Recently, I interviewed the writer Nathan Englander about his novel Kaddish.com, whose protagonist is a lapsed Orthodox Jew who lapses back. Englander finds this religious back-and-forthing eminently understandable. “I don’t think I was born to be Orthodox,” he said, “but I don’t think I was born to be secular. I struggle on my nonfaith the way other people struggle on their faith.”
To Leo, loving God is abstract, and thus impossible. To Surie, loving God is granular. The rules of Hasidism serve to remind her that God is present, as tangible as her unborn children. In Goldbloom’s hands, these rules double as constant moments of obedience, which, as the novel progresses, turn into tiny moments of choice.
Goldbloom can do this precisely because Surie follows Hasidic rules. Surie would be far less motivated to help the wives of Williamsburg if she were ambivalent about remaining one. But Surie loves her faith. She loves the rules that have made her life holy, but accepts—slowly and painfully—that they mean less because they made Lipa’s life hell.
By Goldie Goldbloom Farrar, Straus and Giroux
