Irreconcilable Indifferences

In an odd moment of literary synchronicity, fictional Jewish mothers are dying at an alarming rate. In Boy From the North Country, Kaplan’s Plot, This is Not About Us, and now Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn, the matriarchs are dropping like flies, leaving their maladjusted Jewish sons behind to mope, mourn, and muddle on.

Through a series of delirious journal entries, Night Night Fawn monologues the death of Barbara Rosenberg, a mean-spirited woman living and dying alone in a small apartment on Manhattan’s East 69th Street. Her only comforts are an endless supply of OxyContin and bitter memories of her disappointing husband, disappointing best friend, and disappointing son. Her husband, Steven, declined a lucrative career as a doctor to become a civil servant. Her friend, Sugar, used Barbara for writing material, and her estranged son, J, is a transgender man who haunts Barbara’s apartment as her end-of-life caretaker, and reluctant psychopomp.

Much of the book’s coverage has focused on its status as transgender autofiction. (The Atlantic wrote that Rosenberg’s “clever autofictional dodge sidesteps the expectation that trans people must explain their life to outsiders.”) Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender man who was estranged from his own mother for much of his adult life, and the novel’s kernel came from papers that Rosenberg found after his mother’s death. I’m more interested in the Jewish elements of the book, which have been loudly proclaimed, as is usual for books that plumb the depths of the Jewish experience with words like “oy” and “matzo.” (Please kvell.) The inside jacket describes Barbara’s brooding monologue as “gutter schtick,” whatever that is.

Now, this isn’t a case of phantom Jewishness. Barbara’s wounded outlook on life took shape on the streets of Flatbush and hardened on the East Side, where “Jews should be happy to even have an apartment . . . and not be dead in a ditch in Europe.” She’s obsessed with the victory of getting her kid into the hoity-toity Spence school, and she’s obsessed with the movie Exodus. Despite the Yiddish being flung about—farbisine, fakokta, faygele (maybe Rosenberg’s Yiddish dictionary only came with the Fs)—Barbara’s actual voice and syntax don’t reflect the Brooklyn shtetl of her youth. The problem here is not that Rosenberg is doing “gutter schtick,” whereas we at JRB prefer the higher kind, it’s that it’s nobody’s schtick.

Israel plays a starring role here, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I do think it’s interesting that Barbara’s memories of growing up are somewhat lifeless. She was raised around schmendricks and schlemiels, but Portnoy’s Complaint this is not, and Rosenberg’s schmucks aren’t any fun. Barbara’s father, for example, impishly:

Used to carry around these pennies, along with a supply of nougats and the steel insignias of automobiles . . . which he would pry off parked cars as he walked from the 68th Street-Hunter College subway station to our apartment. When he visited my daughter he would gift her the nougats, and the insignias too. But the pennies he kept for himself.

That’s as fun as things get, and the narrative generally lacks the explosive momentum of Leo Gursky, the lonely old man dying in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, or even the slowly unfolding sense of loss in Sam Sussman’s Boy From the North Country.

But anyways, Israel.

There are many ways that Barbara is a bad person, as Jordy Rosenberg has commented in interviews. She’s homophobic, she’s transphobic, and she’s a Zionist. Her Zionism flows from an obsession with the movie Exodus, even if she doesn’t particularly like the actual Land of Israel (#relatable). She and her family spent some stints living there, but aside from a hope that the culture would enforce some heteronormativity on her rogue daughter, she didn’t like being in the dusty region. In a display of vanity and indifference, Barbara forced J, as a seventeen-year-old, to spend a summer volunteering for SAR-EL in Israel, a real auxiliary volunteer organization:

I remembered the fierceness of the Israeli youth—their total commitment to the commandments of gender . . . I would send my daughter to this army camp too. In Israel—land of rigor, gender, and brutality—they’d take care of the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit. My daughter would come out of it cured and boyfriended. Plus, I can’t say that the idea of helping soldiers in their struggle didn’t appeal to me . . .

Forcing J to serve in the volunteer unit ends with catastrophic consequences for the family, and the strained relationship between Barbara and J snaps. Rosenberg ultimately manages to steer the novel to a beautiful conclusion (even if it relies on a strained twist), in which Barbara isn’t redeemed, but understood and pitied.

But again, not redeemed, which is unthinkable. As Rosenberg recently decreed in an interview, “We don’t have to reconcile with Zionists.” He also makes sure to criticize the “Israeli military and state project” and the ongoing “genocide” in the book’s acknowledgements. It’s fun to think of Israel as a project—some glued together poster board that a sixth grader brought into school one day and got entirely out of hand. And it’s telling in a way that Rosenberg doesn’t intend. He means to undermine the legitimacy of the state, but what he reveals is that despite having spent time living in Israel as a teenager, he doesn’t see it as a real place with ten million people living in it.

Ultimately, this is a book that pretends to have something to say about American Jews and their relationship to Israel but only has the most fleeting understanding of that relationship. It’s been called a satire, and Barbara is certainly cartoonishly grotesque. But is it still satire if all it does is accurately reflect what anti-Zionists really believe about Zionists? I wish I could say the joke is on them, but it’s not. It’s on me—I’ll get to read many more books like this in the coming years.