The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  And Maya would need to understand Sol, how he lost his hearing in one ear when he was a boy—easy to imagine because he told her the story—but she would need to imagine—impossibly—how he loved Walter and what exactly transpired in the upper geniza and what lay behind the words she could barely make out behind a closed door. She would need to hear the secrets that Charlie and Philip taught Lenny before he died and how they pummeled one another into the grass in the backyard—easy because they told her—years before she was born. She would have to understand the ways Rosalie and Sol loved each other, and the ways Rosalie and Walter loved each other, listening to the words they spoke and the silences between the words—impossible.

  And she would have to find herself in the story too: in the scenes she didn’t remember (meeting Walter in the airport lounge when she was two), the scenes that didn’t make sense when they happened (Walter, barefoot; the gift of a silver bracelet in the clothing store), and the scenes she could never recover (did she lose that bracelet on the subway, or was it tossed out with the garbage bags when they cleaned out the house?).

  No doubt she would make an unsalvageable wreck of things. What kind of daughter would permit herself to imagine her parents’ most intimate secrets? What kind of rabbi would trespass in a geniza and sew its scattered scraps into a haphazard crazy quilt? She is the intruder, not Madeline. But it’s too late; she is already crawling inside this web, wrapping her fingers around its sticky tendrils. The path is partly illuminated: here is a slice of lemon cake in a Jerusalem courtyard, a sil batta burnished with spices, ash from burning sheet music, a brown felt hat, and scattered around the margins of a girl’s birthday wishes and Tagore’s poetry: a flower, a doorway, a footpath.

  Just like at shul on Kol Nidre night, everyone is here, perched on the edge, waiting. They gather around; their eternal silence prompts her to listen. It’s okay, they say. We grant you permission. Our lives are over; we lived as best we could. You own the copyright now. Rearrange the fragments, invent a new art form, compose a song without words. It’s your turn to make the beautiful possible. We are your parents and maybe we can show you the way.

  DEAR MADELINE

  December 2008

  Just the other day a backpacker with a faint Dutch accent knocked on my door and asked me if this was the correct address for an elderly French kabbalist who dispenses astonishments.

  “Same address but she’s long gone,” I said. “The generations come and go.”

  “. . . but the earth remains forever. Ecclesiastes.”

  “You’re a good student.”

  “Too bad I missed out on all that kabbalistic magic.”

  “There are still plenty of astonishments to go around,” I said.

  Jerusalem is the only place in the world where this can happen. I can pluck fresh dates from a tree that grows in my garden and meet a kid who knows his sources, searching for his place in the order of the universe. Everything here is layered with history and imbued with a challenge. I live in a crazy city where old dreams are translated into new ones—twisted, rerouted, corrupted, and quite often saturated with beauty. I believe Jerusalem has something to teach me, and I’m learning all the time.

  I make a living leading meditation retreats that weave together Hasidic texts, world poetry, and my own conjurings. I’m the lead singer of Besamim, an Israeli-Arabic–South Asian fusion band. My boyfriend Gil plays sitar and oud, and Jase—who now lives on a yishuv with his wife and four kids—joins us on banjo when he’s not leading American kids on hikes through the Sinai Desert. It’s taken us awhile to gel as a band but we have quite a following now and we’re about to record our first CD. I’ll send you a copy.

  Every Rosh Hodesh I join the Women of the Wall and we read Torah at the Western Wall—the Kotel—at the same spot where you first saw my mother slip her note between the stones. We are often harassed for leading our own Torah service and I find it helps to wear a tallit that doesn’t remotely resemble the traditional one my father wore. My tallit is sewn out of a cotton batik tablecloth that I bought during a rabbinic service trip to Ghana. The batik is patterned with scrolling vines, textured with a border of blanket stitches I embroidered myself. It’s rather immense and I love how it encompasses all of me. When I drape it on my shoulders I feel as if I’m the queen of a vast wadi.

  When I was small my mother and I would stay home from shul on Kol Nidre night, just the two of us. She would sit on the chaise lounge on the back porch and hold me on her lap. Together we would listen to the first notes of the prayer wafting from the shul and I would rest my head on her shoulder and close my eyes. What better Kol Nidre could there ever be? If a child is given a complete world, why ask how it was created? And if that world was created on a bedrock of secrecy, who was I to crack it open? I could nibble on hints for the rest of my life and tango with what I knew and what I did not know. And Madeline—that would have been enough for me.

  Honest to God, it would have been enough.

  But we can’t undo the past. I had buried both my parents and made my peace with the closed door of my mother’s life. And then you blew it all up when you spoke his name. I hungered for every word you gave me and I sought out every seed of truth I could find. And at the same time I cursed you for leading me down that path. But no worries, Madeline. I’m a rabbi; I try to see life from all sides. You had no right to betray my mother, but you were brave enough to teach me what you believed I needed to learn. I never would have chosen you as a chavrusa, but sometimes our chavrusas choose us.

  Once you gave me the bones of the story I had to find my way through it, interpret its code, make it my own. At first I thought I would create a source sheet of their favorite texts and simply meditate on the white space surrounding the words, letting the unspoken patterns speak for themselves. But without a narrative linking the texts, the tesserae would not form a mosaic, the words would be frozen in antiquity, and the story of their lives would be lost forever. My retreat students would show up for a dose of inspiration, but without a good story they wouldn’t stick around to find out what happened. The she’elah-teshuvah lines were easy for me to write, just like the contents of the purple binder were an easy assignment for Rosalie and Walter. Wisdom is easy, Madeline. It’s actual history that proves to be an unknowable, fugitive dream.

  The writing of this half-imagined, half-true book about my three parents has been a comfort of sorts. Like all books, this is an inquiry, a game of blindfold in the dark, a whiff of spice, a forgotten prayer remembered. If I trespassed on their lives, I beg their forgiveness. My inheritance has many layers and unraveling is a messy, dangerous act.

  I hope you will consider publishing The Beautiful Possible with your little press. My retreat students are always hungry for another book—a new seed—and our story may interest them in some way. As for my brothers, I haven’t decided if I will share this with them just yet, though I suspect they won’t be surprised that the milkman’s daughter is really the milkman’s daughter. I’m sure you know the Yiddish proverb the heart is half a prophet.

  But I’m finished now, Madeline. This book is yours. It’s time to free myself to remember my mother and my father as I knew them. My father’s fingers pointing out the words in the Talmud, my tiny hand resting on top of his knuckles. My father standing on the bima, staring down at my mother and me, unable to hide his smile because we were alive in the world and we belonged to him.

  I gave away all my mother’s clothes except for her white cotton Shabbat dress patterned with red bricks. I brought it with me to Jerusalem, along with my father’s books. At times I reach into the back of my closet and touch the satiny fabric, caress the huge flower-shaped buttons that I played with when I sat beside her in shul. The woman who wore that dress was my real mother. How I know and love her cannot be translated into the pages of any book. I am her daughter and she was my mother and I will miss her always.

  On the last day of my retreats I invite my students to meditate on this: Inside every story
lies the hidden kernel of an infinite one. We chant it together to a niggun I composed; you can hear a version of it on our CD. I came up with that line after I finished writing this book. I’m not sure I understand the essence of my own words, but I believe you will, Madeline. At least I hope so.

  I often think about the day you met my mother at the Kotel, looking on as she tucked her note between the ancient stones. You told her that her words would not find their way to a geniza or to God but now I believe that you contradicted yourself. Her words were being watched over; the story was in your hands. And you carried it for all those years so that one day you could give it to me.

  Yours,

  Maya

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel owes its existence to many books, teachers, and conversations. I discuss some of these influences in the “Books Within the Book” essay in the P.S.™ section, and offer particular gratitude to the late Alex Aronson, whose journery inspired Walter’s story.

  Much appreciation to my insightful and intuitive editor, Jillian Verrillo, for her vision, generous work, and advocacy; to Terry Karten for inviting me on board; and to everyone at HarperCollins, especially Amy Baker, Dori Carlson, Cal Morgan, Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, Marry Sasso, Nikki Smith, and Sherry Wasserman; with thanks to Katherine Haigler for her astute copyediting. I am grateful to my dynamic agent, Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency, and offer special thanks to Ilana Kurshan and Deborah Harris for their comments and support.

  Thank you to the scholars who answered my questions: Francis Nicosia (Berlin), Peter Schmitthenner and Stephen Legg (Bombay), and Rabbi Morton Leifman (who shared anecdotes about JTS in the 1940s). My gratitude to readers of early drafts: Richard Greenberg, Sarah Heller, and Lisa Feld, with special thanks to Leah Strigler for her historical lens and multiple readings. I am indebted to my longtime cherished reader, Laura Glen Louis, whose generous and sage advice saved this novel (and me) more than once.

  I am grateful to my teachers: Reb Mimi Feigelson, who first introduced me to the teachings of the Ishbitzer Rebbe, and Rute Yair-Nussbaum, whose illuminations helped me understand how Hasidic ideas and literary fiction could share a common language. Thanks to cartoonist Jennifer Berman for permission to use the Velveteen Rabbi, and to Rachel Barenblat for giving the term new life.

  Thank you to the Bronx Council on the Arts for generous financial support, to the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education for providing a gracious home for learning, and to my friends at the Rabbinical Assembly and JTS who invited me into their circle and gave me a front-row seat to their scholarship. I am grateful to my chavrusas Susan Kaplow and Jill Minkoff and to my Rosh Hodesh group for conversations about all things Jewish and feminist. And thanks always to Laura Paradise.

  This novel owes a debt to the memory of my father, Eli, whose unfinished journey seeded a legacy. Much gratitude and love to my mother, Edie, for providing a house overflowing with stories; to my siblings, Jane and Michael; and to my extended tribe.

  Finally, all my love and appreciation to my husband, Ralph—best reader and best friend—and to our sons, Eli and Ezra, for their many kindnesses.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . *

  About the author

  * * *

  Meet Amy Gottlieb

  About the book

  * * *

  The Synagogue at the Edge of Macondo

  On Writing Enigma

  Read on

  * * *

  Books Within the Book

  About the author

  Meet Amy Gottlieb

  AMY GOTTLIEB IS a graduate of Clark University and the University of Chicago. Her fiction and poetry have been published in many literary journals and anthologies, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. She lives with her family in New York City, where she teaches and writes. The Beautiful Possible is her first novel.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  About the book

  The Synagogue at the Edge of Macondo

  IN THE LATE 1950s, my parents bought a house in East Meadow, Long Island. There wasn’t a synagogue in walking distance, so they joined forces with a handful of neighbors and started one. This fledgling synagogue grew in sync with my childhood: When I was a baby the small congregation gathered in a drab green tent; when I was a kindergartner we assembled in a split-level house; and when I was old enough to attend Hebrew school we had moved into a brick building fronted with glass. Its classrooms were where I first visualized Lot’s wife rendered into a pillar of salt and the Israelites dancing around a golden calf. My friends and I would practice our first kisses in the synagogue bathroom, sample our first cigarettes in the stairwell, and spy on our neighbors in intimate moments of prayer—or gossip—in the sanctuary. I often thought of this synagogue as a palace of guarded secrets, but I eventually outgrew its relevance. I wanted to become a writer, and the Judaism of my childhood couldn’t compete with my literary aspirations.

  As a teenager, I looked to literature to teach me the language of the soul. My dog-eared copy of The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell taught me about poetic transcendence in the face of mortality. I turned to Colette’s novels to appreciate the vocabulary of physical desire. When I discovered Virginia Woolf in college, I identified with her stalwart atheism yet held a deep spiritual reverence for her fiction.

  When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and enrolled in graduate school, as I somehow believed that studying comparative literature at the University of Chicago would reveal the hidden aspects of Macondo, García Márquez’s fictive city of mirrors. (As a naïve and idealistic young writer, I didn’t quite get the irony of this scenario.) I wanted only to pave a life that would allow me to worship the books I loved and, in time, write novels of my own.

  While dissecting Latin American novels and slaving over critical theory during that cold Chicago winter, I craved a diversion and wandered over to the Divinity School, which housed a glorious labyrinthine bookstore and a decent coffee shop. I was quickly welcomed into juicy discussions about ancient fertility cults, everyday mysticism, and the eroticism of the Song of Songs. (My childhood Hebrew school had obviously left out all the good parts.) I took classes with religious historians Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricouer, and identified with what Thomas Merton referred to as the “ingrained irrelevancy” of monks and hippies and poets—marginal seekers whose lives are defined by a quest for meaning.

  I eventually left academia to pursue fiction writing, and moved to a one-room studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was a magical time: I wrote my first publishable short stories in a single room with a dial-free phone that rang only when my elderly neighbor called to tell me she had laid out tarot cards and had discovered a revelation about my future. (She correctly predicted I would marry my husband.) Without a kitchen, I invited friends for gourmet meals prepared in a single electric pan, and I washed the dishes in the bathtub. One night when I couldn’t sleep I examined my bookshelf crammed with literature and criticism, and realized I owned two Jewish books: the small white prayer book I had received for my bat mitzvah and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories. I had no interest in prayer, so I started reading Singer.

  I soon found my way to the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, and other Hasidic masters, and discovered a faith-based language that made sense to me, not as a rabbi or scholar but as an iconoclastic Jewish seeker. From study halls, yeshiva classrooms, and synagogues of many stripes, this quest took over my life, and on the way allowed me to make a living as a Judaica editor.

  For fourteen years, I worked as director of publications for the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. I spent my days in a spacious book-lined office at the Jewish Theological Seminary; from my window I would gaze at the statue of Gabriel blowing his trumpet atop Riverside Church. I was imm
ersed in editing liturgy, theology, biblical scholarship, and a palette of spiritual writing, and received an extraordinary education. I had an insider’s view of the complex lives of rabbis and their families—in the words of my characters, “the impossible holiness trade.” I was also given a glimpse into the Seminary’s history and was often regaled with stories about the days when Conservative rabbis referred to one another as “gentlemen and scholars,” long before women were permitted to join the rabbinate and the shifts in American Jewish life demanded new paradigms for spiritual leadership. As the consummate outsider—a writer working a day job—I could naturally imagine a stranger like Walter passing through the Seminary and began to ponder the threads of what became The Beautiful Possible.

  The relationship between an author and her characters is ultimately steeped in mystery, and I am grateful to these fictional beings whose stories allowed me to re-create a fraction of my childhood synagogue and its guarded secrets. In the surreal logic of my literary imagination, my characters brought me to the edge of another Macondo and invited me to pitch a synagogue tent, just like the tent that welcomed Sol and Rosalie to Briar Wood, just like the tent where my own story began.

  On Writing Enigma

  I WORKED ON THIS NOVEL for well over a decade—with many interruptions—though at a certain point I no longer kept track; I simply kept writing within slices of time carved between the demands of a full-time job and family. For most of those years I would awake at 4 a.m. so I could write before the day began, and those hours passed like a living dream. I had never intended for this intimate story to blossom into a novel filled with historical backstory, large sweeps of time, and a medley of texts. I often felt as if I were trying to build a trapeze sturdy enough to support all this weight yet supple enough to allow my story to fly with a semblance of grace.