The Beautiful Possible (25 page)

This novel owes its existence to many books, teachers, and conversations. I discuss some of these influences in the “Books Within the Book” essay in the P.S.™ section, and offer particular gratitude to the late Alex Aronson, whose journery inspired Walter’s story.

Much appreciation to my insightful and intuitive editor, Jillian Verrillo, for her vision, generous work, and advocacy; to Terry Karten for inviting me on board; and to everyone at HarperCollins, especially Amy Baker, Dori Carlson, Cal Morgan, Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, Marry Sasso, Nikki Smith, and Sherry Wasserman; with thanks to Katherine Haigler for her astute copyediting. I am grateful to my dynamic agent, Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency, and offer special thanks to Ilana Kurshan and Deborah Harris for their comments and support.

Thank you to the scholars who answered my questions: Francis Nicosia (Berlin), Peter Schmitthenner and Stephen Legg (Bombay), and Rabbi Morton Leifman (who shared anecdotes
about JTS in the 1940s). My gratitude to readers of early drafts: Richard Greenberg, Sarah Heller, and Lisa Feld, with special thanks to Leah Strigler for her historical lens and multiple readings. I am indebted to my longtime cherished reader, Laura Glen Louis, whose generous and sage advice saved this novel (and me) more than once.

I am grateful to my teachers: Reb Mimi Feigelson, who first introduced me to the teachings of the Ishbitzer Rebbe, and Rute Yair-Nussbaum, whose illuminations helped me understand how Hasidic ideas and literary fiction could share a common language. Thanks to cartoonist Jennifer Berman for permission to use the Velveteen Rabbi, and to Rachel Barenblat for giving the term new life.

Thank you to the Bronx Council on the Arts for generous financial support, to the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education for providing a gracious home for learning, and to my friends at the Rabbinical Assembly and JTS who invited me into their circle and gave me a front-row seat to their scholarship. I am grateful to my chavrusas Susan Kaplow and Jill Minkoff and to my Rosh Hodesh group for conversations about all things Jewish and feminist. And thanks always to Laura Paradise.

This novel owes a debt to the memory of my father, Eli, whose unfinished journey seeded a legacy. Much gratitude and love to my mother, Edie, for providing a house overflowing with stories; to my siblings, Jane and Michael; and to my extended tribe.

Finally, all my love and appreciation to my husband, Ralph—best reader and best friend—and to our sons, Eli and Ezra, for their many kindnesses.

Meet Amy Gottlieb

AMY GOTTLIEB
IS
a graduate of Clark University and the University of Chicago. Her fiction and poetry have been published in many literary journals and anthologies, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. She lives with her family in New York City, where she teaches and writes.
The Beautiful Possible
is her first novel.

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.

The Synagogue at the Edge of Macondo

I
N THE LATE
1950s, my parents bought a house in East Meadow, Long Island. There wasn’t a synagogue in walking distance, so they joined forces with a handful of neighbors and started one. This fledgling synagogue grew in sync with my childhood: When I was a baby the small congregation gathered in a drab green tent; when I was a kindergartner we assembled in a split-level house; and when I was old enough to attend Hebrew school we had moved into a brick building fronted with glass. Its classrooms were where I first visualized Lot’s wife rendered into a pillar of salt and the Israelites dancing around a golden calf. My friends and I would practice our first kisses in the synagogue bathroom, sample our first cigarettes in the stairwell, and spy on our neighbors in intimate moments of prayer—or gossip—in the sanctuary. I often thought of this synagogue as a palace of guarded secrets, but I eventually outgrew its relevance. I wanted to become a writer, and the Judaism of my childhood couldn’t compete with my literary aspirations.

As a teenager, I looked to literature to teach me the language of the soul. My dog-eared copy of
The Book of Nightmares
by Galway Kinnell taught me about poetic transcendence in the face of mortality. I turned to Colette’s novels to appreciate the vocabulary of physical desire. When I discovered Virginia
Woolf in college, I identified with her stalwart atheism yet held a deep spiritual reverence for her fiction.

When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love with Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and enrolled in graduate school, as I somehow believed that studying comparative literature at the University of Chicago would reveal the hidden aspects of Macondo, García Márquez’s fictive city of mirrors. (As a naïve and idealistic young writer, I didn’t quite get the irony of this scenario.) I wanted only to pave a life that would allow me to worship the books I loved and, in time, write novels of my own.

While dissecting Latin American novels and slaving over critical theory during that cold Chicago winter, I craved a diversion and wandered over to the Divinity School, which housed a glorious labyrinthine bookstore and a decent coffee shop. I was quickly welcomed into juicy discussions about ancient fertility cults, everyday mysticism, and the eroticism of the Song of Songs. (My childhood Hebrew school had obviously left out all the good parts.) I took classes with religious historians Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricouer, and identified with what Thomas Merton referred to as the “ingrained irrelevancy” of monks and hippies and poets—marginal seekers whose lives are defined by a quest for meaning.

I eventually left academia to pursue
fiction writing, and moved to a one-room studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was a magical time: I wrote my first publishable short stories in a single room with a dial-free phone that rang only when my elderly neighbor called to tell me she had laid out tarot cards and had discovered a revelation about my future. (She correctly predicted I would marry my husband.) Without a kitchen, I invited friends for gourmet meals prepared in a single electric pan, and I washed the dishes in the bathtub. One night when I couldn’t sleep I examined my bookshelf crammed with literature and criticism, and realized I owned two Jewish books: the small white prayer book I had received for my bat mitzvah and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
Collected Stories
. I had no interest in prayer, so I started reading Singer.

I soon found my way to the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, and other Hasidic masters, and discovered a faith-based language that made sense to me, not as a rabbi or scholar but as an iconoclastic Jewish seeker. From study halls, yeshiva classrooms, and synagogues of many stripes, this quest took over my life, and on the way allowed me to make a living as a Judaica editor.

For fourteen years, I worked as director of publications for the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. I spent my days in a spacious book-lined office at the Jewish
Theological Seminary; from my window I would gaze at the statue of Gabriel blowing his trumpet atop Riverside Church. I was immersed in editing liturgy, theology, biblical scholarship, and a palette of spiritual writing, and received an extraordinary education. I had an insider’s view of the complex lives of rabbis and their families—in the words of my characters, “the impossible holiness trade.” I was also given a glimpse into the Seminary’s history and was often regaled with stories about the days when Conservative rabbis referred to one another as “gentlemen and scholars,” long before women were permitted to join the rabbinate and the shifts in American Jewish life demanded new paradigms for spiritual leadership. As the consummate outsider—a writer working a day job—I could naturally imagine a stranger like Walter passing through the Seminary and began to ponder the threads of what became
The Beautiful Possible
.

The relationship between an author and her characters is ultimately steeped in mystery, and I am grateful to these fictional beings whose stories allowed me to re-create a fraction of my childhood synagogue and its guarded secrets. In the surreal logic of my literary imagination, my characters brought me to the edge of another Macondo and invited me to pitch a synagogue tent, just like the tent that welcomed Sol and Rosalie to Briar Wood, just like the tent where my own story began.

On Writing Enigma

I
WORKED ON THIS NOVEL
for well over a decade—with many interruptions—though at a certain point I no longer kept track; I simply kept writing within slices of time carved between the demands of a full-time job and family. For most of those years I would awake at 4 a.m. so I could write before the day began, and those hours passed like a living dream. I had never intended for this intimate story to blossom into a novel filled with historical backstory, large sweeps of time, and a medley of texts. I often felt as if I were trying to build a trapeze sturdy enough to support all this weight yet supple enough to allow my story to fly with a semblance of grace.

Ten years is a long interval, and the labor of writing a novel is at odds with the pace of ordinary time. In the predawn hours, scenes may become more saturated and characters more textured, but a writer’s day often begins when she has to abandon the desk, wake her children for school, and leave for work. While I wrote this book, my life had spawned a wealth of responsibilities and many essential joys. I also began to write poetry and explore Hasidic texts, both of which brought me closer to honoring the hidden and the unseen behind the words on the page. The novel demanded that I respect these internal shifts and allow its architecture to make room for theological uncertainty. This proved to be a precarious balancing act, and it sometimes felt as if I were
teetering between poles of subtlety and excess. Just before I dug into a last-ditch attempt at revision, a writer friend sat me down at her kitchen table, reminded me of the central enigma within my novel, and urged me to stay true to my characters’ storylines, wherever they led.

Chekhov writes, “Art doesn’t provide answers; it can only formulate questions correctly.” In many ways,
The Beautiful Possible
is a book of questions. Hidden things—secrets, veiled truths, refractions—dwell at its core. Rosalie, the daughter of an iconoclastic Hasid, accepts that a life of faith is filled with tension and is best lived between the lines. Her unfolding story—from Brooklyn to her blue-tiled bathroom in Mexico—reveals rather than declares. The heart of her belief is not paved by theological certainty but by a desire, in Rilke’s words, “to live the questions.” Rosalie’s truth is expressed in her ambivalence and her yearning, both of which fuel the love story and propel the spiritual flow of the novel.

As the author of the manuscript
The Beautiful Possible
, Maya uses her imagination to navigate the contours of her parents’ braided desires. She is the inheritor of a mash-up of influences, stories, and texts; interpretation is her modus operandi. As a rabbi and novelist, she tries to reconcile the rabbinic compulsion to make meaning with the artistic tenet of “negative capability”—Keats’s
term for the ability to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. In her closing letter to Madeline, Maya writes, “Every story contains the secret kernel of an infinite one,” and then adds that she’s not sure she understands the essence of her own words.
Read this as you wish
, she seems to say,
just as I do
. As I grappled with the enigmatic core of my novel, I wanted to leave room for readers to engage with the story and contemplate its questions, just as Maya does.

A traditional Hebrew phrase
l’dor v’dor
, “from generation to generation,” often seems cliché, but it feels apt for my novel, which begins with a harrowing trauma and ends with Maya’s fulfillment of Sonia’s dream. Because Maya lives, Sonia’s desire is actualized, at least in a mystical sense. This ending is not meant to be a statement on post-Holocaust continuity per se, but suggests the flaws of history. We don’t know what convoluted braid or karmic dance will lead us from the past to the future, but life
is
potential; desire spurs us forward, seeding new stories and fresh questions to ponder and savor.