Sunday Jews
Hortense Calisher
Harcourt, 694 pages, $28
Hortense Calisher has been a fixture in American literature for so long (born in 1911, she has been publishing stories and novels for more than 50 years) that her contribution has been easy to overlook. Her work is equally impressive for the variety of her subjects (ranging from the Deep South to Hollywood to outer space) and the consistent individuality of her style, a subtle, idiosyncratic, sometimes frustrating prose that is inevitably called Jamesian.
Now 90, Calisher has published a weighty novel to crown her body of work. In form, “Sunday Jews” is a traditional family saga: It follows the fortunes of Zipporah Zangwill, a New York Jewish matriarch, and her descendants and friends, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The title comes from Israeli slang: Sunday Jews are those part-time, Diaspora Jews who have allowed themselves to assimilate. And this assimilation, which comes in as many forms as there are Jews, is the novel’s persistent concern. Zipporah married an Irish Catholic, Peter Duffy; her children have pursued a variety of careers, from district attorney to museum curator to university president; her grandson Bertram, the novel’s other focus, seeks ordination as a rabbi but then refuses to take a pulpit. Always, they have at the back of their minds the shaming, resented example of Israel, where Jewishness is beyond dispute, and the contrasting aspiration of America, where every immigrant can be reborn.
The story proceeds at a leisurely pace and is less filled with incident than might be expected in a book of such length. It falls into three main parts. First, in the mid-1960s, comes the decline into senility of Peter, whom Zipporah decides to take on a final tour of Italy with the assistance of a mysterious relative, Israeli-born nurse Debra. Then the novel moves ahead 10 years to find the widowed Zipporah and the idealistic Bertram falling under the sway of reclusive billionaire philanthropist F.D. Mendenhall. Finally there is an episode set in the 1990s, in which the stories of Zipporah, Bertram and Debra find somber resolution.
Along the way there are a few of the devices that usually drive novels forward: secrets, deaths, romances. But Calisher largely scants the pleasures we might expect to find in a novel of this type. Above all, “Sunday Jews” does not seem much interested in exploring how the world works in a certain place and time. From its very beginnings, the genre has had this informational or educational purpose, and the greatest examples of the form leave an indelible impression of a concrete setting: Austen’s rural England, Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Dublin. Calisher’s New York, despite some accurate and evocative writing about apartment life on Central Park West, is far less memorable. The center of her attention, and her greatest gifts, are so far removed from the concrete that “Sunday Jews” lacks a certain sense of reality.
The true focus here is not on New York, nor even on Zipporah, but on Calisher’s own style. This is a highly, perhaps excessively, individual instrument that encounters reality with some hesitation. It is especially ill-suited for dialogue: all of Calisher’s characters sound the same, sometimes to comic effect, as when a 10-year-old British girl and a 19th Century Portuguese Jewish letter-writer speak in the same ventriloquized voice. Its registers can jar, veering from antiquated slang to purple metaphor to long passages of oblique reflection. Very often Calisher seems deliberately to avoid direct statement, euphemizing or skimming over a fact that we only discover later. And the exact timeline of the story can only be estimated; the outer world penetrates “Sunday Jews” so little that it is hard to correlate the characters’ lives with historical events. Even with these flaws, however, Calisher’s style is clearly an achieved thing, a way of seeing the world.
Where “Sunday Jews” succeeds best is not as a tale, an exploration of place, or a reflection on its stated theme of Jewish assimilation. It is, rather, in evoking the life of a large family over a long period. It would be too simple to say that this comes from Calisher’s long life; Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” brilliantly captures three generations of a family, and he was only 25 when he wrote it. But surely Zipporah’s perspective on her children and grandchildren, the mysterious way their personalities persist from childhood to middle age, is partly Calisher’s. And she quite beautifully describes how a family’s common life is built from anecdotes, phrases and opinions woven together over decades. Most moving of all is the novel’s final episode, in which Calisher imagines Zipporah on her deathbed with an uncanny and courageous sympathy. It is a worthy conclusion to a book that may well conclude a worthy career.
