cleveland | Teddy Kollek, a former mayor of Jerusalem, referred to his city as a mosaic of different cultures.
In her new book, “Tevye’s Grandchildren, Rediscovering a Jewish Identity.” Eleanor Mallet is trying to put together her own mosaic. Not of Jerusalem (although that’s part of it), but of her life as a Jew.
As she begins this undertaking, some of the pieces in that mosaic are clearly missing. Others are little more than shards, mere pieces of pieces.
Mallet, a former journalist and columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, lived most of her life as a secular, assimilated American Jew.
“Mine was a generation of Jewish invisibility,” she writes. “Yet Jewishness, at some level, had a passionate center for me. What drove me to begin writing this book were two contradictory feelings: a dissonance I felt about my Jewishness and my passionate attachment to it.”
Also driving her to undertake the long process of researching and writing about her Jewish identity were her two adult sons, Lou and Max. The epiphany came to her as she sat in her kitchen one day and listened to her sons laugh and joke with each other — in Hebrew.
After college, Lou went to Israel to work on Project OTZMA. Through an Israeli family who took him under their wing, he found “a richness in ritual and observance” that he had not experienced at home, Mallet said.
Max was turned on to Judaism by a college course on the Holocaust. He went on to study Jewish history and Hebrew, and then joined his brother in Israel for a time. He, too, reveled in that experience.
“How were they so embracing of something so much weightier for me?” Mallet asks rhetorically.
Both of them, she writes, “have an access to a Jewish language, culture and sense of identity that I didn’t.”
Hardly averse to a challenge, Mallet decided to embark on a journey, she writes, “to heal the effects of intolerance and shame [about being ‘too Jewish’] that were laced through my personal heritage.”
That journey, which she traces in the book, has three trajectories: that of a journalist traveling and interviewing people, that of a researcher delving into the vast literature of Jewish history and that of a person living the experience. To complete the third part of her journey, she lived in Israel for two months “in Jewish time and space.”
Mallet also traveled to Germany, mainly to exorcise the shadow of the Holocaust, which, like assimilation, she tells me, is not a usable past for her. Rather, “it’s something to understand and come to grips with, so it doesn’t control you.”
The beauty of “Tevye’s Grandchildren” is that Mallet makes a cohesive and multifaceted whole from these distinct trajectories — just as the pieces of mosaic tile ultimately come together in a single, satisfying design.
My favorite parts of Mallet’s very well-written book deal with her experiences in Israel. With a journalist’s eye, a woman’s insight and a newly stirred Jewish soul, she gets caught up in the unfolding scenes before her.
Take, for example, her description of experiencing Tisha B’Av, a day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples as well as other catastrophes that befell the Jewish people. It was, she admits, a day “I had never heard of before.”
At dusk on that day, she and Lou joined a “long quiet procession of people making their way to the Western Wall.” At the men’s side of the wall, “two men sat on the ground, back to back, supporting each other, chanting. A father chanted as his young son sat against him in tennis shoes and shorts, asleep, his mouth open, his hand on the prayerbook. A man gestured constantly to the sky as if conducting.
“On the women’s side, a group of observant women stood together, one holding onto a crib on wheels with two babies in it. Modern Orthodox women were there, too, most standing, some rocking forward and back, davening. A woman held her baby in her arms. He sucked his thumb and she rocked side to side, reading prayers. Another crib, momentarily unattended, contained a baby girl and her mother’s purse. I was struck by how seamless this religious observance was with daily life.”
Of her sojourn in the Jewish state, Mallet writes: “Visiting Israel transformed me, yet outwardly I was the same. I did not take up Orthodoxy, or find lost relatives or the perfect synagogue. But what did happen was that Jewishness in me found room to breathe and grow. The fractured pieces came together; I felt whole.”
In Berlin, what Mallet senses most are “the broken pieces, the shards of Jewish life. Berlin represents most accurately what I have felt as a Jew, this absence of wholeness.”
Echoing my own feelings when I traveled to Poland, she writes, “The infatuation with things Jewish [klezmer, etc.] has a ghostlike quality.”
In the book’s final chapter, “Ritual,” Mallet describes a family Shabbat spent on Cape Cod where Lou dons his knitted kippah, says the blessing over the Shabbat candles and the whole family hugs one another, wishing each other a “Shabbat shalom.”
“It was not that long ago,” she writes, “that I felt uncomfortable with such display of religiosity, even in the privacy of family.”
Back home near Cleveland, Mallet put up mezuzot on the front and back doors: “It was a Jewish home; why not mark it?”
Five years have gone by since Mallet decided to stop trying to cram her thoughts into “17 inches of copy” (her column size at the Cleveland Plain Dealer) in order to embark on the journey that culminated in “Tevye’s Grandchildren.”
(The book’s title is a reference to the Sholem Aleichem character whose own daughters, save one, broke from the shtetl world of Orthodox Jewish life to take differing paths.)
Researching and writing her book, Mallet says, “is truly the most exciting and intellectual thing I’ve ever done.” Her personal rewards are “a deeper understanding of my history personally and in a broader sense,” a greater feeling of comfort with her Judaism and a continuing study of Hebrew.
Mallet was asked what she wants readers to take away from “Tevye’s Grandchildren.”
It’s “an invitation,” she responds, to explore “a rich Jewish world where there’s a place for everyone.”
She also feels strongly that “you have to put together the threads of who you are by yourself.” Further, if you can figure out how to be yourself, then “you can live with others who don’t have to be like you.” Given the multicultural world in which we all live, that skill, she insists, is needed by everyone, American, Israeli and Arab alike.
“Teyve’s Grandchildren: Rediscovering a Jewish Identity” by Eleanor Mallet (224 pages, The Pilgrim Press, $25).