Marc Estrin

BAR MITZVAH

May 4, 2005

It’s amazing how dumb we can be about ourselves. Or at least how dumb I can be. It took a reviewer of my debut novel, Insect Dreams, to point out to me that I was a Jewish writer. And yet my first novel, Golem Song, still unpublished, had already been on frankly Jewish themes. I’d thought it was just about some crazy guy.

I’d already conceived The Lamentations of Julius Marantz (between us, “Orange Julius” in Yiddish) about a Jewish kid growing up in Coney Island, seduced by the roller coaster and parachute jump into becoming a physicist. And still I didn’t realize I was a Jewish writer. But then some reviewer said so. And then the National Yiddish Book Center invited me to read in their “Jewish Writers Live!” series. That clinched it. I realized I must be a Jewish writer!

But only after they told me. Dumb.

By now, I’ve written a short novel, Tsim-Tsum, about God – YHWH – who lives in a ’96 Hyundai, and is thinking about how to fix creation according to tricks in the Lurianic Kaballah. And my current novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler, is heavily concerned with one young man’s struggle to understand his Jewish heritage.

But in that novel, Edmund Jabès, the great Egyptian-French Jewish poet, instructs Arnold – and me— in the complexity of being a Jewish anything.

To become Jewish,

Jabès says,

you must not become Jewish. One must not enter the Promised Land, never accomplish the task. One must remain exiled — forever, for being Jewish is an expression in the conditional. The distance that separates Jew from the Promised Land is not only exile from the land itself, but exile even from the call — in order to be what is called. It means no rest — ever. It means swimming, swimming, swimming toward a nonexistent end, in order not to sink. Your questions are not to be linked to any answer, but to a vital, gaping breach forever there between the question and the answer.