Nathan Goldman (deputy editor): There’s a book I’ve been shoving into friends’ hands for months: a novel that sets the bar for what American Jewish anti-Zionist fiction can do. And shockingly, it’s a comedy. Jordy Rosenberg’s uproarious and rigorously imaginative new novel, Night Night Fawn, unfolds largely as one long diatribe, delivered from Barbara, a ranting and raving Jewish mother whose disappointment is the fundamental quality of her being. What’s got her so pissed off? Her son, of course, who has spectacularly failed to meet her expectations, and who now, to her chagrin, has come to care for her after decades of estrangement, as she slowly dies at home, high on OxyContin. But if the Jewish son—a literary figure at least as old as Kafka’s lengthy 1919 letter to his domineering dad—is understood as errant, inadequate, a squanderer of affection and investment, Barbara’s disdain for her progeny goes further: She’s livid not just that he won’t marry a suitable partner or supply her with grandchildren or forswear Marxism, but that he will not embrace the gender he was assigned at birth. Indeed, Barbara has been struggling against her son’s identity since he was only three years old, when he wished to don a pair of men’s leather shoes; the struggle intensified when as an adolescent he showed a troubling interest in Flashdance (“a movie about women in Pittsburgh who took off their clothes”) and in his father’s corduroy blazer. “I grasped then very clearly the enterprise on which she [sic] was set,” Barbara informs us, “one against which I realized I would have to stake my own life.”
Subtly yet surely, Night Night Fawn draws us into the relationship between Barba’s transphobia and her other destructive beliefs—particularly Zionism, which she discovers in the glow of a 1970s revival of the film Exodus. Rosenberg shows us how each ideology manifests as a fundamental desire for something that exceeds but still centers on the self, an irresistible sort of transcendent immanence: If Zionism offers an identity-affirming continuity with the far-flung past, what her son’s transness—and ultimately, embrace of non-procreative queer life—disrupts is the biological futurity to which Barbara feels entitled. The novel explicitly connects the two, if not in these terms. When an opportunity presents itself for Barbara and her son to pop over for volunteer work supporting the Israeli army during the First Intifada, Barbara seizes on it. She has found the conversion therapy settler colony of her dreams, a world away yet right before her eyes the whole time: “In Israel—land of rigor, gender, and brutality—they’d take care of the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit.” Zionism and what Barbara at one point calls a “mania for gender itself” thus become entangled expressions of the Jewish American family, here represented as a technology for the reproduction of fascism. Rosenberg ingeniously contorts and expands the archetypal features of the Jewish mother—overbearing concern and acerbic disappointment—until they become world-historical.
At the same time, Night Night Fawn brilliantly reimagines the complementary archetype of the Jewish son toward a figure of freedom. In her drug-addled state, Barbara has come to perceive her son as a literal monster—specifically, she believes he is in the process of slowly transforming into a giant bird. It’s a thrillingly unsubtle metaphor: “Maybe it had retracted like a flaccid penis back into your regular nose,” Barbara at one point speculates about her son’s apparent beak. Yet even as this conceit functions to portray his mother’s transphobic perception, Rosenberg lets us in on its redemptive valence: In a kind of skeleton key section told through the son’s teenage diary entries, we’re given Marx’s reading of the 16th-century German term “vogelfrei,” a category that describes “the urban and the rural poor” who capitalism frees from feudalism: “Bird-free, free as birds, but also free of any means of support in this life.” The trans bird, then, is at once terrifyingly ill-equipped to survive in a world that rejects him and electrifyingly free of that world’s constraints.
But does the bird really fly the coop? Even the eruptions of the son’s voice are ultimately contained within the mother’s, just as the image of freedom is one that emerges from the mother’s consciousness. And while the son—the real son, the author—has control, depicting his mother in the terms he pleases (and surely not the terms that she would choose), he has described his relation to the voice as a “melancholic possession,” suggesting a relationship less elected than demonically endured. (Even for someone who didn’t know her, it’s not hard to imagine the voice lingering in the ear: In Rosenberg’s representation, it crackles with old-world yenta Yiddishisms and at every moment carries an unmistakably Jewish syntax that, at least for this reader, is at times deeply and disturbingly comforting.) While Night Night Fawn adamantly and wisely refuses Barbara forgiveness, let alone redemption, it does seem that there’s a form of care for her both in the text of the novel and in the fact of it. Though what that care adds up to is a question the novel leaves unanswered, the book remains a gift to any of us reckoning with some form of inheritance we cannot condone yet cannot merely wish away.
Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): The late performance theorist Alice Rayner described the theater as “a ghostly place in which the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter.” I thought of her ideas—no, I somehow viscerally felt them—as I watched César Alvarez’s obstreperous and stirring musical, The Potluck.
The show takes its title from an annual memorial gathering of the comrades of five far-left labor organizers who were gunned down in broad daylight by the KKK and American Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, with the collusion of local police. Every year since, those activists, their children, and eventually their grandchildren have met on a North Carolina beach for a potluck. It’s a fitting meal for erstwhile members of the short-lived Communist Workers Party— composed from each according to their means, consumed by each according to their need.
Alvarez has been part of these potlucks since infancy: their parents were members of the CWP, and while they didn’t attend the demonstration where their comrades were murdered, they were close friends with those who did. Alvarez, born the year after the massacre, was named after two of them, Cesar Cauce and Jim Waller (the others were Mike Nathan, Bill Sampson, and Sandi Smith). “The murders, and the fact that the perpetrators were never punished, are used as recruiting tools for white supremacist violence to this day,” we’re told at one point in the play.
“Potluck” also describes the show’s form: a marvelous mishmash of musical and theatrical styles that careen and collide through its two-and-a-half hours as it wrestles with questions of inherited trauma, the efficacy of activism, the burden of legacy, and the seeming impossibility of representing grave communal and personal loss as an entertainment. Indeed, almost the entire first act presents Alvarez’s avatar, the character César (Anthony Alfaro), a nonbinary parent of three (like Alvarez themself), struggling to create a musical about the Greensboro Massacre and earn their $15,000 commission. They open the show with a comic monologue, melting down over the impossible assignment.
When César realizes that a lot of musicals feature Nazis (Cabaret, The Sound of Music, The Producers), the opening number busts forth, functioning as both a parody and as a genuine action-initiating event accompanied by an upstage band and some singers cavorting behind cardboard cutouts of characters from those Nazi-laden shows. “Let’s make a drama,” they croak, with forced cheer. César’s pixielike intern, Moss (Jasmine Rafael) suggests they develop a documentary play. This becomes an opportunity for them to tell the audience the history of the five, using narration, projected photos, and a clip from a documentary Alvarez’s mother made decades ago with a colleague, which includes footage of the shootings. Audience members who don’t want to watch the violence are invited to head to the lobby for a guided ritual during its seven minutes.
But César still can’t get their writing to go. We stay with their frustration for a long time. There are phone calls with their supportive but anxious parents, cozy in their functioning kitchen stage right (in the second act, they make paella—the dish César’s dad brings to the potluck each year). There are yoga sessions with an online instructor. There are scenes (and later an indie-rock song) recounting their queerness and gender nonconformity since adolescence (the CWP decried homosexuality as a bourgeois distraction, but César assures, their parents “feel bad about” that now). Despite some great dime-store tinsel aesthetics—the campy yoga teacher carries a cardboard frame around their face to indicate a computer screen, for instance—the I-don’t-know-how-to-write-this trope becomes grating as the show trundles on.
But then, amazingly, it all pays off.
Moss and César decide to conjure the five murdered activists through a séance. They build an altar with objects relevant to each—an opportunity for some biographical exposition and then a strange, incantatory song for César (“There is a trap door on the floor of my need for things, and it opens onto oneness. . .”). Magic ensues: Rising nonchalantly from their posts in the band upstage, the five emerge from the afterlife.
After the ramshackle fabulosity of the first hour, director Sarah Benson now delivers matter-of-fact earnestness, and that contrast powers massive waves of emotion. While César wears raincoat-yellow billowing pants (and later, a lacy blouse and full skirt), the five ghosts are dressed in unfancy late-’70s street clothes (costumes by the divine Qween Jean)—bellbottoms, an “end apartheid” T-shirt, a denim vest. Though César is The Potluck’s protagonist, and it’s their personal development that describes its arc, the ghosts are the show’s heart. They close the first act arrayed along the lip of the stage, singing “The Ballad of the Five.” Set to the tune of the American folk song, “The Buffalo Skinners,” it’s a rousing account of how they stood up to the Klan “for your freedom and for mine,” that last phrase repeated again and again, the audience joining in (many of us crying).
The second act is driven more by songs—not that they advance the action in any conventional sense. César’s numbers become anthemic, with nonlinear, surreal waves of lyrics (“I need a sword made of rainbow light to cut the melon”). The parents, however, are given plaintive ballads that would be at home on Broadway. César’s Mom, contemplating her radical past, sings about how “It’s hard to mess with the myth you’re held up with.” In an absolute showstopper, Dad addresses his long-deceased best friend, Cesar Cauce, filling him in on all he’s missed in the last half-century: “You’ll never believe it, they ended apartheid in South Africa and elected Mandela president.” There’s AIDS, 9/11, climate change. It’s a gorgeous remembrance of a beloved friend, a celebration of a rare victory, and a rueful reflection on the quashing of almost everything the old comrades fought for. The show’s dialogue sometimes flattens when characters announce meaning: Maybe Cesar Cauce had a message for them, Moss tells César: “You can’t get it all right. But you still have to face it.” But the unfussy, compelling presence of the five makes up for any clunkers.
After half a dozen years of development, The Potluck has found a splendid full production—in a collaboration between Soho Rep and Intar—at a time when other children of ‘60s/’70s revolutionaries are reckoning with their parents’ youthful commitments. In Which Side Are You On, the novel by Ryan Lee Wong (also a child of CWP activists who has long attended the potlucks), the young Asian American protagonist wants to drop out of college to devote himself to Black Lives Matter as he is getting woke—“You sound like Adorno, if he, like, worked out his ideas on Twitter,” a friend tells him—even as he seeks to understand the lessons of his parents’ radical past. Zayd Ayers Dohrn (author of the searching memoirDangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground) and Harriet Clark (author of the magisterial novel The Hill) had more immediate experiences of their parents’ allegiance to the cause. All of them, in different ways, in different genres, are seeking the meaning—the uses—of a past they had no choice but to inherit.
Alvarez has the advantage of working in the theater, a form, Raynar wrote, that “uniquely insists on the reality of ghosts.” The Potluck conjures them.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I devoured Sigrid Nunez’s magnificent new volume of short stories, It Will Come Back to You, in two sittings. I was riveted—enthralled by the simple direct prose and the author’s remarkable insights into human motivations. I don’t read much contemporary fiction anymore, and a single word explains why I love this book, these stories, these characters so much, why they stand apart from so much fiction today: “mature.” Fiction today belongs to the young. Perhaps it always did, but when I was young I saw nothing objectionable about this. I recognized myself in a certain type of contemporary writing. Most of the books I see reviewed or try to read now might as well be about people from another planet. The woes of young people today frankly leave me cold. There is little depth to anything in a world of hookups, annoying roommates, boring jobs, the struggles of surviving in the hipper (i.e. pricier) quarters of Brooklyn. It’s all thin gruel as far as I’m concerned.
A kind of generational kvetching appears briefly in It Will Come Back to You, when Nunez’s character Mo in “The Mother-Daughter Story” laments and puzzles over the omnipresence of tattoos. “It had always amazed Mo how tattoos had come to be so common. People who never expected to wear the same wardrobe or hairstyle for life—How could they think they’d want to be stuck forever with the same tattoos.” I think that too about my tatted son and daughter-in-law, and when I see my three-year-old granddaughter Sylvie proudly showing off temporary ones I despair for humanity. It’s ugly, but in the end, who cares? But this moment of literary weakness quickly fades. What Nunez’s years bring to this book is a wealth of experience, a way of seeing things, of expressing them, that is impossible for a younger person, and all the richer for that. The tangle that is family becomes more tangled as the years go by and generations pile up. Only someone on the grandparent end of a family knows, as Nunez does, the satisfaction felt when a child views the grandparent as an ally against her mother and father.
Who that does not have decades behind them could think to describe—as a character in the story that gives this collection its title does—atrial fibrillation by saying that “It feels like love”? It could be said that a young writer would have no reason to mention atrial fibrillation, but if that’s so, more’s the pity. Atrial fibrillation, as I know, can also feel like a headlong rush to death. If you survive it, if your mind is free and open, it grants you an insight into life (and death) that the young aspiring clock-watchers writing novels today lack.
The characters in these stories are almost all between their late forties and their seventies. They have lived through failed marriages, widowhood, and parenting. They’ve done the best they could, and it sometimes hasn’t been good enough. But Nunez’s characters all strive to be honest, if not with those around them, then at least with themselves. We are all haunted by the devils from our past, often located within our families. In “Mother-Daughter Story,” the mother wonders about her life: “She had been unlucky in her parents. But the luck of being born into love shouldn’t be like the luck of being born into money, should it?”
There is, however, a hitch. The honesty I praise here is often ruled by a product of memory, but for those of a certain age there is a difficulty: “As memory fails, imagination steps in.” And worse: “And aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives?”
Nunez’s characters try to do the best they can with the information at hand. Sometimes they fail unknowingly. It Will Come Back to You is a deeply humane book. There is more life in its few pages than in many doorstops that clutter our shelves.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Devarim from Avigayil Halpern
Last month, I watched in horror as anti-ICE organizers were prosecuted for possessing books that I, too, own. A week later, as I walked down the street in Washington DC, where I live, a police officer with a canister of pepper spray in his hand told me they were about to start “clearing the sidewalks.” Later that day, a squad of National Guard soldiers walked down my quiet side street, and I turned around to tell my neighbors smoking weed on their porch that armed troops were coming. I yelled at the soldiers to quit their jobs—the same sentiment that a college student was arrested for expressing a few days later. As I reflect on these recent experiences, I know that I am among the safest in this city, protected by my whiteness and class position. There are so many others around me who face far greater risks, and this knowledge often feels staggering in its horror; we are living in very scary times.
As Moses begins his retelling of the Israelites’ 40-year trek through the wilderness which will comprise the bulk of the Book of Devarim, beginning with our parshah, fear is a subtle but persistent companion to the journey he recounts. Moses, in describing their travels and the conquest of the land of Canaan that will follow, uses the root “y-r-h”, meaning “fear,” six times. The word is deployed in two different but intertwined ways: God’s message to the Israelites not to fear others, and God’s message to the Israelites that others will fear them. Notably, all of these usages refer to conquest, and specifically to the Israelites’ encounters with the residents of Canaan and its environs. The proposed resolution to their fear revolves around the question of divine favor. As the final line of the parshah puts it, “Do not fear them, for it is the Eternal your God who will battle for you.” God’s support is the reason the Israelites should not fear entering into violent conflict with others—and it’s the reason those others, the Torah promises, will come to fear the Israelites.
Fear, then, is determined in our parshah by the Israelites’ relationship to God—or, perhaps more accurately, by God’s relationship to the Israelites. The other nations fear the Israelites because God is on their side, whereas the Israelites are told not to fear the peoples of the Land of Israel for the same reason. In this formulation, the Israelites don’t overcome fear so much as they overcome others, which then alleviates their need to fear.
But this kind of fear—and this relationship to it—is not the only one mentioned in the Torah. Outside of our parshah, the Torah provides other examples in which fear exists not in the context of domination but as a resource for strength. More than four decades prior to our narrative, we encounter two righteous women: the midwives of the Israelites, Shifra and Puah, who are summoned before Pharaoh and ordered to kill all Israelite baby boys. But “the midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live,” the Torah tells us. If the midwives feared Pharaoh, the text does not tell us. The relevant fear is their fear of God.
The feminist author and activist Audre Lorde, in an essay that was originally delivered as a speech to lesbian writers, describes the importance of “learn[ing] to work and speak when we are afraid,” because, as she warns, if “we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” In other words, we can never overcome fear; we must instead work while afraid, because the world we are seeking is more important than the fear we feel in confronting it.
Jewish thought views “yirah,”and especially “yirat Hashem,” or fear of God, as an important catalyst for action. We might also translate “yirah” in such contexts as “awe”—our encounter with wonder and reverence, before which all other concerns pale. Awe can push us to elevate the sacred imperatives of what we owe to each other and to the future, which stand above the fear of the moment. Viewing fear as bound up with awe makes fear itself a comrade: accompanying us in our work, giving us the strength to act against and despite the smaller and manifold fears that we face.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
