The Many Shades of Jewish Culture

by

Gillian Polack

I need to re-read Chaim Potok.

My first reading of Potok was very positive. I was about seventeen or eighteen and the worlds he described were exotic and alien. I was impressed by his level of invention and the way he described alienation. I couldn't wait to meet the man.

That summer, there was an arts and crafts and literature camp for Australian Jewish university students in hot, dry Bacchus Marsh. Someone had found funding from somewhere and Potok was the international guest of honour. I wasn’t just going to meet him—I was going on camp with him. I walked around in a daze for weeks, wondering what it would be like. I made sure I had My Name is Asher Lev and The Chosen both re-read and packed. I was ready.

Before I talk about the very interesting events of that camp, I need to make my own background clear. On paper, Potok and I had similar backgrounds. What I didn't know was that there were two sheets of paper: they had the same words, but the pieces of paper themselves were quite, quite different. I am (or I was then) 100% wholly Orthodox Jewish. I am (and I was then) umpteenth-generation Australian. We kept kosher, but my father worked on Saturdays. Australian Orthodox was different to US Orthodox (it probably still is, but I haven't compared them recently).

I was a typically privileged Jewish undergraduate. I fitted right in at Melbourne University. My privilege was not US privilege. My privilege worked something like this: when I turned up on the first day of university, I did the duty thing (known as ‘keeping Mum happy’) and went up to the Jewish Students’ stall and paid my membership and respects. The President of the society said “Hi, Gillian. My mother and your mother said you'’d turn up. I’m to take care of you.” I was suspicious, and with reason. “Taking care” meant I got put on the committee and did all the lifting and carrying and making things work. It also meant, however, that I got over my shyness quickly and that I was ripe and ready to go on camp.

That camp changed my existence in many ways. It was where an editor asked for my first piece of fiction to go in his magazine. It was where Serge Liberman explained to me how evocative writing could work and how it was perfectly legitimate to stay awake at night wondering about a word. It was where Felix Werder taught me to love Mahler. It was where I found out what a very fine human being John Bluthal is. I did not, however, discover the Chaim Potok I expected to discover.

In defence of Potok, he had a bad case of flu and an even worse case of jet lag. This was at a time when very few people from the US understood Australian culture, which is also important. Additionally, Potok’s sense of privilege was not the same as mine. Nor was his education style. He wanted to talk to us under a tree, him standing and us sitting, cross-legged. He wanted strong listeners and much thought. He wasn’t really comfortable with arguments.

What do you get when you bring a bunch of Aussie students together on camp? Arguments. We thought it was intellectual discourse, because most of us were eighteen or nineteen and sometimes the level of intellectual discourse must have been phenomenal, but often we just argued, amicably. The notoriously pathetic argument was whether we should rip all the toilet paper up in advance for Shabbat, because some of the participants were very frum and others were missing their bacon for breakfast. In the end, that argument was decided hut by hut. Mine went Ultra-Orthodox and my sister’s didn't.

Argument amongst ourselves was fine. Potok understood the need for us to fret out every small idea within ourselves and find out where we stood. We were Jews who had grown up in a very secular world, after all. And we came from right across the spectrum of the Australian Jewish community, so our horizons had gown just by us mixing with each other. The Progressive Jews didn’t know what hit them the Saturday night someone put on Time Warp (the song from Rocky Horror) and twenty-one young Ultra-Orthodox men, in their Shabbat garb, jumped up and did the dance.

Potok didn’t know what hit him when we argued with him. “Excuse me,” I asked once, standing because sitting at his feet under a tree was just not comfortable in 100 plus degree heat, “Can you tell me what your sources were for your Roman history? It’s just that you contradicted something my lecturer said last year.” He looked puzzled and a little affronted. “Suetonius said . . .” I continued.

He walked away. I think mine was the only conversation he actually walked out on (and he was ill, don’t forget, and we were stroppy) but after day three, Chaim Potok jokes abounded. The jokes were petty, but we were undergraduates and not entirely nice, and we found them funny.

He came back a few years later and was much loved. I’ve often thought back, however, to the dynamics of that first encounter between young Aussie undergraduates and Potok. Since then I’ve had the privilege of meeting Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and I can see where he was coming from. His educational technique was different to the ones we were used to. Almost all of us on that camp belonged to a secular world, because this was Australia thirty years ago We might have respected him better if we had understood that.

He was very generous with his time (except for that once, with me, obviously—I think the moral of the story is that if you're going to walk away, make very sure that the person you walk away from never turns into a writer). He was also munificent with what he told us. Not many of us were able to appreciate this at the time: I certainly didn’t.

Despite the fact that he and I had obviously not hit it off, he sat down next to me at dinner. I didn’t mention Roman history and I was scrupulously polite. Also very nervous. What if he walked away again?

The thing that struck me the most was how very Observant he was. Like many of his characters, he was scrupulous in his observance of ritual. I come from a different form of Orthodoxy, so I knew the ritual and observed when others did, but wasn’t fretted if I missed a blessing or two. So I did the full Grace after Meals with him and most of the others had left, and he talked.

He struck me as a very conflicted man. He wasn’t as confident as he had looked, those first few days. Australia had, somehow, pushed him off-balance.

The thing I’ll never forget is what he said about his religion. This is the man who wrote My Name is Asher Lev—one of the great books about internal conflict within a Jewish family. I asked him why he chose a crucifix for the controversial painting.

“There are Jewish symbols,” I said.

I didn’t know then that so many people have told him that. I’d read his books in a vacuum. Unlike Potok, my Jewish education came almost solely from the home: I’d gone to state schools. Where Potok had spent most of his developmental years in Jewish environments, I’d spent mine outside the borscht belt. I’ve had to fight to be Jewish outside the home since I started pre-school, in fact. Our questions about life were different. Our lives were different. This was obvious when Potok said, impatiently, that no, there were no Jewish symbols that carried nearly as much strength as the crucifix. It was a question of suffering.

I kept my mouth shut. I disagreed with him, vehemently, but I also realised that it was his belief in this that caused the cross to work so very well in the book.

That moment taught me something I needed to know about the power of writing and I’ve carried that with me ever since. There are Jewish symbols that are just as powerful as the cross. But these are symbols that have power for me. I’d used them and clung to them when I’d had to deal with problems of non-acceptance and bigotry. If he didn’t feel their power, if his life hadn’t given them to him in this way, then he couldn’t use them. If he had felt them, he would have written a different novel entirely. The deep conflict in My Name is Asher Lev depends on that symbol being so very wrong for someone Jewish.

The conversation moved on while my brain was still processing. Chaim Potok—who had just finished a set of religious activities to formally conclude dinner—then admitted to me that he was probably an atheist. If not at atheist, then at least an agnostic. He did the rituals as an act of preservation and identity.

I was torn by this. It was not something I was capable of understanding.

I didn’t get him to sign the books I had so carefully brought with me. I found I couldn’t. In fact, in a moment of rebellion, I asked John Bluthal to sign them. After all, John Bluthal had told me stories of Spike Milligan.

My excuse now is that I was eighteen then. Now I’m nearly fifty, I think back to how very fortunate I was to have discovered that Potok and I lived on very different planets. How amazing it was that he gave me the key to understanding his writing so quietly, after dinner one night.

I wouldn’t be him, for the world. He was inhabiting a cold universe when I met him. His fiction shows me how he negotiated that chill place. If he were still alive, I’d thank him. He might not have been good with Australian undergraduates in summer camp, but he was without doubt a generous teacher.

Books mentioned in this column:
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok (Anchor Books, 2003)
The Chosen by Chaim Potok (Ballantine Books, 1996) 

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.