Ruchama King Feuerman's Blog, page 2

Exploring the Hassidic and the Kabbalistic

Hey! I'm on Jewish TV with Joseph Berger (religion reporter, New York Times), he covering the Hassidic, me the Kabbalistic. (Among other things, I talk about a proposal I received -- ages ago -- from a wild kabbalist.)

Click here to listen.

Why I like Writing about Older Singles, Failed Men & Other Stuff

Journalist Michael Orbach asked me a few questions for "Jewish Action" and I thought I'd share the Q&A:

Q: Was it difficult leaving Israel?

A: I remember my last day there, I felt like my stomach was getting ripped out of me. I’ll put it this way: In Israel whenever I got in someone’s daled amos, their four cubits of space, I could almost hear a song under the breath. There was this uplift, this musicality that was thrumming through Israeli life. When I came to America it felt a lot saner but there was just so much less beauty. I didn’t feel that underlying spiritual bass rhythm.

Q: Both your main characters seem flawed. What is it that attracted you to write about them?

A: I think that, if I’m honest, I’m very attracted to writing about failed men. Men who are on the verge; Isaac is the almost person: he almost became a rabbi; he almost married the woman of his dreams; he almost started a yeshiva. [I’m interested in] people who strive but are not quite there. People who are successful don’t always strike me as interesting. They’re not in a state of yearning because often a person who is successful has already arrived, at least in his or her own mind, and so they’re just boring to me, fairly or not.

That’s why I’m also attracted to singles, especially older singles. They’re in limbo, not there yet, whatever ‘there’ means.  Read More 

Why I like Writing about Older Singles, Failed Men & Other Stuff

Journalist Michael Orbach asked me a few questions for "Jewish Action" and I thought I'd share the Q&A:

Q: Was it difficult leaving Israel?

A: I remember my last day there, I felt like my stomach was getting ripped out of me. I�ll put it this way: In Israel whenever I got in someone�s daled amos, their four cubits of space, I could almost hear a song under the breath. There was this uplift, this musicality that was thrumming through Israeli life. When I came to America it felt a lot saner but there was just so much less beauty. I didn�t feel that underlying spiritual bass rhythm.

Q: Both your main characters seem flawed. What is it that attracted you to write about them?

A: I think that, if I�m honest, I�m very attracted to writing about failed men. Men who are on the verge; Isaac is the almost person: he almost became a rabbi; he almost married the woman of his dreams; he almost started a yeshiva. [I�m interested in] people who strive but are not quite there. People who are successful don�t always strike me as interesting. They�re not in a state of yearning because often a person who is successful has already arrived, at least in his or her own mind, and so they�re just boring to me, fairly or not.

That�s why I�m also attracted to singles, especially older singles. They�re in limbo, not there yet, whatever �there� means.

"Saving Mr. Banks," and the psychic burdens children carry

Oh, the things you'll tell a blogger you've never met that you wouldn't tell your mother or friend.

Deborah Kalb asked how I came to write about a certain character in my novel. Here's what I answered. " Then there�s Mustafa, an Arab janitor on the Temple Mount with a horrible case of torticollis � his neck twists permanently over one shoulder. Somehow this man so different from myself wandered into my creative unconscious and I had no idea why.

But then I recently saw the wonderful movie, "Saving Mr. Banks," and it touched so many chords in me. It becomes clear that Travers wrote Mary Poppins to save her talented drunk of a father. She carries the psychic burden of her father�s failures and it weighs heavily on her. My father�s life, his struggles, also weighed heavily on me. Like Mustafa, he suffered from a strange physical deformity � he was missing an ear from a car accident as a child.

"A crop of superb novels by younger writers keen to edge their fading elders from the spotlight"

I'm happy my novel was included in the Wall Street Journal's overview of the best novels of the year. It's a provocative article. Here's the link, but if you're not a WSJ subscriber, I cut and pasted it below.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/S...

The Year in Fiction 2013
A crop of superb novels by younger writers keen to edge their fading elders from the spotlight.
by Sam Sacks

Nothing better encapsulates the state of fiction at the end of 2013 than the hoary motif of Father Time and Baby New Year. On one side are the old, the established, the reverenced; on the other, the young and fresh-faced, squalling for recognition and eager to nudge their elders from the spotlight. They will do it soon if the past 12 months were any indication.

No reading year is without disappointments, but it's noteworthy that in 2013 almost all of them came from A-list novelists whose books failed to warrant the attention they attracted.

The Accidental Holy Man --

That's the tagline to the Wall Street Journal Review of my novel. I nearly burst out laughing. But which character is the reviewer referring to: Isaac, the haberdasher and would-be rabbi, or Mustafa, the garbage picker and keeper of the Temple Mount? Maybe both.
(I'd give the link but you need to be a WSJ subscriber).
Book Review: 'In the Courtyard of the Kabblist' by Ruchama King Feuerman
A Lower East Side clothier decamps for Israel and ends up dispensing kabbalistic advice to eager supplicants.

By BARTON SWAIM
Dec. 13, 2013 3:11 p.m. ET
'A month after his mother died, Isaac Markowitz, forty, plagued with eczema and living on the Lower East Side, sold his haberdashery at a decent profit and took an El Al flight to Israel." So begins Israeli writer Ruchama King Feuerman's second novel, "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist." In the Holy Land, Isaac finds work as an assistant to a kabbalist rabbi, who (to oversimplify) uses esoteric and unconventional Talmudic readings to deal with a variety of human problems.

Ms. Feuerman vividly catalogs the supplicants who crowd the holy man's courtyard in Jerusalem: "homemakers, unemployed Israelis, yeshiva students, a concert pianist who hiccupped excessively and couldn't play anymore." To each of these the rabbi is able to convey exactly the appropriate spiritual remedy. When he dies, the people keep coming for counsel, and Isaac, who isn't even a rabbi yet, has to somehow take his place. What sort of wisdom can he impart to a portly rabbi who confesses to hitting his children, or to a Hasidic teenager with severe acne? He has no clue, but somehow he cobbles together some satisfactory bit of insight for each. His greatest challenge, however, comes from an Arab boy.

Mustafa is a janitor on Jerusalem's Temple Mount—the site of the Western Wall of the Second Temple and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Horribly deformed, the boy is shunned by his own community. ("Don't stand out in any way or bring attention on yourself," a relative had once told Mustafa. "It would be like drawing attention to a mistake of Allah.")

In return for a small act of kindness from Isaac, Mustafa presents him with an ancient pomegranate engraved with Hebrew lettering. Mustafa has found the pomegranate while helping with renovations that the Arab authorities have undertaken near the dome; the Arabs had intended the pomegranate and other Jewish relics for the landfill.

The gift only brings trouble. Isaac is outraged that the Arabs are trashing the artifacts they find. The Israeli security forces in turn suspect Isaac of fomenting trouble among the "crazy mountain faithful" and "black hatters," as one officer calls Hasids and Orthodox Jews.

All this takes place in the late 1990s, as the Oslo Accords are beginning to unravel. The Israeli authorities, worried that Isaac's fervor for rescuing the artifacts might spark a security incident, detain him in jail. Mustafa, meanwhile, is finding more artifacts and devising ways to smuggle them off the Temple Mount and bring them to Isaac.

"In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist" is a deeply conservative work—in the broadest sense of the word. Its overarching theme is the value of work, even or especially lowly forms of work. Isaac has done well, financially, selling clothes, but he is unhappy until he finds work serving ordinary people in quiet and unremunerative ways. Mustafa's disdainful attitude toward his own work completely changes when he finds that his janitorial duties are in some ways akin to those of the Jewish kohen, or priest—a keeper of the temple. When his fellow janitor Hamdi remarks, "My brothers laugh at me and say it's donkey work," Mustafa responds nobly: "Well, it would stink here without us."

NYRB Lit, the e-book's publisher, deserves praise for bringing out "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist." Ms. Feuerman's novel hasn't even been published in the writer's home country. I don't know anything about the Israeli book market, but it says nothing good about the American one that this book has not garnered more attention.

It's a sophisticated and engaging book. Moreover, it treats an endlessly tangled topic—relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews—with intelligence and originality. The narration seamlessly moves between Isaac and Mustafa, and the author brings the work's interwoven stories to a brilliant climactic end.

The novel lacks two important elements, however: cynicism and irony. Isaac's love is real love, Mustafa's self-realization is never undercut by "capitalism" or religious hypocrisy, and in this novel death isn't some pointless consequence of racism or war but a heroic expression of friendship. If there's any cynicism here, it's the cynicism one feels toward a publishing industry that has failed to recognize a manifestly terrific novel.

"The Accidental Holy Man" review of "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist" in Wall Street Journal

(I'd give the link but you need to be a WSJ subscriber).
Book Review: 'In the Courtyard of the Kabblist' by Ruchama King Feuerman
A Lower East Side clothier decamps for Israel and ends up dispensing kabbalistic advice to eager supplicants.

By BARTON SWAIM
Dec. 13, 2013 3:11 p.m. ET
'A month after his mother died, Isaac Markowitz, forty, plagued with eczema and living on the Lower East Side, sold his haberdashery at a decent profit and took an El Al flight to Israel." So begins Israeli writer Ruchama King Feuerman's second novel, "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist." In the Holy Land, Isaac finds work as an assistant to a kabbalist rabbi, who (to oversimplify) uses esoteric and unconventional Talmudic readings to deal with a variety of human problems.

Ms. Feuerman vividly catalogs the supplicants who crowd the holy man's courtyard in Jerusalem: "homemakers, unemployed Israelis, yeshiva students, a concert pianist who hiccupped excessively and couldn't play anymore."

What does a kabbalist eat for breakfast?

Once upon a time, a person could easily make reference to a rabbi, maybe a rav, and maybe even a rebbe, but a kabbalist?

In Jerusalem, a kabbalist is as common as a plumber. Everyone knows what you’re talking about. In the holy city, the lexicon of magic, amulets and incantations are as real as the corner drugstore. You have a cold? Go to a kabbalist. You have a problem in religion? Go to a kabbalist. You want to marry a man? Go to a kabbalist, he’ll help you.

For the past seven plus years I’ve been swimming in kabbalists, collecting true tales from whoever visited with these mystic figures and rebbes. It was research for my novel In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist. Of course, I had my own set of kabbalists I’d met during the ten years I’d lived in Jerusalem, but oddly my experiences created a writerly static in my mind. To construct a fictional kabbalist, I needed to start from scratch.

Someone told me about a kabbalist who predicted he’d win a good chunk of money and he did, only to spend it all on expensive dental surgery the following week. Then there was the kabbalist, quasi-prophetess who directed someone to the exact place where she would meet her bashert, at a silver factory in Givat Shaul. (I don’t recall if she went or not.) A Hasidic man told me about a kabbalist he’d consulted with who said a special prayer whenever his non-religious brother was on the verge of getting married to a non-Jewess. Break-ups always followed shortly after.

I heard stories that could blow the socks off your feet. Listening to them, I felt like I was living in an alternate reality. Reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon: A writer says, “It must be winter because my characters are starting to wear mittens again.” Me, I knew I had to be in Jerusalem, because my characters were taking Egged buses, spitting sunflower seeds and visiting kabbalists in Geula.

After awhile, though, even these wonderful tales began to make me feel, well, impatient. None of them were what I wanted – and I had no idea what I wanted. All I knew was, they didn’t bring me any closer to my elusive fictional kabbalist.

Well, maybe I was asking the wrong questions. I switched to: Did your kabbalist ever say something, speak words that caused some major shift to happen in you? What was it?

Here people fell silent. It was hard to dig, to find something.

Then a teenage girl told me how once her nose was stuffed – no, plugged so badly she could barely speak for weeks. After she met and talked with the kabbalist, a strange thing happened. She told me her nose unplugged. She seemed embarrassed that her story was so silly, so trivial. I don’t know why, but this hit a chord within me. A man who could cause nasal passages to open, such a man – and story – I could believe. A baby miracle. Nothing too grandiose. The fog surrounding my kabbalist lifted a tad.

Another woman told me that her baby was overdue and she was terrified she was going to have a Caesarean. The kabbalist reassured her it would be a regular birth. “It will come out, it will come out, it will come out” – zeh yetzei, he said, in Hebrew. She was comforted, but why had he said it three times, she wondered. A few days later, she was on the birthing table trying to push the baby out for nearly two hours. The Caesarean team surrounded her. At one critical point, the team gave up. The doctor said, “It won’t come out,” the anesthesiologist said, “It won’t come out,” and the surgeon said, “It won’t come out.” The woman looked at all three of them and just then realized why the kabbalist had said “zeh yetzei” three times. She burst out laughing, a deep upwelling that came from her very womb, and the baby slithered out in one whoosh. I didn’t use that story in my novel, but it too helped me see the kabbalist more clearly. It had a bit of earth and a bit of heaven in it, of this world and beyond, the right balance. Too much heaven made me leery. No – too many miracles made me leery.


And if I, a believer, was leery of miracles, then a modern skeptical reader would certainly gag on such fare.

I began to pose different questions. To someone who knew a kabbalist very well, I asked: What did he like to eat for breakfast? Did he enjoy music? What kind? What books – if any – did he keep in the bathroom? What did he talk about with his wife? Did he wash the dishes? How did he treat the cleaner who did sponja? To others, whose encounter was brief, I asked for hand gestures, facial expressions, what he wore, detailed descriptions of his beard, his hands, the timbre of his voice. Basically I treated him like any old character I was trying to capture.

Slowly, slowly, like the magazine puzzle pieces the character Truman puts together of his beloved, the kabbalist picture began to fill. I loved each precious detail that came my way. But often the person telling the story would say, in half-annoyance, “But this is nothing! I have the most amazing miracle to tell you!” And she would begin to pour forth.

Try, just try to stop someone from sharing her miracle story. Even still, I would hold up my hand — as if I could halt a waterfall — and say, “Please, please, no miracles.”In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist

What does a Kabbalist eat for breakfast?

Once upon a time, a person could easily make reference to a rabbi, maybe a rav, and maybe even a rebbe, but a kabbalist?

In Jerusalem, a kabbalist is as common as a plumber. Everyone knows what you�re talking about. In the holy city, the lexicon of magic, amulets and incantations are as real as the corner drugstore. You have a cold? Go to a kabbalist. You have a problem in religion? Go to a kabbalist. You want to marry a man? Go to a kabbalist, he�ll help you.

For the past seven plus years I�ve been swimming in kabbalists, collecting true tales from whoever visited with these mystic figures and rebbes.

Kosher Soup for Ramadan & Other Tales of My Mother's Moroccan Childhood

The Bergen Record was coming to my house to do an interview for my new novel. You�d think after having spent years and years writing this book, I�d have imagined this moment, prepared for it, I�d have my patter down, my lines. Ten minutes before they came, I called my husband. �Quick,� I blurted, �tell me again why I wrote this novel.� My husband, a psychoanalyst, replied, �Tell them you wrote it to be closer to your mother.�

I rolled my eyes, laughed, and then I thought, hey, there�s a shtickel bit of truth here. In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist features a Muslim Arab man. My mother grew up in Casablanca, Morocco, which technically also makes her an Arab, even if she�s an Arabic Jew. Here�s the thing, though. Whenever friends meet my mother, they can�t believe we�re even remotely related. She can belly dance with the best of them and hunt down bargains and tchotchkes with a terrifying zeal. In her seventies she is still noticed, still the Casablancan glamour queen. In contrast,