Rachel Sondheim is searching for a home.
Not an actual house, but a burial ground where her late mother’s ashes can rest.
The heroine in Lois Silverstein’s new novel “Daughter,” Sondheim is struggling between traditional and innovative religious observance.
She has respected her mother’s wishes by cremating her, but she can’t bring herself to scatter the ashes. Instead she spends the novel seeking out a halachically sound loophole for burying the ashes next to her father.
“She’s just trying to do the right thing and preserve Judaism by pulling her family together,” said Silverstein. “Unfortunately, doing the right thing doesn’t seem to fit any one of the Jewish rules, so she has to find some law or some addendum to a law — there are a series of obstacles where her faith is challenged along the way.”
Like her heroine, Silverstein is also a person “open to many variations” when it comes to Judaism. She is a member of Conservative Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley and feels “like I’m constantly learning.”
Silverstein doesn’t need to find a home — she’s happily settled in Berkeley with a husband and a son, and is a registered expressive arts therapist, a writing consultant and an instructor at various Bay Area universities, colleges and graduate schools. Along with her first novel, “Daughter,” she has published four books of poetry.
Although the plucky Sondheim and the novel are not autobiographical and “the story just came out by itself,” Silverstein appreciates the significance in Judaism of finding a gravesite.
As a self-professed amateur genealogist she has encountered firsthand the difficulty of the Jewish people in seeking out family roots. Unlike her character’s mother, who was cremated at will, many of those who died during World War II, for instance, did not have a choice in the matter and their records are hard to locate.
Luckily for Silverstein, most from her father’s side emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1860s and her mother’s side came from Ukraine in the early 1900s.
She has discovered a large part of the family tree from her mother’s side, “but it wasn’t so easy to find, because often they were hiding or changed their names.” On her dad’s side, meanwhile, “the records were very spare.”
Silverstein said this disconnection from her ancestry affected her “peace and harmony with the universe” tremendously. “You want to be able to say, ‘Oh that’s what happened to Great Uncle Mo.’ You look for part of your self in that.”
This sense of peace and harmony with the universe is Sondheim’s quest in “Daughter.” She regrets cremating her mother, said Silverstein, “and she has to live with it, but she’s going to make it fit somehow.”
The character also deals with feminist issues in Judaism, a sibling relationship, and the similarities and differences between Jewish and Zen Buddhist attitudes toward death and burials — all as she weaves through the streets of New York with her mom’s ashes in a Guatemalan tote bag.
“She’s a wonderful heroine for me,” said Silverstein. “She’s so life-giving.”
Silverstein stressed, however, that she doesn’t want “Daughter” to be viewed as a critique of cremation. If any ethical questions do arise while reading the book, she hopes readers will look to themselves and their own Jewish practice.
The idea, she explained, is to elevate the concept of “belonging to Jewish tradition in the best possible way.”