Allon. Gabriel Allon.

As the doggiest days of summer are upon us, I find myself savoring every moment of the season’s blessedly slow pace.  I think I cling to summer a little more desperately than most people, even more than the kids on my block who are celebrating its freedoms. And I treasure having the time to read, especially fiction.

One sure sign of summer for me is the arrival of a new Gabriel Allon novel. Gabriel Allon is sort of an Israeli James Bond; a globetrotting superspy working for the Jewish State against its many enemies whose evil, more often than not, threatens the world order beyond the Middle East.

Gabriel Allon is the creation of author Daniel Silva, a journalist-turned-novelist who earned his stripes by serving for many years as a Middle Eastern correspondent for United Press International. He’s created a series of novels that have certainly struck a chord with the public: Each summer’s new Gabriel Allon adventure rises to the top of the bestseller lists. As Israeli politics more and more elicit a sigh (and an oy), it’s a fun fantasy to step into this world.

“Gabriel Allon doesn’t want to carry the weight of the Jewish future—or the world’s—in his hands, but it is regularly thrust upon him: a theme which is very Jewish.”

Since it’s a literary conceit that superspies have superpowers, Gabriel has one too: he’s a master art-restorer. In these novels, before he’s called into to service, he’s often found in Italian cathedrals, a Jewish artist restoring Grand Masters’ church altarpieces with his meticulous paintbrush. (There’s an interesting metaphor at work there, but it’s summer and I don’t want to think about it too deeply.) Gabriel’s world inevitably brings together recurring characters such as London gallery owners, Corsican mafiosi, secretive Vatican officials, and world-famous classical musicians.

But Gabriel Allon is quite different from James Bond doing his duty for her majesty’s secret service. Gabriel doesn’t wear tuxedos or play cards with super-villains in Monte Carlo, nor is he a suave womanizer. He’s full of reticence and ambivalence, though when a mission arrives, he will ruthlessly see it through to a just conclusion.

Gabriel is no lone wolf like 007 either. Over the arc of the series, Gabriel has gone from being a master spy/assassin, to the ambivalent Head of the Mossad, to the now-retired figure who keeps getting sucked back in to saving the world. He works with a recurring team of Israeli Mossad agents, each one a distinctive Israeli character: a feral Russian, a passionate Yemenite, a woman damaged in her youth from a terrorist’s bomb, an aging scholar who worked in a Vienna office hunting Nazi war criminals before being recruited, and so on.

My favorite recurring character in these novels is the elderly and retired spymaster Ari Shamron, a fictional figure who is presented as the founder and shaper of Israel’s spy network, ruthlessly hunting down Israel’s enemies “by way of deception” (Proverbs 24:6, and the title of a famous expose of the Mossad). In the novels, Shamron earned his legendary status by engineering the capture Adolf Eichmann, which makes him an imaginative amalgam of Isser Harel and others. He’s a father figure to Gabriel, but also often gives voice to the coldblooded ruthlessness of the task at hand—a counterpoint to the moral ambivalence that Gabriel, or the reader, may feel.

What makes Daniel Silva stand out in the genre of spy fiction is the authority with which he writes about the world’s crises. Sure, the books are summer potboilers, and as such, they don’t qualify as great literature. But they seem rooted in very timely evils. The new novel The Collector was written in 2022-23, and the ongoing Russian assault on Ukraine provides the intrigue. While the book is populated by art thieves, corrupt energy officials, bloodthirsty Russian oligarchs, and amoral white collar criminals of all sorts, there is one archvillain behind it all: “Volodya,” as his nervous acquaintances know him. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin never actually appears in the novel, but the author makes clear that he is the mastermind of the Russian kleptocracy that inherited the Soviet Union’s morals and values—and its nukes. As such, this villain is significantly scarier than, say, Goldfinger or Dr. No or Ernst Stavro Blofeld, because Putin is all-too-real.  

The book elaborates on Putin’s viciousness. As the Russians plot a false-flag operation in Ukraine, we read this exchange among his subordinates:

“How many will die?
General Belinsky had shrugged. They were only human beings, after all.
“But they’re Russian citizens.”
“So were the people in those apartment buildings back in ninety-nine. Three hundred were killed, just to make certain that Volodya won that first election.” (The Collector, p.336)

 
The Gabriel Allon adventures provide several valuable gifts. For starters, they are “just” novels—their primary purpose is the pleasure of a good page-turner, perfectly timed for summer reading.

Second, Daniel Silva’s writing has the scent of insider-truth. He not only has done his investigative homework, but he also seems to know things from the contacts he made through his years as a correspondent in Washington and the Middle East. I trust him, for instance, when he implies that Putin’s insidiousness and cruelty go far deeper than most of us realize. (I write this in the days after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary who led a rebellion against Putin’s military two months ago, was killed in a mysterious plane crash.) All of Silva’s books seem full of insider information—and all of them have an Author’s Note at the end that delineate which aspects of the book are fiction and which are rooted in reality.

Most importantly, there’s the question of whether or not the world needs an Israeli James Bond.

The key distinction between Gabriel Allon and James Bond is the most obvious: Allon is Jewish, working for the security of the Jewish state. As such, he doesn’t have the luxury of being an amoral, smirking playboy like Bond. Although the series almost never gets preachy about Zionism, there is always, beneath the surface, a sense of “we’re fighting for our lives, because we have to.” Gabriel Allon, a fictional creation, was recruited in the wake of the very real Munich Olympics Massacre, when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israelis while the whole world was watching. As Gabriel sought out and assassinated the perpetrators, he paid a devastating price: a terrorist’s car bomb killed his son and maimed his first wife. That wife, Leah, recurs in the novels as a spectral presence living in a hospital in the Jerusalem hills, unable to make new memories, caught in an awful moment in time of Jewish victimhood and personal tragedy.

This darkness gives the books an edge, an awareness, that most potboilers lack. Gabriel Allon is a perpetually ambivalent figure. We sense that he’d prefer to be with his wife and kids, or with his paints and brushes. He doesn’t want to carry the weight of the Jewish future—or the world’s—in his hands, but it is regularly thrust upon him: a theme which is very Jewish.

Neither Allon nor Daniel Silva is prone to making long speeches about the justice of their cause. In fact, we sense that each of them is well aware of the moral imperfections of their case. Gabriel Allon’s Jewishness is not found in the Talmud or the synagogue. It’s found in a wearying view of Jewish history, especially in Europe, that led to tragedy and the absolute need for a Jewish homeland (and its defense forces). Here’s a brief exchange from The Collector, between Gabriel and his Danish intelligence counterpart:

“A promising beginning.”
“It’s early, Lars.”
“I’ve always believed in the power of positive thinking.”
“That’s because you’re Danish,” said Gabriel. “I find it comforting to prepare myself for a calamity and to be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be a garden-variety disaster instead.” (p.268)

There’s also no small amount of fantasy-projection going on in these novels, too. Any Jewish reader of these stories will say, “If only we had a secret weapon like Gabriel Allon!”

Throughout this hot summer of 2023, Israel’s existential threats seem to be internal as much as external. No superspies will rescue us from the current crisis, which calls upon the Jewish people as a whole to take a stand.  In the meantime, I’m glad to know that Gabriel Allon is out there where he belongs, ready to set aside his paintbrushes and step into service when he’s needed. Just in time for summer.

Michael Oren's Ghostly and Liberating Tales

Michael Oren is certainly a Jewish renaissance man. He’s a respected historian who wrote the definitive history of the Six-Day War. He’s an accomplished diplomat, serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States from 2009-2013. He has been a widely admired political leader, representing the centrist Kulanu party in the Knesset from 2015-2019 and serving as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s cabinet.

To that list of accomplishments, add that he’s a terrific and provocative storyteller, as we discover in his new collection of short fiction The Night Archer and Other Stories.

Oren’s imaginative GPS is set to a place where the paths of Delmore Schwartz, Stephen King, O. Henry, Etgar Keret, I. B. Singer, and episodes of The Twilight Zone all intersect. This collection of stories—most of them are quite short, just three to six pages—reveal a vigorous and wide-ranging imagination. And underneath it all is a freewheeling and slightly wicked Jewish sensibility, even in the tales that have no obvious Jewish referents.

In the Introduction, Oren reveals that many of these stories were written and stored away during his years as a diplomat. No wonder: not only are Israeli political leaders expected not to publish books during their tenures, but these stories also unveil a dark, romantic imagination of the sort that politicians prefer to keep tamped down.

And many of these stories are quite haunting—and haunted.

Ghosts abound in Oren’s fiction. “Ruin,” the story that opens the collection, is a sort of ghost-story-in-reverse, with a clever moral at its climax.  In “The Reenactor,” a Polish actor has a job at a local Jewish museum (that is, a museum to Judaism; the Jews are gone from this place)—until he drunkenly stumbles into the forest, where the ghosts of Jewish martyrs are everywhere. Likewise in “Aniksht,” which also features an Eastern European forest which becomes a place of flight during the Holocaust—and many years later as well.

Some stories seem to draw inspiration from Stephen King. (A compliment: I think King is one of our greatest living storytellers, who knows the economy of words and whose oeuvre is much broader than he receives credit for.) Like King, in some of these stories you can viscerally feel the writer’s glee in taking an idea—sometimes a genuinely twisted one—and riding it home. “The Betsybob” is the most overtly King-ish story, concerning four women who, as childhood friends, once had a shared mystical encounter in the woods near their summer camp. In adulthood, they return, looking for one more connection with one more desperate wish.  Oren knows how to stick the landing, too: some of the tales build to a witty and occasionally shocking punchline.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. These short stories also include: would-be political power couples, parents and children, love found and love lost, medieval conquistadors sojourning to the New World, lachrymose novelists, Civil War reenactors, outsider suburban schoolkids, and much more. Oren writes science fiction, mystery, romance, tragedy, animal fables, detective stories, some elaborate allegories, and many sober reflections on human absurdity. It’s all a lot of fun, and written with such economy of language that none of the chapters overstays its welcome.

Oren wears his Jewish sensibility comfortably; that is to say, it’s never heavy-handed or pandering. Two of the stories here—“Day Eight” and “The Book of Jakiriah”—are outright midrashim, told through a comedic lens. And “The Betsybob,” too, is self-aware enough to make reference to the famous Talmudic legend of the Four Sages Who Entered the Orchard (of mystical speculation). Still, Oren’s grasp is much larger than the narrow niche of “Jewish literature.”

In his Introduction, Oren makes the case for a Jewish sensibility that underlies everything that he writes. In particular, he reflects on the paradoxical relationship that Judaism has with freedom: namely, that true freedom is framed by responsibilities and statutes. As it says in Pirkei Avot:

The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, incised [חָרוּת] upon the tablets (Exodus 32:16).
Don’t read “חָרוּת/incised on the tablets,” but rather “חֵרוּת/freedom was on the tablets.”

Michael Oren’s freedom—after years of serving the Jewish people in a public capacity—has been well-earned. Here’s hoping there are many more wonders to be drawn from his prolific literary imagination.

I’ll be hosting Ambassador Michael Oren in conversation about The Night Archer on my online platform on Thursday, November 12, at 12:00 noon Eastern time. Register here to receive the Zoom link and passcode.

פידלער אויפן דאך—Fidler Afn Dakh: The Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof

We all know the well-worn critiques of Fiddler on the Roof: it’s sentimental, full of caricatures, and frontloads all of its most memorable songs in Act One. More significantly, it romanticizes a world that in reality knew more than its share of misery. Suffering belies the Jews’ dancing on tables with Cossack “brothers” during the song “To Life!”  

Still I love it, and always have felt that the critics protested too much. After all, an antisemitic cloud hovers over the plot, and the population of Anatevka does end up being expelled from the Pale. This musical was never simply one long hora.

Joel Grey’s Yiddish-language production, just closing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and making aliyah to the Theatre District, makes that point clearer than it’s ever been.

Since (the English-language) Fiddler is now more than a half-century old, we can better appreciate the context in which it appeared. Historian Rachel Kranston sees Fiddler as an expression of the “ambivalent embrace” of post-WW2 American Jewry’s flight to the suburbs. While many Jewish families found comfort and economic success, thoughtful Jews of that generation understood that big sacrifices were being made when they left the cities. Jewish leaders worried that with prosperity there would be a spiritual descent, a loss of multigenerational intimacies, and a turn towards political conservatism that comes with not seeing the daily struggles of your neighbors. Fiddler—along with the photo-essays of Roman Vishniac and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Earth is the Lord’s—were romanticizations of the past, signs of a generation sensing that something precious was being lost.

Celebrating Yiddish, too, carries the same risks. The language of the daily life of Ashkenazi Jews for centuries, Yiddish was the primary vehicle of their spirituality, their wit, and their literary character. Unfortunately, Yiddish for many people connotes lazy nostalgia or borsht-belt vulgarity. The author and scholar Dovid Katz upends most of this conventional wisdom in an entertaining history of Yiddish, including the mistaken notion that Yiddish is in decline. The truth is that Yiddish is alive and well and embraces more speakers every year. It’s just that almost all of them are Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jews)—not the sort of mamaloshen that most nostalgists have in mind.

Fiddler on the Roof being performed in Yiddish is a great experience, and aims to restore some of those losses. One thing that always rang hollow was its clunky use of Jewish language. Take, for instance, the “Sabbath Prayer.” No Jew says “Sabbath”, of course; that’s Jewish-in-translation for outsiders peering in through a window. But would any audience have been confused because of the word “Shabbos”? Surely not. Even if Fiddler were being performed by a public high school in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the audience would have understood. So why the coyness?

Same goes with “Torah”—or, better, the Yiddish Toyre—instead of Tevye’s constantly invoking the “Good Book” like a frum John Calvin. In the minimalist set of this Yiddish production, a backdrop with the word תורה shadows the set. At first I thought it was a hokey device—until the culmination of the first act. During Tzeitl’s and Motl’s wedding, Russian thugs vandalize the town and beat up the Jews and, at the scene’s climax, rip the tableau “Torah” in half. It’s an unexpectedly visceral and powerful moment.

Similarly, there’s something restorative about reading the spellings of the names in the playbill—“Motl”, “Hodl”, “Khave”, “Leyzer-Volf”, “Anatevke”—rather than their more familiar, ever-so-slightly Americanized versions.

My grandmother never called the Yiddish language “Yiddish”—she just called it “Jewish.” Which is, of course, what it means. And she had a point. Just as Robert Frost once defined “poetry” as “that which is lost in translation”, so too does Judaism in translation lose some of its Jewishness.

Language means everything in Judaism. “The Sabbath” is not “Shabbos”, “the Good Book” is not “Torah”, “charity” is not “Tzedakah”, and a “house of worship” is not a “shul.” The Yiddish Fiddler restores so much of this to the rhythms and cadences of songs and dialogue that have entered our vernacular.

Despite a half-century of rabbis’ and scholars’ gripes about Fiddler, I’ll keep going to see it forever. It is a Jewish-American landmark, and deservedly so: There is just so much memory of Jewish pain coursing though its veins. But Yiddish is the most effective vessel of that pain and that memory, and having seen Fiddler in Yiddish, I don’t think I’ll ever again enjoy English versions of the play quite as much.

Philip Roth: An Appreciation of the Wicked Child

I am one of the Exiles of Newark, New Jersey.

My father was raised on Goldsmith Avenue, became a Bar Mitzvah at Young Israel, and went to Weequahic High School, class of ’59. His mother was born in Newark; both she and my grandfather spent their careers teaching in the Newark public school system. My great-grandparents’ graves are in Newark, in the McClellan Street cemeteries.

No doubt I would have been there too. Except that, to bastardize the words of Agnon, through a historical accident—the upward mobility of postwar Jews, the riots of 1967—I was born in one of the villages of the Diaspora.

The Old B'nai Jeshurun building in Newark, now Hopewell Baptist Church.

It always struck me that Newark must have been one of the most extraordinary communities of the American Exile. All the currents of Jewish life in early 20th century America—socialism, Zionism, Reform, Orthodoxy, Yiddish culture, labor—flourished in its environs. In 1948, nearly 60,000 Jews lived in Newark[1], served by scores of synagogues. The caliber of rabbis, cultural figures, political leaders, labor and social justice advocates, business leaders, and philanthropists that emerged from that place is astounding. And it disappeared so incredibly quickly.

But Newark endured in the stories of Philip Roth, and for that reason I always took Roth’s writings personally. As he dissected the psyche of the city and its expatriates, I told myself I was discovering my origins. (That’s ridiculously romantic, of course. Like many Jews of Eastern European descent, my family lived in Newark for barely two and a half generations. But we’ve got very little to go on about the Old Country—the shtetlach and hamlets that were annihilated by the Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, et al—so Newark is all I’ve got.)

Roth left Newark, but wouldn’t leave it behind. Newark—with its concentration of Jews anxious to become optometrists and entertainment lawyers and accountants; its polio terror and stickball in the streets; its racial tensions and Nazi paranoia—was a prism through which he wrote about America.

Now that Roth is dead, the American Jewish community can start doing what it always does: remaking him in our image. Which is rather a shame.

Because Roth at his core was the wicked child of the Seder. He dared to fling our pieties in our faces and say, “Yes—but what does all this mean to you?” Starting with Goodbye, Columbus and running like a crimson thread throughout his work, he satirized and criticized the Jewish community as only an insider could.

Consider his devastating short story, “The Conversion of the Jews” (1959). Ozzie Freedman is a bored Hebrew school kid of the sort that the Coen Brothers captured so perfectly in the movie A Serious Man. He is punished by the rabbi and other authorities for asking “dangerous” questions, the kind that the wicked child asks. Ultimately Ozzie ends up on the roof, threatening to jump unless the Rabbi and the adults answer the question that got him rebuked in the first place: “Do you think that an almighty God could make a child without intercourse?”

It’s so perfect, because Ozzie found the exact question to prick everyone’s sensibilities: the rabbi’s platitudes, the newly-emancipated liberal Jews’ boundaries with their Christian neighbors, and of course the sexual obsessions which Roth would explode in Portnoy’s Complaint.

Or consider his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. The narrative itself is outrageous. A famous Jewish writer named Philip Roth discovers that some nutjob has taken the alter ego “Philip Roth” and is spreading the gospel of “Diasporism,” leading Jews out of Israel and back to Europe—an antisemitic fantasy!

But here’s the rub: like any great critic, Roth knew intimately the subject he criticized, which ultimately rebounded back on himself. If he mocked Israel as a modern Jewish shibboleth, Operation Shylock also shows a deep intimacy with its people, its culture, and its totems. For instance, his true (not fictional) dialogues with Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld in the book (Appelfeld died just this past January) reveal sensitive insights about what, exactly, Jewish identity means at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Ultimately Roth’s subject wasn’t Judaism, it was America. He asked: Why shouldn’t the Jewish lens be as valid as any other lens through which we can understand America? After all, Faulkner wrote about America, but through the perspective of the American South. So did Steinbeck, via the western frontier. So did Ellison, and Kerouac, and so on. America is big and complex and refracted into a thousand hues. Who’s to say that America’s freedoms and dysfunctions aren’t perfectly represented through the eyes of Bucky Cantor, a Newark playground director terrorized by polio (Nemesis, 2010)? Or Coleman Silk, the classics professor who gets caught in the wheels of the political correctness machine (The Human Stain, 2000)?

Or, for that matter, Roth’s masterful creation Swede Levov, the protagonist of American Pastoral (1997)? His name is the perfect encapsulation of Roth’s work: a Newark Jew who marries a (shiksa) beauty queen, flees to the Jersey suburbs, and expects that his Nordic looks and nickname will help him shed his history. But the shtetl, and the past, is as present as his surname.

America does fascinating things to the identities of its immigrants and their descendants. Those complexities are more than enough to stake a career on. We were blessed to be of a generation that had such an articulate master to challenge our assumptions and satirize our self-righteousness. If we grapple with Roth seriously, we will understand ourselves better—because it will be much harder to hide.

[1] William B. Helmreich, The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and Metrowest, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999, p.30.