awards, including Israel’s elusive Sapir Prize and an Award for Best First Publication from the Ministry of Culture. In addition to writing, Namdar also leads classes about Jewish literature.
The Ruined House marks Namdar’s debut within English-language literature. The novel focuses on a protagonist by the name of Andrew Cohen, who has devoted his life to the pursuit of prestige and academic accomplishment. He is a part of the faculty of New York University, yet this is not his only success in life. His writings have been featured in prestigious publications, he resides in one of the most lavish apartment complexes in the city, and he has a young, gorgeous girlfriend as his companion. However, Andrew doesn’t suspect that someday his glimmering world may come crashing at his feet and force him to reckon with his faith. It begins with a sudden religious experience—the sight of Heaven floating and unfurling along the New York skyline. From there, Andrew’s life only heads farther downhill. One by one, he is forced to part with everything he so heavily valued in life: his career, his polished appearance, and even the woman he loves. All the while he is haunted by religious visions that further sever his ties to sanity. Washington Independent Review of Books contributor Philip K. Jason remarked: “Ruby Namdar has set himself enormous challenges, met them marvelously, and left this reader gasping for breath.” On the Tablet website, Adam Kirsch wrote: “The originality and power of this idea, along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.” Josh Lambert, a writer on the New York Times Book Review website, commented: “It is a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.” Mosaic reviewer Michael Weingrad said: “Whether or not his intended readers will ever be able or willing to hear or heed his words, however, Reuven Namdar’s great Israeli and American Jewish novel shows that he has been listening with stunning fidelity to theirs.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Ruined House.
ONLINE
Connecticut Jewish Ledger, http://www.jewishledger.com/ (April 3, 2018), Judie Jacobson, “Conversation with Ruby Namdar,” author interview.
Jewish Week Food and Wine, https://jwfoodandwine.com/ (March 5, 2018), Akiva Miller, “Ruby Namdar’s Gospel of Mindful Meat-Eating.”
Mosaic, https://mosaicmagazine.com/ (March 5, 2015), Michael Weingrad, “An Israeli Writer’s Great American Novel,” review of The Ruined House.
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 10, 2018), Josh Lambert, “An Unusual Jewish Novel, Full of Blood and Incense,” review of The Ruined House
Ruby Namdar website, https://www.rubynamdar.com (June 11, 2018), author profile.
Tablet, http://www.tabletmag.com/ (November 15, 2017), Adam Kirsch, “Smoke in the Air,” review of The Ruined House.
Times of Israel, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ (January 28, 2015), Beth Kissileff, “In first, expat author Ruby Namdar wins Israel’s leading literary prize.”
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (December 11, 2017), Philip K. Jason, review of The Ruined House.
Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His novel The Ruined House won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. He currently lives in NYC with his wife and two daughters, and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative. The English edition of The Ruined House (translated by Hillel Halkin) was published in the US by Harper Collins in November 2017.
Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, Haviv (2000), won the Israeli Ministry of Culture’s Award for Best First Publication. The Ruined House won the 2014 Sapir Prize—Israel’s most important literary award. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters, and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Conversation with Ruby Namdar
Author of The Ruined House talks about American Jewry and the crisis of faith
By Judie Jacobson
In 2015, not long after his novel The Ruined House won Israel’s esteemed literary award, the Sapir Prize, author Ruby Namdar said in an interview with JTA that one of his greatest joys is to sit in a coffee shop in New York, hearing the buzz of English all around him, while writing in Hebrew on his laptop.
Indeed, Namdar is a man deeply connected to two countries. Born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage, he moved to the United States after completing his army service, where he discovered Jewish-American writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. Namdar’s first book, Haviv (2000), won the Israel Ministry of Culture’s Award for Best First Publication.
Namdar will deliver the Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture at Wesleyan University on Thursday, April 12, at 8 p.m. Titled “The Holy Temple in Jerusalem: A Symbol of Gruesome Glory,” the lecture is free and open to the public.
In The Ruined House, which has been translated from the original Hebrew by Hilel Halkin and published by HarperCollins, Namdar tells the story of Andrew Cohen, a professor at NYU whose happy, meticulously arranged world begins to mysteriously unravel, disrupted by visions of an ancient religious ritual. The narrative is occasionally interrupted by a second plot, which is told on pages arranged to resemble the ancient Talmudic style. These faux-Talmudic pages are unprecedented in American literature, and they deepen Andrew’s connection to the past, calling into question everything he believes about his comfortable life.
When the book was published in Israel, Tablet Magazine gave it a rave review, noting its multiple layers. “It’s about American Jewry’s search for meaning. It’s about faith in modern times….It’s hard to think of [a novel] more ambitious, more engaged with the core questions that have bedeviled Jews, in Israel and abroad, for so long.”
He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Recently, the Ledger interviewed Ruby Namdar about The Ruined House, his view on American Jewry, and his upcoming lecture.
JEWISH LEDGER (JL): You write about religion. Were you brought up with a religious background?
RUBY NAMDAR (RN): I was born in Jerusalem to parents of Iranian-Jewish heritage. In spite of the fact that we were not really religious, the atmosphere at home was of warm Jewish tradition. I never studied in a religious school or yeshiva, but nonetheless, I found myself being drawn, at a very early age, to the wonderful world of Biblical and Talmudic text. This attraction informs and feeds my writing today. I find ancient Jewish text a wonderful source of inspiration.
JL: What was the impetus for writing The Ruined House? Where did the idea come from?
RN: In 2000, I arrived in New York City, following the rekindling of an old love story (luckily it has a happy ending: we live happily in NYC together, and raise our two daughters). It was during the first months of my stay in New York, where the idea of The Ruined House began to ferment inside me. I believe it was my way of processing this wonderful cultural shock; and the great discovery of American Jewry and American Jewish literature – about which we know very little in Israel. A great lover of the urban condition, I was especially taken by the vastness and intensity of New York City. Some say the city is so alive in my novel that it has almost become one of the protagonists.
JL: The book seems to be about American Jewry in particular – specifically, its failings. Is that accurate?
RN: The novel is certainly about American Jewry, but it is by no means a criticism of it. If anything, this novel might have been my way of discovering and identifying with the rich world of American Jewry. True, there is a satirical and critical element in the novel – but it is not limited to diaspora Jewry. Israel and Israelis are described in an even more biting, more satirical manner, as are academia and the New York City cultural elite. As a matter of fact, over the last few years, I’ve gotten into some serious trouble in Israel publicly arguing that one can lead a very meaningful Jewish life outside of Israel, and that Zionism is by no means the only way in which one can express an authentic Jewish identity.
JL: Do you think American Jews have issues related to faith that are different or more complex than other Jews, both in the diaspora and in Israel?
RN: Jews and gentiles, Israeli and Americans, we all have issues with faith nowadays – and that includes the Ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic communities. Whether we want it or not, we all live in a secular world and function within a secular culture. It takes an extra effort to maintain a religious identity in a world that is no longer governed by religious thinking. I like to point out to Israelis that they too, like American Jews, have a crisis of identity. Once the faith factor was removed from the equation, and is no longer a common denominator, we are left grappling for new modes of identification and solidarity. The Ruined House speaks of this crisis. It opens these questions and does not rush to offer answers – as there are no good ones, really.
JL: Tablet Magazine calls the book “the quintessential Hebrew novel.” What do you think makes it so?
RN: The Hebrew edition of the novel celebrated the Hebrew language with all its historic glory. It wove together modern, Biblical and medieval Hebrew in a way that was unprecedented in modern Israeli literature. The English edition, translated by the great Hillel Halkin, preserves this tension in English, which to me, is a testament to the alchemy of art, and Halkin’s mastery. A testimony to this success is the fact that Adam Kirsch [Tablet Magazine, Nov. 15, 2017] refers to the English edition of The Ruined House as “A new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read” and that The New York Times [Jan. 14, 2018] called the novel “a masterpiece of modern religious literature.” It makes me very happy to see that that the power of the novel transcended the Hebrew and traveled into the English.
JL: Your Wesleyan talk is entitled “The Holy Temple in Jerusalem: A Symbol of Gruesome Glory.” Can you give us a preview?
RN: The Holy Temple in Jerusalem is one of the most fascinating symbols of our culture. It is at the same time alien, a little frightening, intriguing and some would say even slightly dangerous. For many centuries, the mourning for the loss of the temple was a major element in our religious culture. As a matter of fact, every prayer in our Siddur or Machzor is a direct reference to sacrificial or ritual practice in the Lost Temple. In my talk, I will attempt to revive some of this awe-inspiring experience, the mystery and the allure that the temple held for our ancestors – and explain why I find it to be such a potent cultural symbol to this day.
“The Holy Temple in Jerusalem: A Symbol of Gruesome Glory,” with guest lecturer Ruby Namdar, author of The Ruined House; Thursday, April 12, 8 p.m.; Wesleyan University, Russell House, 350 High St. Free and open to the public. For information: Wesleyan.edu/cjs.
Ruby Namdar's Gospel of Mindful Meat-Eating
Ruby Namdar/ Courtesy Beowulf Sheehan
The acclaimed author wants you to think more about the steak on your plate
Akiva Miller
03-05-2018
Ruby Namdar cares deeply about symbols. And meat.
“A piece of meat is not just food… it is a very charged and potent symbol. The fact that meat is morally questionable, and always has been, makes it such a powerful symbol,” Namdar told me in a special interview for the Jewish Week Food and Wine.
Namdar is the Israeli-born author of The Ruined House, which appeared in English translation in 2017 and was highly praised in the Jewish Review of Books and The New York Times. (Read The Jewish Week’s take here.) Naturally, we conduct the interview at Deli Kasbah on the Upper West Side, a kosher meat restaurant decorated with pictures of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. On the door there is a quote from Psalm 51: “Bulls Will Then Be Offered.”
Throughout our lunch, Namdar, who is also a teacher of Jewish literature, assumes a lecturer’s cadence as he traces meat’s symbolic significance in Judaism back to its earliest beginnings. In the bible, he explains, blood is equated with the animal spirit, and eating the blood is taboo because of its significance within the cosmic order. The bible repeats the prohibition against eating blood next to the permission to eat flesh in several places, first in Genesis among God’s admonitions to Noah after the flood, and again in the laws given by Moses to the Israelites in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
While eating meat is permissible, the Bible’s word for the desire to eat meat, ta’ava, etymologically links it with the other carnal desire, and both desires are always fraught. In Genesis, the aging and blind Isaac asks his son Esau to hunt venison for him and cook it so that his spirit may bless him. Isaac is not merely hungry, explains Namdar. He desires hunted meat, so fresh that life and death are still contending within it, to revive his animal spirit so that he will be able to confer the spiritual power of his blessing upon Esau. “This meaningful moment is often overlooked,” notes Namdar, adding, “a blessing is not a mere wish, but has spiritual power to affect the universe. Every time we order steak at a restaurant, we should remember that moment.”
The power of this blessing was certainly understood by Rebecca, Isaac’s wife. At Rebecca’s behest, Jacob deceives his father by bringing him the meat of a slaughtered goat from the heard, not the venison Isaac craved, and steals his brother’s blessing. This deception arouses deadly enmity between the brothers and causes Jacob to flee for his life.
The desire for meat has deadly consequences again in the Book of Numbers, where, during the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert, they cry to God for meat to satisfy their craving. In response, God punishes them with an overabundance of quail meat and scourges many of the gluttonous Hebrews with death.
As his lecture gains pace, Namdar gives the impression that he is trying to formulate a thought that has been building inside him for a long time. His train of thought meanders and he needs no prompting from me. It was his idea, after all, to devote our meeting to his thoughts on meat. He continues.
The book of Deuteronomy develops the distinction between the profane meat eating out of carnal desire and ritual meat eating as an act of high spirituality. Upon their entry into the land of Israel, the Israelites are given special permission to eat meat “…within all thy gates, after all the desire of thy soul…the unclean and the clean may eat thereof, as the gazelle and as the hart is eaten.” (Deut. 12:15) However, meat eaten with high spiritual intentions as an offering, a vow, or a sacrifice, may only be eaten in the temple according to the ritual proceedings and purity requirements.
“We forget that at the time of the temple, people rarely ate meat, some perhaps no more than three times a year during the festivals,” Namdar remarks. Eating meat out of pure desire would have been a rare occasion.
Getting to the temple worship, I can’t avoid brining up Namdar’s novel, The Ruined House, in which the awe and splendor of the ancient temple worship dramatically encroaches upon the present. The novel tells of a modern-day professor of comparative culture, Andrew P. Cohen, who is thrown into spiritual crisis by visions of the ancient temple. The novel contains two memorable scenes revolving around meat, one in which Cohen prepares a sumptuous roast as if performing an elaborate ceremony, and the other in which a fine cut of meat becomes the object of revulsion.
ruinedhouse.jpg
To Namdar, the temple worship epitomizes the profound importance that the ancient Jews ascribed to the slaughter and consumption of meat. “The animals sacrificed in the temple were always the most beautiful animals, and everything about the ceremonies was spectacular,” he explains. In an age when even dyed cloth was a rarity, seeing the priests resplendent in their pristine white clothes dyed with scarlet and azure, adorned with gold and precious stones, and carrying vessels of copper and gold would have been a marvel to behold.
The ceremonies reached their zenith on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when a long procession of animals was slaughtered in ever more intricate ways, their blood ceremonially splattered on the altar and inside the temple.
“The sacrificial worship of the temple had something of the erotic excitement of the corrida (Spanish bullfighting),” thinks Namdar. “Death is very fascinating and arousing. Seeing an animal go from being alive to dead arouses great curiosity that is practically erotic,” Namdar observes, referring to the classical meaning of eros as desire or love, not necessarily of a sexual kind. “It all goes back to the notion that blood is the sprit. The temple was the beating heart of a cosmic economy or spirits.”
Namdar laments the loss of the ancient Jewish intentionality around meat eating. While the laws of kosher slaughter retained some of the original spiritual understanding of meat-eating in Judaism—such as the prohibition on eating blood, the requirement that the animal be healthy, the quick and relatively painless slaughter technique, and the shochet’s special blessing—what we think of today as Jewish food has sometimes become the butt of jokes, or thought of as filling but uninspiring comfort food.
As meat became more industrialized and abundant, it lost its place as a rare delicacy. In addition, Jewish food, as it developed in Eastern Europe and came to America, was originally a poor man’s food, using the coarsest cuts of meat that had to be overcooked and flavored with other ingredients to be tasty. “Part of the reason people have turned away from Jewish cuisine is because the aesthetics are not pleasing,” remarks Namdar.
At the same time, argues Namdar, modern Jews have not abandoned the spiritual symbolism of meat, but merely derive their fantasies about eating meat from the French brasserie or the American steakhouse.
“For a large portion of Jews,” observes Namdar, “this is a metaphor for the desire to assimilate into the general culture and turn one’s back on Jewish cooking.”
Namdar expounds his concept of the symbolic fantasies associated with foods: “A steak is always more than a steak. A glass of wine is always more than a mere glass of wine,” he says. The more a food is symbolic—and meat and wine are the most symbolic foods of all—the greater the fantasies we build around them.
“When you go to a fine restaurant and order a steak, you imagine yourself as if you are a European aristocrat or an American cowboy,” notes Namdar. “When you step into a steakhouse, with its oak-paneled walls and expensive bottles of wine, it’s like stepping into a movie. You enter a fantasy.”
Here, Namdar brings his idea full circle, back to the spirit: “…the greater the tension of fantasy, your experience of existence is increased, and so we return to the spirit – your very spirit is increased.”
We ask for the check, and Namdar concludes the interview on this thought: “Think how far we are from appreciating the true essence of our culture and how much more interesting it is from the humdrum Judaism we talk about today. These concepts are spectacular! … After the destruction of the temple, Jewish culture took all that magnificence and grandeur and turned it from 3D to 2D and put it in a book. But it’s all there, we just need to open the books and read them, and these things will come out again... we need to do it creatively out of attention and intention.”
In first, expat author Ruby Namdar wins Israel’s leading literary prize
'The Ruined House,' written in Mishnaic Hebrew, is about a Jewish-American protagonist in New York, a noted departure from other award-winning works
By Beth Kissileff
28 January 2015, 5:16 am 3
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Ruby Namdar, right, with his editor, Haim Weiss, at the Sapir Prize award ceremony, Jan. 26, 2015, in Israel. (photo credit: Carolyn Cohen/JTA)
JTA — Israel’s biggest literary prize, the Sapir Prize, has the drama and mystery of a lottery.
The identity of the judges remains secret until shortly before the ceremony, when they meet for an early dinner to decide the fate of the five nominees short-listed for best novel. Meanwhile in a separate room the short-listed novelists and their families, dressed in their finest and sipping wine, wait for the ceremony, broadcast a few hours later on Israel’s Channel 2, to begin.
The Sapir also has another lottery connection — it is funded with revenues from Israel’s national lottery, which grants the winner $38,000, distributes the winning book to 500 libraries around Israel and pays to have the book translated into Arabic and a language of the winner’s choice. Most recent winners have chosen English.
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This year’s winner Reuven “Ruby” Namdar is no stranger to English, however. Namdar, who has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for the past 15 years and speaks English at home with his American Jewish wife and daughters, is the first expat Israeli to win the Sapir. Not only does Namdar live outside Israel, but his award-winning “The Ruined House,” (HaBayit Asher Necherav) while in Hebrew, takes place outside Israel (in New York) and is about an American protagonist. Emphasizing the non-Israeli nature of the book, its cover features a historic photo of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
Ruby Namdar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near where he lives. (Photo credit: JTA/Beth Kissileff)
Interviewed by Skype from Israel, where he had traveled for the ceremony, Namdar told JTA that he was “stunned” by the victory of his novel, which took a decade to write. He described the book as “ambitious” and a “challenge” that demands a “reading commitment.” He added that he was pleased his “ZIP code” was a “non-issue” for the judges.
That a winner for a prize intended to be a national one does not reside in Israel apparently did not dissuade the panel of judges, chaired by Menny Mautner and including Aviad Kleinberg, Batya Shimoni, Shiri Lev-Ari , Meron Isaacson, Sara Fun Schwartza and Iris Milner. Lev-Ari, reached by phone, said that Namdar’s residence was “mentioned as a fact” in the judges’ discussions but that his book is “like every other Hebrew book, even if the author does not live in Israel.”
She added, “We live in a global world, people have more than one place to live.”
In an email to JTA, Kleinberg said that Namdar was chosen “because his was the best book.”
Namdar described his novel as “a Jewish American tale told only the way an Israeli could tell it”’ and said that he “honestly cannot wait for the translation of this novel to come out in English so I can share this novel with those I love and live with.” His American Jewish wife speaks some Hebrew but not well enough to read a complex literary novel; their daughters attend Jewish day school but are not currently fluent in Hebrew.
Namdar’s novel is about Andrew P. Cohen, a successful and well-known professor of “comparative cultures” in New York, who, in a serious midlife crisis has “visions of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem without knowing what he is seeing and without having the interpretive tools to cope with his visions.”
Besides its rootedness in American Jewish sensibilities, what makes the novel unique in modern Hebrew literature is its connection to biblical and Mishnaic literary language as well. Namdar calls it a “Jewish American book written in rich contemporary and ancient Israeli Hebrew. “
In a way, Namdar’s writing, that of a person who lives in English and writes in Hebrew is a return to a more classical approach to the language. As Namdar told JTA, when he is in New York, Hebrew is a “holy language, festive” since it is removed from the speech of his daily life.
While the Sapir Prize ceremony may not have the glitz of the Academy Awards or the Grammys, the mere fact that it is broadcast on television is impressive, given how few literary ceremonies garner TV coverage in the United States. The event combines musical performance (Ethiopian Israeli singer Esther Rada) and spoken-word entertainment with video clips of each author speaking about his or her writing process.
Perhaps more significant than the Sapir’s cash award are the opportunities that being translated offers. Namdar, who published a book of short stories in Hebrew in 2000, has not had his work translated into English before.
Writer, journalist and translator Mitch Ginsburg, who edits the literary magazine of Bar Ilan University’s English creative writing program, said in an email interview, “Few people in the world read Hebrew. Almost all Israeli authors, even those that have self-published, are keen to get their work out there in other languages, to spread their work to faraway shores.”
Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, Haviv (2000), won The Ministry of Culture's Award for Best First Publication. His novel The Ruined House has won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative.
Namdar, Ruby: THE RUINED HOUSE
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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Namdar, Ruby THE RUINED HOUSE Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $29.99 11, 7 ISBN: 978-0-06-246749-2
An elegant NYU professor at the peak of his powers and pleasures is reduced to a quivering puddle by a violent, unsought, yearlong spiritual awakening.For 52-year-old academic superstar Andrew Cohen, the term charisma is a "cheap inadequacy." "His dress and appearance, his speech and body language, his ideas and their expression--all had a refined aristocratic finish that splendidly gilded everything he touched." He has a 26-year-old girlfriend, Ann Lee, and a stunning apartment overlooking the river; he publishes in the New Yorker; he even has a good relationship with his ex-wife. Was a character ever more cruelly set up for a fall? Namdar's debut follows poor Andrew for a year beginning on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul in 5760, or Sept. 6, 2000, when he has the first of many increasingly intense spiritual experiences which will ultimately destroy his sanity and his life. The myriad subsequent chapters are each identified by both a Hebrew and a regular date and grouped into seven "books." These books are separated by pages telling a second story set in ancient Israel and designed in the style of the Talmud, and this is just the tip of the iceberg vis-a-vis the self-importance of this apocalyptic, overwritten, bloated screed against assimilated American Judaism and self-satisfied elite academics. Between the fusillades of exclamatory prose, the innumerable dream sequences, hallucinations, and visions, the detailed and repetitive descriptions of vile pornography and disgusting physical phenomena, the tedious chunks of student papers and other quoted material, the clear hostility of the author toward the main character, the brutally slow pace and repetitive plot development, and the bizarre, ill-advised handling of 9/11, one begins to wonder if Namdar is intentionally punishing the reader. Is S&M a literary genre? Maybe in Israel, where this novel won the Sapir Prize, that country's equivalent of the Man Booker. Consider yourself warned.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Namdar, Ruby: THE RUINED HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192331/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b46f3f8. Accessed 14 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192331
The Ruined House: A Novel
By Ruby Namdar; translated by Hillel Halkin Harper 528 pp.
Reviewed by Philip K. Jason
December 11, 2017
This breathtaking tale of a prominent professor's undoing is expertly woven with biblical passages.
Some books are so spectacularly original, so far beyond the boundaries of any reader’s expectations, and so challenging that they establish a new point of reference for any further discussions of literary achievement.
Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House, set at the dawn of the 21st century, explores the givens of a cataclysmic era that may become a period of tumultuous cleansing. Though centered on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual disintegration of a successful, middle-aged college professor, it fully engages the new American century’s self-masking: its adulation of elites and its confusion of cultural values.
Andrew P. Cohen, an accomplished and proud secular Jew, has tripped over the scales of hubris and found himself to be a foul beast. His aura of polite self-congratulation has become contaminated and slowly begins to smother him. His many faults, the recognition of which he has artfully hidden from himself for decades, are in the process of being revealed.
The selfishness with which he ended his marriage is exposed to him. The comfort and security he felt in his academic achievements, the physical attractiveness and health that he nurtured and in which he delighted, and his assumption of fully controlling his always upward-bound destiny are most painfully stripped away.
Namdar tells his story, almost sings it, with a lyricism that is only the richer for the hideous images that increasingly fill up Cohen’s world as he falls apart. The erotic turns into its hideous opposite. Images of grotesque tongues and penises fill his imagination. He sees signs of what’s coming, has nightmares and incredible daydreams, and they all finally rest on how his being — if not his world — has been penetrated, irradiated, by ancient texts: sections of Old Testament with accompanying Mishnaic commentary.
This material, represented in the graphic style of the original manuscripts, focuses on the preparation of the Temple’s high priest for performing his duties during the seven days leading to Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. These duties are largely rituals of purification, but also include various kinds of sacrifices — offerings to God.
Inner and outer cleansing of the self and the temple are described, along with a number of sacred objects like fire pans and candelabras. The strange ceremonial practice of purifying holy places by sprinkling them with blood is included.
Seven sections drawn from this running narrative/commentary serve as the dividers marking the seven chapters of Namdar’s book. The yearning for divine approval registered in the priest’s actions seems to magically journey through time and space, ushering in Cohen’s self-loathing. The images in these passages also vividly reveal themselves in Cohen’s world and Cohen’s awareness, however fleetingly.
Of course, Cohen bears the title of priest. That’s what his last name means. However, he has not taken on the mantle of a Kohane’s responsibilities. If he were truly a descendent of the Kohanim, his behavior until this invasion for the distant past would have disgraced his lineage.
It is hard to determine to what extent author Namdar wishes his readers to engage with these seven intriguing passages, but clearly they are not meant to be merely ornamental digressions. Readers must be open to the relevance of this unexpected material.
As Andy Cohen falls from the grace of his comfortable, prestigious university position, it is as though he has worshiped false gods. He had taken his gifts for granted by deluding himself into thinking that he had used them well.
His behavior toward his ex-wife, his daughters, his students and colleagues, and his girlfriend is ultimately always Andy-centric. Namdar is remarkable at painting Cohen’s dawning awareness of his ravenous ego, as well as at representing the false promises Cohen makes to himself to change his ways.
Namdar alludes to (and briefly quotes from) Yeats’ The Second Coming and, through this reference, reminds us, if not Cohen, that the professor is only a representative figure in a doomed civilization. For Cohen, the phrase “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” is only about him.
The many scenes of disorientation, gluttony, perverse visions, panic, and depletion in the novel are gorgeously crafted, as are those that develop the several boldly conceived characters in this convention-bursting novel. These include Cohen’s insightful older daughter, Rachel, his shallow friend the university president, and his clever, complicated girlfriend, Ann Lee.
Namdar’s sketches of the various New York neighborhoods in which scenes are set are in themselves small masterpieces. So, too, are his descriptions of the more confined settings: the restaurants, the apartments, the offices, and the interiors of universities.
This effort must have been an enormous challenge for translator Hillel Halkin, whose contribution to Namdar’s opportunity to amaze the English language audience is immeasurable.
Ruby Namdar has set himself enormous challenges, met them marvelously, and left this reader gasping for breath.
Philip K. Jason is professor emeritus of English at the United States Naval Academy. A former editor of Poet Lore magazine, he is the author or editor of 20 books, including Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture and Don’t Wave Goodbye: The Children’s Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom. His reviews appear in a wide variety of regional and national publications.
Smoke in the Air
In the ‘cosmic and frightening’ Sapir Prize-winning The Ruined House, by Israeli expatriate Ruby Namdar, the secular modern world and the ancient divine mysteries coexist
By Adam Kirsch
In literature, as in so many other ways, American Jews and Israeli Jews live in separate worlds. American Jewish readers who are dependent on translation to read Hebrew fiction are mainly limited to a few marquee names: Grossman, Oz, Keret. Small presses, including academic and Jewish publishers, make an important contribution by bringing lesser-known Israeli writers into English, such as Gail Hareven and Zeruya Shalev. But the view of Israeli literature from New York bears little resemblance to the view from Tel Aviv. And the same is true the other way around, even though English is more accessible to Israelis than Hebrew is to Americans. The American Jewish canon—Roth, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick—is surprisingly little known in Israel, and more than one Israeli reader has described coming to these books as a revelation.
The Ruined House, the newly translated novel by Ruby Namdar, is the rare book to have a foot in both literary cultures. That is because Namdar, a native Israeli who writes in Hebrew, is also a resident of New York City, where the book is set. When The Ruined House was published in Israel in 2013, it was the first novel written by an expatriate to win the Sapir Prize, Israel’s equivalent of the Pulitzer. Subsequently, the prize rules were changed to prevent any writer outside Israel from winning again—an act of cultural defensiveness that bespeaks a narrow view of what the Hebrew language can do, and who it is for. What the Jewish literary world needs is surely more communication between cultures, rather than less.
That is exactly what Namdar accomplishes in this cosmic and frightening book. A reader who picks up The Ruined House might take it, at first, for a work by an American author. Indeed, in outline it sounds deceptively similar to books like Herzog and The Anatomy Lesson, in which a male Jewish intellectual undergoes a midlife crisis. But in Namdar’s hands, this classic trope is fascinatingly estranged. Indeed, Namdar redefines what it means to tell a Jewish story. Instead of simply a comedy about “Jewish” traits like neurosis, alienation, and over-intellectuality, The Ruined House is a human drama with cosmic dimensions, in which past and present intersect in mysterious, often frightening ways.
That crossing begins on the novel’s first page, which is dated precisely to Sept. 6, 2000. On that day, Namdar writes, “the gates of heaven were opened above the great city of New York, and behold: all seven celestial spheres were revealed, right above the West 4th Street subway station, layered one on top of another like the rungs of a ladder reaching skyward from the earth.” It is a vision out of Ezekiel, which seems to place us in a mystical dimension that is totally incompatible with the matter-of-fact subway station. And, in fact, no one on the New York street seems to notice the splendor above: “No human eye beheld this nor did anyone grasp the enormity of the moment,” Namdar writes. Already we are plunged into the central paradox of The Ruined House: The secular modern world and the ancient divine mysteries co-exist, but in parallel dimensions that cannot communicate.
Except, for some mysterious reason, they do meet in the person of Namdar’s protagonist, Andrew Cohen. The Ruined House, like those classic books by Bellow and Roth, is an extended tour of the world through the mind of a richly imagined protagonist. We follow Andrew to parties and doctor’s offices, on drives through Westchester and walks through Morningside Heights. The chief pleasure of the book lies in Namdar’s evocation of Andrew’s thoughts and feelings and observations, in a style that ranges from the colloquial to the poetic. More than most novels, The Ruined House lives in the quality of its prose, which renders the achievement of the translator, Hillel Halkin, all the more impressive.
Andrew Cohen is an unlikely choice for a portal between the Jewish past and the Jewish present, since he has no interest in God or Jewishness. Early in the book, a refrain comes to his mind: “Who by fire, who by water: wasn’t that a Leonard Cohen song?” Leonard Cohen got it from the Yom Kippur liturgy, of course, but Andrew Cohen only knows it from Leonard Cohen—a succinct diagnosis of the state of contemporary American Jewry. Andrew actually does attend Yom Kippur services, but he can’t say exactly why he does: “It was neither a rational decision nor the outcome of lengthy debate, but an unthinking, almost absent-minded choice.” In any case, he slips out early to go to the opera.
In other words, Andrew is an American Jewish archetype—a New Yorker and an intellectual, a professor of “comparative culture” at NYU. Yet he is not a Woody Allen-ish intellectual, an anxious nebbish. On the contrary, he belongs to the new breed of worldly academic superstars who are equally comfortable in a seminar or a dinner party. His work, what little we see of it, involves producing clever little analyses of pop culture, couched in academic jargon. For a man of mind, he seems inordinately interested in pampering his body—workouts at the gym followed by elaborate feasts, which he takes pride in cooking himself. He can pursue this epicurean lifestyle because, years ago, he divorced his wife and left his two daughters; he is proud of his “wisdom and courage in having left home, with its ceaseless, cloying clamor of family life, for the personal and aesthetic independence of the marvelous space inhabited by him now.”
As this passage suggests, Andrew Cohen is heading for a fall, and a deserved one. Over the course of 500 pages, which chronicle the year between September 2000 and September 2001, fall he does—losing his looks, his health, his girlfriend, his promised promotion, and his overweening confidence. But this humbling—to borrow the title of Philip Roth’s novel about the hard passage of an aging man—is unlike any story of midlife crisis we’ve read before. That is because Andrew’s transformation is accompanied, if not actually prompted, by visions and visitations that he himself barely understands—visions of the Temple in Jerusalem, of priests and sacrificial bulls, of blood and fire.
For it turns out that the Temple—in Hebrew the beit hamikdash, the Sacred or Sanctified House—is the “ruined house” of Namdar’s title. And while “Cohen” is just a Jewish name today, Namdar remembers—and wants us to remember—that it originally meant “priest,” and designated the caste of Jewish priests who officiated in the Temple. Andrew Cohen bears that legacy somewhere deep inside—in his DNA, or his soul, or his Jungian unconscious. When he sees flashes of ancient Jewish life, he is peering into the collective past—and the joke, and the tragedy, is that he has absolutely no idea what he is seeing.
Andrew’s story thus proceeds on two tracks, mirroring the many dualisms of Jewish life: modern and ancient, secular and religious, New York and Jerusalem. On the surface, his ordeals can be explained as simply the indignities of age. His relationship with Ann Lee, a former student half his age, starts to wilt as Andrew grows uninterested in sex, and then incapable of it. He finds himself gaining weight, unable to keep up his exercise regimen. He has graphic nightmares in which he is castrated, his loss of potency made concrete. Even cuisine loses its appeal: “He dug his fork into a quail, detaching a piece of gray, fibrous meat and putting it cautiously in his mouth. It was thick and cartilaginous, revolting.”
But the more the reader knows about Judaism, and particularly about traditional Jewish rituals and taboos, the more pointed and meaningful Andrew’s aversions seem. One night he wakes up next to Ann Lee to find she has begun to menstruate. His body and the sheets are bloody, and he reacts with unreasoning, inexplicable horror: “He felt a new surge of fury, disgust, and panic. He had to wash himself, to scrub his polluted flesh with soap and scalding hot water. The voice of reason, echoing in the empty chamber of his mind, was hollow and unconvincing. Why on earth should he feel this way? What had happened, for goodness’ sake? She had gotten her period, that was all.”
Andrew does not know that sex with a menstruating woman is taboo according to Jewish law, yet somehow his subconscious has retrieved this knowledge—from a previous incarnation, perhaps?—and he can’t help reacting accordingly. Similar episodes of disgust and pollution visit Andrew when he has a nocturnal emission—another source of ritual impurity according to Jewish law—and when he contemplates cooking a piece of non-kosher meat. Indeed, his predilection for cooking meat itself comes to seem like an atavistic impulse, a return to his priestly ancestors’ role of tending to the Temple sacrifices.
Namdar does not make these parallels fully explicit, but he helps the reader along by inserting, at intervals throughout the novel, the story of an ancient High Priest performing the atonement rituals in the Temple on Yom Kippur. These pages are arranged like pages of Talmud, with a narrative at the center flanked by the Biblical and Talmudic passages from which Namdar takes his details. This High Priest, the reader comes to understand, may be Andrew Cohen’s distant ancestor. They inhabit utterly different worlds, yet the two men are somehow connected. This is exactly the kind of primal connection to Jewishness that so many American Jews feel the lack of; yet when Andrew experiences it, it is terrifying and suffocating.
One of the best extended sequences in the book follows Andrew through Manhattan on an August day, as he feels increasingly disturbed by the smell of smoke in the air. Finally, he can barely breathe, yet he can’t find the source of the smoke—nothing seems to be on fire. For the reader, however, this invisible smoke seems like a double visitation, from the future and the past. It is August 2001, just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks: is Andrew inhaling the smoke that is about to cover downtown Manhattan? At the same time, it is the 8th of Av—each section of the novel is headed with both the English and the Hebrew date—which is the day before the anniversary of the burning of the Temple. Is he remembering the smoke from the ruined house, which covered Jerusalem 2,000 years before?
Namdar allows both suggestions to linger. Each moment of history—not just the past but those still to come—is somehow simultaneously present in Cohen’s life, and in our own. Jewishness, The Ruined House intimates, is a matter of waking up to this historical connection, with all its splendor and horror. The originality and power of this idea, along with Namdar’s fertile power of observation and evocation, make The Ruined House a new kind of Jewish novel, which everyone interested in Jewish literature should read.
An Unusual Jewish Novel, Full of Blood and Incense
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By Josh Lambert
Jan. 10, 2018
THE RUINED HOUSE
By Ruby Namdar
Translated by Hillel Halkin
514 pp. Harper. $29.99.
It’s been a season of reckoning for our high priests, as one after another, in the film industry, journalism, politics, academia and other fields, have been judged and sometimes punished for their sins. How eerie that Ruby Namdar’s strange and exhilarating novel, “The Ruined House,” should appear in English translation just now.
Namdar wrote the book, his second, in his native Hebrew, and received Israel’s most lucrative literary award, the Sapir Prize, for it a few years ago. Having lived in New York for decades, he was the first expatriate ever to gain that particular honor, and it looks as if he’ll remain the only one: After his win, the rules were shamefully changed to exclude those who live abroad.
It’s just coincidental timing, then, that the novel centers on the sort of American high priest who has recently come under long overdue scrutiny. In “The Ruined House,” he’s the kind of 50-something Jewish New Yorker who publishes his essays in The New Yorker, occupies an impeccable Upper West Side apartment and leads seminars on “comparative culture” at N.Y.U. You can probably already picture him, this elegant Andrew P. Cohen, down to “the old-fashioned watch on his left wrist, the cartoonishly heavy-framed reading glasses, the Warholian shock of hair with its playful wink of gray.”
We follow Andrew as he floats through his putatively enviable life, preparing for classes, visiting the mother of his 26-year-old Chinese-American girlfriend, schmoozing the slick president of N.Y.U. He shuttles between the Hamptons and gallery openings, treating himself to cappuccino and biscotti and almond croissants at “those sexy bakeries that have been opening all over.” True to type, Andrew surrounds himself with admiring women he has selected because they will play their roles (ex-wife, girlfriend, daughter) without ever impinging upon his “personal and aesthetic independence.” Namdar skewers the man thoroughly as a hypocritical misogynist, phony scholar and petty narcissist.
But Namdar’s deeper subject isn’t contemporary patriarchy and its discontents. Some critics have mistaken the book as continuing the tradition of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud — whose names Namdar strategically drops, as red herrings — with Andrew just another Kepesh, Silk, Levin or Herzog. Namdar actually has less in common with those novelists, whose imaginations were largely secular, than with Cynthia Ozick, who has grappled with religious prohibition, or with the young Leonard Cohen, who harangued an audience in Montreal in 1964, telling them: “There is an awful truth which no Jewish writer investigates today.... It is this truth: We no longer believe we are holy.”
As if in response to that howl, in “The Ruined House” ancient Jewish holiness bleeds, insistently, horrifically, into the present. The connection is hinted at from the start, in the Hebrew dates given in the chapter headings, which count “from the creation of the world”: The novel begins on Elul 6, 5760 (“which happened to fall on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2000”), and ends on “The 1st of Tishrei, 5762” or “Sept. 18, 2001.” This indicates that Andrew’s story is being narrated, unusually, as part of the trajectory of the long Jewish past.
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Uneasy links between that past and the present animate the visions that begin, over the course of the novel, to flood Andrew’s senses and invade his dreams, frightening and finally paralyzing him. He’s overtaken by the sights and smells of fires, bulls, golden candelabra and massacres; he watches as “red, boiling blood runs in the streets,” hears “wails of terror and sorrow” and has no idea why.
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An explanation, eventually available to the reader but not to Andrew, appears in a pseudo-Talmudic narrative set during the Roman rule of Palestine and involving the High Priest and one of his many assistant priests. This ancient back story appears on pages styled to evoke the commentary-laced text of the Talmud.
In that fine print, it turns out that Andrew’s breakdown — his visions, the attendant writer’s block and uncontrollable urges, as well as a protracted, bizarre battle he wages with a “cut of Black Angus beef tenderloin, dry aged for 21 days and weighing seven and a half pounds, at $39.99 a pound” — reflects the strictures that governed the ancient High Priest’s conduct leading up to the moment, during Yom Kippur, when he would speak the name of God and attain atonement for all the world’s Jews.
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Such a conceit — a projection of a perspective from ancient Judea onto the lifestyle of a contemporary secular New York Jew — might strike some readers as tendentious or random, but it’s not.
First, it should be noted, it’s only natural that Namdar, as a Hebrew speaker and teacher of classical Jewish literature, should perceive strange crossings of the ancient and the modern that English-speaking Americans would miss. Many such echoes, present in Namdar’s Hebrew original, could not be conveyed even in Hillel Halkin’s extraordinary translation, but some do manage to peek through. For example, apropos of not much, on a jaunt out of the city, Andrew happens to notice “the opaque, misplaced names on the road signs — Goshen, Rehoboth, Bethel,” which are noteworthy only if you’ve been thinking about the old Canaan, the one that’s not in Connecticut.
Andrew’s surname, Cohen, functions in the same way, as a portal between past and present. It means “priest,” and the people who bear it — every songwriter, model, television host, comedian, Trump lawyer, baseball announcer, novelist and figure skater — all trace their roots, knowingly or not, to the functionaries who performed ritual sacrifices (slaughtering animals, burning incense) in the Temple in Jerusalem, before A.D. 70. Don’t be embarrassed if you didn’t know this: Since the days of vaudeville, in America “Cohen” has meant nothing at best, and at worst it’s been the punchline of a cruel joke. Namdar’s protagonist, sophisticated and brilliant as he may be, hasn’t the slightest inkling of his inheritance.
As the novel carefully reminds us, though, the sacrifices performed by priests in the Temple have always been the not-so-thoroughly repressed core of religious Judaism. It’s not just the Orthodox, but also Conservative Jews, all across America, who still pray constantly for the Temple to be rebuilt. Before the advent of political Zionism in the 19th century, that dream of rebuilding was the reason Jews even cared about Zion: They believed the only thing that could purify them or secure their atonement was ritual sacrifice, possible nowhere but on that highly contentious scrap of land, the Temple Mount.
So it’s no caprice on Namdar’s part to take seriously the legacy of the destroyed temple, the “ruined house” whose fall sent the Israelites into exile and elevated the rabbis over the priests as Jewish authorities. On the contrary, his is an attempt to recover the mythic foundations of the present.
Namdar has no thesis, and the novel does not suggest that the return of the repressed would be easy or even productive. At times dripping in gore and effluvia, steeped in sacred texts and apocalyptic visions, “The Ruined House” cannot be recommended lightly. But it is a masterpiece of modern religious literature, exactly as deep, disturbing and unresolved as is necessary to remind us, habituated as we are to the shallows of contemporary Jewish life, what still lurks beneath — primitive, raw and exacting.
Josh Lambert, the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author, most recently, of “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews and American Culture.”
An Israeli Writer’s Great American Novel
In his prize-winning new novel, Reuven Namdar asks whether American Jewry is a house on fire. His answer is. . . .
Photo by Reuven Namdar.
Observation
Michael Weingrad
March 5 2015
About the author
Michael Weingrad is professor of Jewish studies at Portland State University and a frequent contributor to Mosaic and the Jewish Review of Books.
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sraeli reviewers have repeatedly invoked the word “ambitious” to describe Reuven Namdar’s Hebrew novel, Habayit asher neḥerav (“The House That Was Destroyed”), which in January won the Sapir prize, Israel’s equivalent of Britain’s Man Booker award. The term is richly deserved. In The House That Was Destroyed, Namdar, an Israeli of Persian descent who for the past fifteen years has made his home in New York, has given us, simultaneously, four kinds of novel. Each is worth describing in order to grasp what may be the book’s culminating, if most elusive ambition: to be read one day by the American Jews who are implicated in its pages.
First, Habayit asher neḥerav is a campus novel. Andrew Cohen, its American Jewish protagonist, is a successful, fifty-two-year-old professor in the “department of comparative culture” at New York University. A popular teacher, he writes highly regarded academic essays in the fashionable postmodern mode; his current effort bears the provisional title “Woody Warhol and Andy Allen: Representations of Inversion or the Inversion of Representation.” When not hosting dinner parties in his elegantly minimalist Upper West Side apartment, he fills his social calendar with gallery openings, museum exhibits, and meals at fashionable Manhattan restaurants. Still, bad trouble looms: his standing at the university is challenged when his politically correct colleagues protest that a white male lacks the moral authority to chair the department. They also suspect him as a Jew who, while known to protest Israeli policies, does not display quite as great a passion as theirs for the Palestinian cause. Satire, or realism? It is fair to ask.
At the same time, Habayit asher neḥerav is a novel of domestic life or, more accurately, post-domestic life: a probing and somber depiction of divorce. Although Cohen seems to enjoy his bachelor life, and has acquired a girlfriend half his age, he dreams frequently, even yearningly, of his ex-wife, and slowly comes to comprehend the emotional damage his decision to leave has caused her and their two daughters, not to mention the psychic rootlessness to which he has consigned himself. Notes of sadness and loss creep in gradually, as when Cohen finds himself wondering what became of his old wedding ring:
The last time he saw it, it lay in a little box in the top drawer of the end table in the living room. Probably still there. You don’t throw out wedding rings, right? Antique stores are full of them: old gold rings, smooth or carved, studded with diamonds or inlaid with sapphires, engraved with old-fashioned names in scrolling letters, names whose bearers haven’t been among the living for a long while. Not worth melting down; the metal has minimal value. People will buy them, perhaps even use them as wedding rings. How strange, such ghost weddings, the living wearing the dead.
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Third, the novel is a horror tale, its creepiness quotient lying somewhere between Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and a David Cronenberg movie. In what constitutes the book’s main plot line, Cohen is visited by increasingly hideous visions having to do with the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Our protagonist may be a third-generation American and an indifferent bagels-and-lox Jew, but his name—Cohens are descendants of the ancient Israelite priesthood—has claimed him with atavistic force. Initially, he suffers hallucinations of the Temple’s sacrificial rites; these soon evolve into an acute sensitivity—experienced as a series of skin conditions, bizarre allergies, and inexplicable mood swings—to non-kosher food, pagan imagery, and ritually impure bodily discharges. (One night, sensing a monstrous presence in the room, he awakes to discover the sheets stained with his girlfriend’s menses; even after she removes the offending sheets, the blood “was still palpable, frightening and repulsive, as if the entire room were tainted.”) By the end of the novel, now in the grip of mental and physical breakdown, he envisions ghastly images of Jerusalem ablaze, the heads of tender babes dashed upon its walls.
So far, the questions raised by Namdar’s novel seem to arise out of the anxieties and fragile condition of many an introspective urban liberal, Jewish-style. What has been lost in the rush to slough off or repudiate traditional forms of sanctity and community? Why are we yet haunted by phenomena we thought safely relegated to the attics and storage lockers of human experience? Among its many charred and smoldering rooms, the “destroyed house” of the title contains the desiccated yet doctrinaire thought-system propagated by the postmodern academy, the imploded state of contemporary marriage, the terror of living in a godless world. But in the end Namdar has more particular concerns, which fully inhabit the fourth and most important strand of his novel.
Above all, Habayit asher neḥerav is a keenly observed meditation on the failing inner resources of American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century. What Namdar’s novel asks is whether American Jewry is another house on fire. To this, his answer is equivocal.
Before getting to that answer, we might briefly consider two literary parallels to the enterprise of this book. Almost inevitably, Habayit asher neḥerav recalls the work, and the temperament, of late-period Saul Bellow, and indeed it includes a telling reference at one point to Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s fiercely unblinking threnody to Western civilization circa 1970. Yet its truer precursor may be another Hebrew novel that is also set in New York City: Shimon Halkin’s 1945 Ad mashber (“Before the Crash”). Halkin, a poet, novelist, and scholar who lived mainly in the United States from 1914 until 1949, when he was appointed to a professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, similarly explores the psychic crises of his Jewish characters and, by extension, the American Jewish community. In another common feature, both Ad mashber and Habayit asher neḥerav offer lyrical paeans to Manhattan even as they grimly survey the crumbling topography of American politics, race, and spiritual and erotic life.
Unlike Halkin, however, Namdar gives his novel a partially redemptive ending, holding out the possibility of an American Jewish restoration. Several times, Andrew Cohen notices an Israeli who bears a more than passing resemblance to Namdar himself, and, though they never meet or speak, at one point the American professor is struck by the “absurd thought” that this anonymous Israeli “holds some kind of key to the perplexity lately filling his life.” Resorting to a different literary mode, Namdar also offers a charming faux-rabbinic tale of his own devising that renders Cohen’s tribulations as necessary but temporary payback for a sin committed by an ancestor 2,000 years earlier. In interviews, Namdar has explicitly voiced the hope that American Jews, including his own wife and children, might one day be able to read and heed the message of his book, if not in the original then at least in translation.
The hope is assuredly noble, if all but belied by the accumulated record of spiritual and psychic fissure that fills the 500 pages of Namdar’s novel. Indeed, it is difficult to put down this book without concluding that the troubles besetting American Judaism are in no way comparable to a residual attack of ancient bad karma that might pass like a breaking fever. Whether or not his intended readers will ever be able or willing to hear or heed his words, however, Reuven Namdar’s great Israeli and American Jewish novel shows that he has been listening with stunning fidelity to theirs.