A few Jewish words referring to a few ritual baked goods eaten by a few Jews does not a Jewish novel make. Nor does a description of a modestly clad woman with her hair tied back by a long scarf. If the Peter Decker novels wielded some specific charm by virtue of their glimpse into orthodox Jewish life, that charm is gone. Gone too is the charm of an utterly believable relationship of utterly believable characters: husband and wife Peter and Rina. Instead we have an infinitely patient, infinitely wise, infinitely understanding wife who agrees with her husband agreeably, and a pouty teenaged daughter that contributes nothing to the conversation or the scenery but red hair. A police procedural on Prozac.
Tag: Los Angeles
The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman performed by Mitchell Greenberg
Rina Lazarus is a religious woman who cleans the ritual bath, cooks huge Sabbath meals, and teaches Math at a Yeshiva for boys in “Jewtown”, near L.A. She dresses modestly, covers her hair with a kerchief or a wig, and celebrates the Sabbath by hosting huge home cooked meals for the rabbis of the Ohavei Torah community. After a woman is raped while walking home from the bathhouse, Rina finds herself in the middle of a rape investigation, helping the red-haired goy-detective in charge. Peter Decker is enchanted by Rina, who reveals herself to him as a lover of the Book — which is what “Ohavei Torah” means.
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins read by Bernadette Dunne (!)
I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:
This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.
The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.
He became, she tells us,
by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”
And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.
It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.
And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…