The Case for Assimilation

...Almost every subject in the novel is "anthropologized" —not only the big ones such as ethnic, religious and tribal identities, men and women, sex and death, and of course Jews, but also nearly every detail that catches Zipporah's (and her creator's) eye, from women's toilets to toilets at highway rest stops...

...Resolving to protect Peter from becoming a public spectacle as his disease progresses, Zipporah sells her fabulous apartment and the couple, joined by Debra, begin their travels in Europe...

...In the course of carrying out his duties he will search for, find and marry Debra, currently living in London with a daughter by Lev...

...Thank God, in the interest of upholding the Seminary's good name, Bert is able to answer...

...The strongest evocations of emotion throughout the novel are accomplished through withdrawal and holding back...

...In the first, we are introduced to the Jewish Zipporah and her Catholic husband, philosophy professor Peter Duffy, and their surviving five children (a sixth, Mickey, died young of meningitis and is tenderly remembered), plus assorted grandchildren, most notably Bert...

...As the title suggests, though, its subjects are the more assimilated members of the tribe, The phrase "Sunday Jews," Calisher tells us in her elliptical, occasionally obscure prose (a style that quite often comes across as a kind of private shorthand), evolved as something of a putdown—"sneering that phrase meant you yourself were still kosher, still the crowd for real...

...But I could not operate...

...Two of these Sundays constitute central and protracted set pieces, developing characters and driving the action forward...

...The two instantly recognized each other as soul mates, though Zipporah has consistently refused to marry him...

...Stop the anthropology now," she admonishes herself...

...All of this often seems less like social science than an intelligent matron's accumulated wisdom of a lifetime...

...It opens in Zipporah's apartment when she is in her mid-60s, and somewhat mysteriously ends there with her death in her own bed at age 96—surrounded, tended and adored by family and friends in a manner that nowadays, unfortunately, comes off as almost a folly of wishful imagining...

...Let us rise then in tribute to Hortense Calisher, born in 1911, for her impressively hefty Sunday Jews, in which all of her signature complexities, idiosyncrasies and pleasures are on full display...

...That evening Nell, one of Zipporah's daughters, lets herself into the apartment to tell her mother she has been diagnosed with breast cancer, but leaves without the soughtafter maternal comfort when she sees Mendenhall naked in her parents' bedroom...

...In truth, when it comes to details related to Judaism (a minyan of "six" men...

...The most admirable one, Bert, a veritable if somewhat pompous prince, is hailed close to the end as "the perfect assimilate...

...Along with acceptance, and its corollary here, assimilation, comes an abhorrence of all perceived narrow-mindedness and exclusionary behavior...

...A Jewish divorce (orget) is difficult enough without throwing in for good measure the humiliating shoe-removal ceremony that is part of the chalitzah ritual of levirate marriage law, not divorce law...

...There are no hard feelings, however...

...The dimensions of the corner master bedroom are noted by one crass character as Zipporah lies dying in it: "Eighteen by—I'd say—twenty-seven...

...New Yorkers will appreciate her truly enviable piece of real estate...

...It is during the first Sunday gathering that we learn Zipporah's husband, diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease, is rapidly declining...

...Gassed, but still breathing...

...At this point Zipporah, now in her mid70s, is embarking on an affair with Mendenhall...

...Soon afterward Lev is murdered, something no one seems interested in elucidating, and Zipporah takes the grieving Debra into her home...

...It takes place a decade later, and is marred by the penetration of unknown vandals who smear blood in the bathroom (another crime that has no follow-up...

...Zipporah had become notorious during a lecture tour in Israel by speaking out against the religious treatment of women, among other issues...

...at best...

...She notes this failure of feeling in one of her musings: "Yet, Zipporah reminds herself, the professional analyzers of society-at-large often have a poor score at tallying the personal emotions, much less identifying those, either in other people or in them selves...

...The highlight of this scene is an unexpected visit by a family friend, the diamond merchant Lev Cohen...

...or to resolve such inconsistencies as one of her sons, Charles, being introduced as an astronomer, then morphing some 300 pages later into a lawyer with Supreme Court aspirations, and ending as a university president...

...She is, rather, a well-regarded anthropologist and author of one book, Images of God, about the varieties of worship throughout the world...

...Zipporah appears to recognize as much shortly after her ruminations on rest stops, while driving down to Maryland to check out the billionaire Foxy Mendenhall, who is about to offer her grandson Bert ajob at his charitable foundation...

...This house is built on acceptance," Zipporah thought while viewing the first Sunday of the book...

...In that regard, the distinguished Hortense Calisher, with her keen and penetrating eye, has not been well served...

...In one scene, a Scottish convert and professor at the "Theological"—as the author refers to the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary until settling on its correct appellation—asks his student Bert if he knows what a get is, a shockingly elementary question...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara,' "Master of the Return," "The Jewish War" In an era when laurels are routinely heaped on the heads of young writers who dazzle us with precocious works of fiction, is it not also right and proper that we give an extended standing ovation to a seasoned author of formidable skill who, in her 91 st year, has come out with her 15th novel (not to mention six collections of short stories and novellas, and two autobiographical works...

...It fosters diversity and growth, along with a concomitant rejection of narrow orthodoxies and intolerances...

...The device of establishing Zipporah as an anthropologist provides the internal justification for numerous pauses for observation and commentary...

...This portion of the book effectively ends with the Catholic Peter's death by a mercy killing in the old synagogue in Venice: When Zipporah steps out to shop for gifts, Debra administers a fatal shot from her ubiquitous medical bag...

...Myself, she broods...

...In the novel's extended climactic scene some 20 years later, surrounded by all who love her (including Nell), we find Zipporah on her deathbed, still venerated, still analyzing and formulating to the very last breath, still "both a domestic woman and a demi-scientist," as she had earlier described herself...

...In a novel that holds up for examination almost every concrete and abstract detail, Peter's morally questionable death is simply allowed to trail off without much curiosity—and, it should be added, without any palpable demonstration of emotion on anyone's part, including Zipporah's...

...Most writers require a diligent editor to rescue them from embarrassments of that sort—from pathos slipping inadvertently into absurdity, from the consequences of their own peculiar predilections, self-righteousness and biases...

...In this instance Bert's oldest brother, who long ago had vanished, is brought to the open house by Mendenhall, but upon witnessing his mother in her characteristic throes of bourgeois material acquisitiveness, he slips away without identifying himself...

...Elise Weil (a near anagram for Elie Wiesel...

...it was impossible for either an anthropologist or a philosopher to believe in God...

...The case for assimilation is further enlarged by a neat flip that the protagonist, anthropologist Zipporah Zangwill Duffy, enunciates early on: "Why is it that we Jews never think of it as us assimilating themV As the book unfolds it demonstrates the payoff from the reciprocal arrangement—Jews being enriched and changed for the better by the culture at large, while enriching and enhancing it in turn—making an interesting argument for the process...

...He is accompanied by an enigmatic woman, a stunning Israeli nurse named Debra wearing her Army shorts...

...The novel spans the closing 30 years of the last century, although hardly any reference is made to the tumultuous events of the period...

...Before they'd slept together that very night," it is reported of Zipporah's initial meeting with Peter, "they'd agreed that...

...Moreover, virtually all of the action is observed within enclosed spaces, mostly inside rooms, seldom out of doors or against events in the world at large...

...with the dressing room, even more...

...Thetitlemayalsobe construed as a reference to the regular Sunday open house Zipporah conducts in her spacious Central Park West apartment...

...Here it is the Upper West Side of Manhattan, specifically assimilated Jews, with special attention paid to the women of this exotic subspecies...

...Calisher is invariably a little off...

...In Calisher's hands, however, assimilation is good...

...who is both his wife and, incredibly, his surgeon, and who amazingly describes her own mother's extermination in this way: "I saw her, you see...

...That's my character flaw, whether or not those close to me have tolerated that, or even been aware...

...Even amid the responsibilities of childrearing, she takes off for numerous forays into the remotest corners of her field, to the unanimous approval and respect of her clan...

...That insular and ironically provincial focus defines Sunday Jews...

...The aspect of her characters' habits and reality that the author records and interprets in perceptive detail is social, rather than personal or political...

...To which the reader, more than once, may mutter a resounding Amen...

...Sunday Jews would have benefited incalculably from scrupulous fact-checking as well as ruthless editing and cutting, not only on the aforementioned subjects, but to weed out such distractions as Zipporah dying in the apartment she had effectively sold three decades earlier...

...The brunt of disapproval is directed at Israel and Orthodox Judaism...

...The fictional territory Calisher has carved out and made her own is New York City...

...The evidence notwithstanding, Zipporah is "the woman they've never dared call matriarch," one of her granddaughters, the doctor who attends her during the deathbed vigil, admiringly notes...

...Bert, already ordained as a rabbi but unable in conscience to practice, is working at Mendenhall's foundation, where the emphasis is on human rights...

...That aversion is given full expression in the account of the sabra Debra's divorce from her first husband, an impotent fanatic known as the "reb...

...or to moderate such preposterous situations as the ailing Scottish professor's visit to Zipporah's last Sunday accompanied by his caretaker, the Holocaust survivor Dr...

...We go to anthropology," Zipporah reflects toward the end, "to learn our own...

...The messiness and elusiveness of emotion is similarly sidestepped in the second Sunday episode, which turns out to be the last one Zipporah ever holds...

...Around 16 at the time, he is an aspirant for ordination as a rabbi who shares his grandparents' deep ambivalence in matters of faith...

...Bert, some 10 years her junior, is instantly fascinated...

...This theme permeates the novel, manifesting itself primarily in the personas of the more engaging characters...