In “The Ladies Auxiliary,” Tova Mirvis probes the insular world of Memphis’ Orthodox community, through the eyes of those ensconced inside. In her second novel, the best-selling author takes on “The Outside World,” a clever culture clash between modern and fervently Orthodox, parent and child.
She reveals the wide variations in lifestyle, practice, belief — and disbelief — within the Orthodox community, from the fervently religious enclaves of New York and Jerusalem to modern Orthodox neighborhoods in New Jersey and her native Memphis.
Mirvis, 31, will be speaking Tuesday, April 27, at the Lafayette Bookstore.
“I think that people tend to view the Orthodox community as being monolithic, and I think there’s a huge spectrum — right wing to left wing,” Mirvis said during a phone interview last week from Nashville, where she was on tour. “Even within the right-wing community, there’s a diversity in inner life. On the inside, people vary tremendously.”
In an inversion of the “Fiddler on the Roof” theme, she portrays a comical “march of the stringencies,” an intergenerational one-upmanship game in which kids are becoming more observant — much to the chagrin of their modernized parents.
After a year in a Jerusalem yeshiva, the modern Orthodox-raised Bryan adopts his Hebrew name, Baruch, trading in his blue-and-white crocheted “Go Yankees” yarmulke for a black hat and the pious path of the most observant. Naomi, his live-and-let-live mother, balks when he imposes stringent kosher standards on her kitchen, forcing her to adopt customs she had never observed in her own youth. Meanwhile his father, Joel, a workaholic attorney who doffs his yarmulke when he enters his workplace, goes ballistic.
Baruch, said Mirvis, is symptomatic of a “rightward drift” in the Orthodox community — a community that in the past did things as their parents and grandparents did. Today, some are “disconnecting from that [family tradition] and relying on text more. There’s a break in that family connection, an embrace of the strict opinion [of rabbinical rulings],” which Mirvis finds “personally troubling.”
On the other side of the spectrum are the Goldmans, striving to keep up with their frum-from-birth neighbors in Brooklyn. But Shayna, the mother, has a deep, dark secret. She was born Susan, in a secular home, and four of her five young daughters are unaware of her roots. What they do know is that Shayna, like most of her neighbors, stashes a TV in her upstairs bedroom — a TV that was sneaked into the house in an air-conditioner box.
Determined to fit in, Shayna is determined to create the wedding of the century — all she needs is the groom and a willing daughter. But her eldest daughter Tzippy, at 22 practically an old maid, is fed up with the cookie-cutter parade of potential grooms she’s introduced to. After 42 arranged dates, Tzippy wants out and escapes to Israel.
Tzippy and Baruch, who knew each other in childhood, meet up again, not so accidentally, in Jerusalem. Are they a match? And can they create their own identities in “the outside world”?
“Tzippy is a good girl on the outside, but inside she has a very rich, imaginative inner life,” Mirvis said. Baruch’s father, Joel, a self-described “observant agnostic,” “has real and serious doubts, but he lives with it.” Shayna has no doubts as far as belief, but she “doubts her belonging.”
Baruch, in turn, doubts his parents’ commitment to Judaism, while his mother is probing new models of feminist spirituality within Judaism.
One of the reasons Mirvis named the book “The Outside World” is that “it always seeps in … even for those who want to separate themselves, it’s always there.”
By way of example, she recalls watching a fervently religious man in a black hat eyeing the smorgasbord at a kosher wedding, walking over to it and “expertly picking up a piece of sushi,” eating it with precision, with chopsticks.
Like Baruch’s mother, Naomi, the New Jersey housewife who suddenly finds herself facing a community turning rightward, Mirvis’ own mother grew up with a more lenient Orthodoxy in Memphis, where coed dancing was the norm and kosher laws seemed less complex. “People used to eat foods based on their ingredients,” Mirvis said. “Now they require kosher certification.”
By way of illustration, the sketch on the cover of the book — which deals with the kosher-food business as well as the business of marriage — reveals a bride carrying a bouquet made of broccoli. Broccoli, Shayna’s husband says, along with lettuce and cabbage, is one of those foods that could benefit from hydroponic processing for the kosher market, as bugs lurk between the florets.
Mirvis, who received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia, places herself on the leftward edge of Orthodoxy. She has never left, and although her born-Orthodox characters have secret longings to eat at McDonald’s and try on another lifestyle, like a bare evening gown or a short skirt, she herself has never noshed a Big Mac. She does, however, wear pants, eschews the wig and keeps kosher 24/7. She lives in New York with her husband, an attorney, and their two sons, ages 5 and 1.
“I’m observant,” she said. “I value tradition and ritual, and find meaning in that. But I also value pluralism and feminism. While the majority of Orthodox are moving to the right, there’s also a growing left-wing edge — interested in pluralism and spirituality, and participating in the larger Jewish world.”
How did she capture the lifestyle of the most observant — from dress to secret longings?
“I eavesdrop all the time,” she said. Sometimes at a restaurant, her husband will catch her listening to the conversation at the next table. “Are you working?” he’ll say. “Yes,” she nods in response.
“The Outside World” by Tova Mirvis (283 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, $24).
Tova Mirvis will speak 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 27, at the Lafayette Bookstore, 3579 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette. Co-sponsored by the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center, a beneficiary of book sales. Information: (925) 284-1233.