by Amy Gottlieb
Ten years is a long interval, and the labor of writing a novel is at odds with the pace of ordinary time. In the predawn hours, scenes may become more saturated and characters more textured, but a writer’s day often begins when she has to abandon the desk, wake her children for school, and leave for work. While I wrote this book, my life had spawned a wealth of responsibilities and many essential joys. I also began to write poetry and explore Hasidic texts, both of which brought me closer to honoring the hidden and the unseen behind the words on the page. The novel demanded that I respect these internal shifts and allow its architecture to make room for theological uncertainty. This proved to be a precarious balancing act, and it sometimes felt as if I were teetering between poles of subtlety and excess. Just before I dug into a last-ditch attempt at revision, a writer friend sat me down at her kitchen table, reminded me of the central enigma within my novel, and urged me to stay true to my characters’ storylines, wherever they led.
Chekhov writes, “Art doesn’t provide answers; it can only formulate questions correctly.” In many ways, The Beautiful Possible is a book of questions. Hidden things—secrets, veiled truths, refractions—dwell at its core. Rosalie, the daughter of an iconoclastic Hasid, accepts that a life of faith is filled with tension and is best lived between the lines. Her unfolding story—from Brooklyn to her blue-tiled bathroom in Mexico—reveals rather than declares. The heart of her belief is not paved by theological certainty but by a desire, in Rilke’s words, “to live the questions.” Rosalie’s truth is expressed in her ambivalence and her yearning, both of which fuel the love story and propel the spiritual flow of the novel.
As the author of the manuscript The Beautiful Possible, Maya uses her imagination to navigate the contours of her parents’ braided desires. She is the inheritor of a mash-up of influences, stories, and texts; interpretation is her modus operandi. As a rabbi and novelist, she tries to reconcile the rabbinic compulsion to make meaning with the artistic tenet of “negative capability”—Keats’s term for the ability to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. In her closing letter to Madeline, Maya writes, “Every story contains the secret kernel of an infinite one,” and then adds that she’s not sure she understands the essence of her own words. Read this as you wish, she seems to say, just as I do. As I grappled with the enigmatic core of my novel, I wanted to leave room for readers to engage with the story and contemplate its questions, just as Maya does.
A traditional Hebrew phrase l’dor v’dor, “from generation to generation,” often seems cliché, but it feels apt for my novel, which begins with a harrowing trauma and ends with Maya’s fulfillment of Sonia’s dream. Because Maya lives, Sonia’s desire is actualized, at least in a mystical sense. This ending is not meant to be a statement on post-Holocaust continuity per se, but suggests the flaws of history. We don’t know what convoluted braid or karmic dance will lead us from the past to the future, but life is potential; desire spurs us forward, seeding new stories and fresh questions to ponder and savor.
Read on
Books Within the Book
MY CHARACTERS DWELL among books, and I invited several works to become part of my novel’s essential conversations. Readers may want an introduction to some of these books and their authors, along with other works that influenced me.
The Ishbitzer school of Hasidism is a radical branch of Hasidic thought that expresses ideas about how to live an authentic life. The Ishbitzer Rebbe, Mordecai Yosef of Ishbitz (1800–1854), was author of the Torah commentary Mei HaShiloach, published posthumously by his grandson and later translated into English as Living Waters: The Mei HaShiloach by Betsalel Philip Edwards. The Ishbitzer’s subversive theology was often invoked by countercultural rabbis Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, both of whom contributed to a spiritual revitalization within the contemporary American Jewish community. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Wrapped in a Holy Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters is an excellent introduction to the motifs of Hasidism, neo-Hasidism, and Jewish existentialism. His early work, Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism, provided the source for the Radish’s interpretation of the bride’s seven circles.
This novel owes an immense debt to the legacy of theologian, scholar, and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), author of Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, The Prophets, The Sabbath, and more. Heschel’s works are marked by a faith-based vocabulary that is honest, challenging, and grounded in poetry. His writings are accessible, but for readers who wish to understand his influence and context I recommend Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence by Shai Held. Heschel’s 1945 YIVO speech is recounted and partly quoted in Edward Kaplan’s Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety.
The transcendent poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), India’s first Nobel laureate, is connected to Walter’s journey and lives at the heart of this novel. The mystical language of his epic poem Gitanjali (“Song Offerings”) shares some overlaps with images from the Zohar. (Tagore was a beloved and popular Bengali folk poet, making it plausible that Kavita would have been familiar with his songs.) The Zohar quote about the ceaseless river is taken from Daniel Matt’s magisterial translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Volume 3.
I originally conceived of The Beautiful Possible as a midrash on the Song of Songs. (The Mountain of Spices was its working title.) Several of the novel’s motifs derive from the Song of Songs, with hints of Ruth, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The Same Sea, a lyrical novel by Amos Oz, served as a model of how ancient Jewish texts could wind through a contemporary character-driven story. For a poetic look at the subversive nature of biblical texts, see For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book by Alicia Suskin Ostriker.
My love of the Bible is enhanced and renewed by the work of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, author of several volumes of biblical commentary, including Genesis: The Beginning of Desire and The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious. Her biblical explorations form a tapestry woven from rabbinic midrash, literary criticism, Hasidic thought, and psychoanalytic theory. Her discursive approach is illuminating and often quite moving.
Some of the novel’s language of contradiction owes a debt to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
Anita Desai’s novel Baumgartner’s Bombay made me aware of Jews who fled Nazi Germany and went to India.
I am indebted to several books that enabled me to imagine Walter’s journey. Martin Kämpchen’s chapter in Jewish Exile in India 1933–1945, edited by Anil Bhatti and Johannes H. Voigt, taught me about Alex Aronson’s sojourn at Shantiniketan. Aronson wrote a beautiful account of his stay at the ashram, Brief Chronicles of the Time, which was published in India and bound in purple sari cloth. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson was a source of useful background information, and Helmut Newton’s Autobiography gave me a window into the 1938 voyage of the Conte Rosso. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Germany by Francis Nicosia lent me insights into my characters’ circumstances in Germany.
The character of Madame Sylvie owes a debt to the memory of the Jerusalem kabbalist Colette Aboulker-Muscat, whose work has been documented by several of her students, including Rodger Kamenetz in his book The History of Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Life of the Soul.
This novel was influenced by Hasidic thought, which invites enigma, and a radical honesty in the face of the unspoken—essential tools for a writer. For perspectives on embracing literary paradox and uncertainty, I find inspiration in the essays of poets Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World and Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
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PRAISE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL POSSIBLE
“Poetic and deeply moving, The Beautiful Possible is an artfully woven story of love and loss, of spirituality and desire, of the stories that make us who we are and the stories we tell ourse
lves. Gottlieb’s debut is beautifully written and captivating.”
—Jillian Cantor, author of Margot and The Hours Count
“Amy Gottlieb’s characters pray that they ‘will find a way to live between the dual cracks of uncertainty and truth.’ Readers will delight in Gottlieb’s metaphors, which express the otherwise inexpressible. In The Beautiful Possible, Gottlieb’s characters careen precariously from love to love, strength to strength, weakness to weakness. This is a lovely book, whose dual themes of faith and passion braid together powerfully like the wicks of a candle whose flame marks the transition between the ordinary and the holy, the sacred and the profane.”
—Nomi Eve, author of The Family Orchard and Henna House
“What makes The Beautiful Possible so astonishing is not simply its elegant prose and erudition or the compelling love story at its core with its moments of joy and heartbreak but the novel’s deep sense of wisdom that comes from the mysterious between places of the heart and soul, a wisdom that in Gottlieb’s hands is never insistent or boastful but a grand meditation on human and godly grace.”
—Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul
“The Beautiful Possible is impossibly beautiful, also luminous, lyrical, and unforgettable. With this stunning first novel, Amy Gottlieb announces herself as a formidable literary talent and a bright star in the firmament of twenty-first-century Jewish writers.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate
“People always want to know what a book is about. That’s a hard question to answer when it comes to The Beautiful Possible. I’ve never read anything quite like this lyrical and infinitely wise novel. There’s a line in the book that reads, Inside every story lies the hidden kernel of an infinite one. That’s what this book is about.
“If I had to say more, I would add that this novel is about a woman in love with two men, and the way that she sustains both relationships over a lifetime, not without signifiant cost. It’s about faith and love and lust and mysticism and poetry and the eroticism of spices. It’s about the things we give our children but prompts us to think about what we should give them, and what they, in turn, should give us.
“Mostly though, it’s about how a book can be a wonder. If books could shimmer, this one would.”
—Elizabeth Berg, author of The Dream Lover
“The Beautfiul Possible is a deeply felt and evocative novel that draws on history, memory, all the senses, and the author’s own considerable conjuring skills. Alive with characters and unafraid to examine ambigous emotional complexities, this is a moving debut.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
“This enchanting novel is a ‘braid’ of romance, passion, and betrayal; of marriage, family, and loss; of three characters whose love is incomplete in the secrets each conceal; of the beauty that is possible and the wrong that makes it possible. It’s also a delightful and brilliant commentary—a midrash on the Song of Songs and Tagore and Whitman, on Hasidic wisdom and Hindu wisdom, on the mundane and the sublime and how we live between them. Read it once for its story, again for its wisdom, and one more time for its poetry and truth.”
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream
CREDITS
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Tuan Tran / Getty Images
COPYRIGHT
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Robert Bly. The translation of “Dusk” by Rabindranath Tagore is from The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy edited and translated by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1995 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Robert Bly.
Coleman Barks. The translation of “There Is a Light Seed Grain Inside” by Rumi is from The Essential Rumi. Copyright © 2004 by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks.
This novel is a work of fiction. Characters, places, dialogue, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are used fictitiously.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE BEAUTIFUL POSSIBLE. Copyright © 2016 by Amy Gottlieb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition February 2016 ISBN 9780062383372
ISBN 978-0-06-238336-5 (pbk.)
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