Jewish-American experience brilliantly tackled in new book

While serving in the army together, I once asked Jewish-American writer Avner Landes who he is competing with as an American writer based here. His response was: “Everybody.” His debut novel Meiselman: The Lean Years is evidence he was extremely serious.  

Set in the fictional location of New Niles near Chicago, the reader accompanies the book’s protagonist for eight days set during the second Bush administration as Meiselman plots to best an old school friend (and current author, who published a novel he finds offensive), learning much about the character’s obsession with the White Sox and getting a peek into his emotional and sexual inner landscape. The fictional Meiselman is a Torah-observing Jew living in the age of the Internet, yet the music of his inner language aligns with Bernard Malamud and might even be in step with Sholem Asch, making him very much out of step with those around him.

Meiselman is an anomaly. As a teenager he reads Bang the Drum, a novel about fictional baseball player Henry Wiggen, first published in 1956. Later he puts a poster of White Sox hitter Frank Thomas in his room and attempts to improve himself by reading the autobiography of US General Colin Powell. All highly conservative models of normative American success. Deeply conservative, Meiselman is not interested in, say, rebel Abbie Hoffman, a Jewish radical; or writer Rod Serling, a Jewish writer who married outside the faith. He is interested in the sort of success his parents would be able to relate to.

Around Meiselman, other people change. His wife, raised by a pork-munching Jewish-American father, embraces a religious lifestyle for his sake. His brother leaves New Niles and travels the world while keeping a kosher diet. His old rabbi is a Vietnam vet who found out he is not considered fully Jewish due to him having a non-Jewish mother and converts late in life. Even the man he sits next to during service informs him he wants to hear the sermon and not talk of baseball. Meiselman does not budge. He lives in a house bought by his parents, drives to work in the town he grew up in and attends services in the synagogue he was circumcised at.

IS HE happy? Well, no, he is not. Just like Portnoy from Philip Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint and Calvin Cohn from Malamud’s 1982 God’s Grace, Meiselman is angry. True, God did not yet unleash a new flood, making him the sole survivor human as he did to Cohn and, unlike Portnoy, he is able to function within the Jewish faith. Meiselman is the same, but different, with a sense of continuity in both general American culture and Jewish Chicagoland. 

“Some of us still keep the rules!” his father bellows to his uncle when the latter dares to call on the holy day of rest to deliver bad news after forcing Meiselman to pick up the phone with a shinui (change). All his life Meiselman keeps rules, who sees Meiselman having his episodes?  

Meiselman is extremely bad at reading what goes on around him. If Roth had Portnoy referring to his blonde, non-Jewish girlfriend as Monkey, Landes has Meiselman constantly dropping the ball when describing what is going on around him. He makes his wife coffee each morning, not realizing she never drinks it but likes to place her hands around the mug for warmth. He thinks the woman working at the local Polish bakery and coffee shop is called Kotek, oblivious to it being an affectionate term [Kitten] given to her by the baker, not her actual name. While this is first seen as comical, maybe even lovable, Landes makes sure the reader quickly catches on that this is not just funny. Meiselman is not a buffoon over whom the reader and Landes share a wink; he is a deeply flawed human being.

When he eats a meal his wife was preparing in the kitchen he does not simply confess to having consumed it and orders a pizza but instead pretends his wife imagined making it. Tasked with reading the book composed by his former school friend Izzy Shenkenberg to lead a discussion about it, he is unable to do so. Meeting the man with questions cobbled up from interviews other people have conducted with different famous persons, Meiselman steals ideas and expressions used by others and passes them off as his own. As he does, he is forever obsessing over how others regard him and where his place on the totem pole is. This turns him into a highly unreliable storyteller. We see the world out of his flawed mental eyes and cannot help but notice how off the mark he actually is.

THE NOVEL is superbly crafted to contain not only two layers – what goes on in the tale and what goes on in the silent dialogue between author and reader – but also an impressive mise en abyme or two. In a Jewish-American novel, the protagonist reads a Jewish-American novel. Shenkenberg has his character scratching his hemorrhoids while visiting a crematorium built in occupied Poland by the Nazis to murder Jews. During a March interview with Aaron Hamburger published by Fiction Writers Review, Landes shared that this detail was lifted from a story he wrote decades ago and rejected, believing it an example of flawed writing meant to get a cheap laugh. In the novel, a library visitor asks Shenkenberg why Jewish-American writers still write about the Holocaust.   

Meiselman, an alienated fictional Jewish-American character, reads interviews with (real) American authors ZZ Packer and Imad Rahman who write about, you guessed it, alienated black and Muslim-American characters. Meiselman’s mother wonders why nobody reads the 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron anymore, a work depicting Poles committing crimes against Jews during the Holocaust. Later in the novel, in one of the few scenes where Meiselman actually has an enjoyable interaction with another human, it is the elderly Polish-Catholic baker who tickles him and sees the sadness lurking behind the beard – a surprising scene that reminded me of the 1953 Asch novel A Passage in the Night, which concludes with Polish-Americans acting kindly towards the tormented Jewish character in that novel. All these details amount to Landes waving and winking, turning his headlights and taillights on and off to signal to the careful reader: “What a world we live in huh?” Or maybe “See what I did there?”

So Jewish is Meiselman that halfway through the novel I began humming the tune to “The Baseball Game” from the 1990 Musical Falsettoland [“We’re watching Jewish boys who cannot play baseball play”] and regretted Meiselman never mentions Andy the Clown, who once delighted White Sox fans at Comiskey Park. Clowns and musicals, of course, are outside Meiselman’s character. The first being narishkeit (foolishness) and the second tainted with the fear enjoying a musical leads others to wonder if one might be a feigele (gay).   

A word of warning: this very Jewish-American novel does not carry footnotes and presumes the reader steps up to bat with a healthy padding of Hebrew and Yiddish words in the body protected by the helmet. Not meant for complete beginners, this is a superb choice to anyone interested in the Jewish-American experience.