This is Not Just About the Rubinsteins

I like to lie awake at night and worry about the end of Jewish literature. There’s nothing quite like the rush of fretting over Irving Howe’s belief that Jewish literature died in the seventies, or agonizing over whether SY Agnon already said everything there is to say about the Jewish condition. So it’s nice when a new book comes along to remind me that Jewish literature isn’t dead yet, and does so with the disarming appearance of warm apple cake.

Through seventeen interconnected stories, Allegra Goodman introduces readers to the Rubinstein sisters—Helen, Sylvia, Jeanne—and their little tribe. This is Not About Us opens on the death of the baby sister, seventy-four-year-old Jeanne: or at least, the process of her death. In the final stages of a brutal cancer, she takes an awful long time to die. “Jeanne’s death, unimaginable, and now—even worse—postponed.” Her family mourns her, waits, waits a little longer, grows impatient, and maybe a little concerned she won’t die at all.

Jeanne’s untimely death, when it does finally occur, is the first of the life-cycle events and holidays that structure the book—a bat mitzvah, a bris milah, a foodless Passover, a McDonalds Yom Kippur, a divorce, a dance recital, a college rejection . . . Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and in Goodman’s novel, this Jewish family is Jewish in its own way—which is often the same thing as being unhappy.

Take Dan and Steve, Jeanne’s middle-aged sons, who relive Passover each year in the shadow of their deceased father Irving, a Holocaust survivor, who “ruined the holiday for everyone because it meant so much to him.” Uptight and tense, Dan and Steve do their best to uphold the tradition of ruining the holiday for their family and their wives, Melanie and Andrea: “While Dan was non-practicing Orthodox, Steve was egalitarian, which meant Andrea did everything.” Exasperated by her husband’s yearly mania of cleaning a non-Kosher kitchen according to the strictest standards of kashrut available, Melanie thinks, “It wasn’t his fault that his religion was all rules. But where did it say you couldn’t keep your cottage cheese containers?”

Goodman effortlessly makes her characters recognizable and real, even as she maintains a gently teasing tone throughout much of the book. At Steve’s modern, sing-along seder, Dan:

Shifted in his seat because he hated off-road Judaism. The unscripted seder. The personal connection. Although he felt oppressed by the old rituals, he preferred them, which was why he brought his own Haggadah.

Goodman has always known how to nail that funny quirk of the knowledgeable non-religious: “I may not believe in this, but if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it the Right Way.”

Shuffling over to another branch of the family, the chapter “The Last Grown Up” is a long rumination on the closely related attitude “Am I The Only One Here Who Gives A Damn About How To Do Things Right?” Debra isn’t a bloody Rubinstein —sorry, isn’t a Rubinstein by blood. She’s the ex-daughter-in-law of Sylvia, and struggles to raise her daughters with her ex-husband, Richard, and Richard’s young, new, pretty, pregnant partner Heather, who Debra is totally, completely, fine with—no really. She’s just a little bit tense:

Debra sighed, because she knew that there was nothing to be done with feelings but to feel them. There was nothing to do about her ex-husband and his new relationship except to watch events unfold. Debra understood that. (She was good at therapy.) If only Richard and Heather would hurry up and get it over with.

Debra is an anxious Jewish mother, and admits that she “tended toward the worst-case scenario.” But there’s no stereotype here. The joke in Goodman’s ironic voice isn’t on Debra’s worries, but on Debra’s self-awareness, since being aware that she’s in the middle of a maddening new parenting dynamic cannot alleviate the unfortunate fact that she’s in the middle of a maddening new parenting dynamic.

Why would you choose to sit in temple fasting in cold air-conditioning? Grandma Sylvia always says the air-conditioning is so cold someone should do something, and then she has a headache.

It’s a question that lies at the heart of the book—why do we keep doing these things, any of these things? Why fast on Yom Kippur? Why sit through a miserable Seder? Why keep baking apple cakes as your sister lays dying?

To oversimplify a few decades of Jewish American literature, broadly speaking there are two kinds of Jewish novels: The flight from tradition (The Rise of David Levinsky, Portnoy’s Complaint), and the return flight (Everything Is Illuminated, The Ruined House). But in This Is Not About Us, the characters do not fly to a kind of Judaism, so much as list ambivalently onward. Why should Lily practice for her bat mitzvah? Why should her grandmother fast on Yom Kippur? Why should Dan and Steve keep up their old Passover traditions? The truth is they don’t really know why—though only the twelve-year-old kid can properly express that confusion.

The novel’s final story, “Poppy,” is a comedic masterpiece of grandmotherly anxiety as Sylvia awaits the birth and bris of her unexpected grandson via Richard and Heather. Iced out of helping plan the bris, Sylvia and her husband make their way through a snowstorm to the shul, where Sylvia internally laments the lack of food, flowers, and set up. She “did not comment. She did not criticize at all—but she would not touch anything.”

The novel ends with Sylvia admiring the newborn baby—not so much as a celebration of Jewish continuity, but as the possibility of starting over again with a blank slate. Yet the baby is not a blank slate, not really. He has been named after his great-grandfather; he has been circumcised, though no one is entirely sure why. Goodman loves her characters and their bumbling ambivalent Judaism, and never forces an answer on them. And yet, in ending with new life, she may be suggesting that if the next generation is to care about any of this at all, it must, somehow, find a reason.