The Hebrew Kid and the Apache Maiden
I read this novel by Robert J. Avrech straight through in two hours Friday night. I laughed out loud a dozen times. It is terrific and a much-needed contribution to fiction for religious Jewish kids.
.........
A soldier approaches the frum family.
"You get back to your Cossack friends before I knock your head in, you dirty little sheygitz." Mama lifted a cast iron skillet.
"Please, ma'am, I'm not a sheygitz. My name is Schulman. I'm a landsman. A Jew."
...............
The mother yells at this Indian maiden Lozen. "So you be careful who you call a witch. Let me tell you something, you might scare the goyim with your whoops and hollers and guns and knives, but to me you're just a little shicksah pisher. And a little advice, maidel: you should spend a bit more time on your looks... You think a man is going to want to marry a wild girl? You should be thinking about a shidduch, not riding around like you're on the warpath!"
Mama was practically shouting. Lozen nodded mutely.
............
The book is written from the perspective of Ariel, a 12-year old about to celebrate his bar mitzvah in the Wild West of the 1870s.
It's clearly crafted by an accomplished screenwriter. All the scenes have conflict and move the story forward. Most of the chapters end with a hook that compells you to keep reading. The story often heads in the opposite direction of what you'd expect.
Dialogue is an Avrech strength. His emails are frequently hilarious when he paints his life with spare dialogue.
While Ariel is the book's most sympathetic character, momma and Doc Holliday are the most entertaining.
The book reminds me a great deal of Robert's movie A Stranger Among Us with its romantic view of Jewish mysticism. Both works have lead characters named Ariel who dabble in kaballah.
I love the absurd tensions of an Orthodox family trying to deal with the goyim in the Wild West.
The book comes out of a robust confidence that must flow from Robert's life that Orthodox Judaism is strong enough to tackle the wider world. I believe that Robert Avrech (who comes from a long line of Orthodox rabbis and his son Ariel would've carried on that tradition) is the first Orthodox screenwriter of feature films (with Brian De Palma's Body Double in 1984). In the world in which he grew up, Hollywood was at best foolishness.
So Robert must've learned at his secular college, and at his secular kibbutz in Israel, and in secular Hollywood, how to interact with non-Jews, righteous and otherwise, while maintaining his Orthodoxy.
Robert's life reminds me of My Name is Asher Lev, probably my favorite Jewish novel.
I read The Hebrew Kid for fun, but I reflect on it as an allegory of Robert's journey through the non-Orthodox world.
Like the frum family in his novel, Robert has long strived to practice Orthodox Judaism within a frequently hostile environment.
Avrech is not of the "Yossi Klein Halevi school of Orthodox Judaism," which simply posits that Orthodoxy is the language he learned to communicate with God. Robert is authentically Orthodox (literally means correct belief) in the sense that he truly believes in the Thirteen Principles of Maimonidies, and not just in some figurative sense. I know. I've grilled him on these.
I believe that Yossi and Robert both went to Brooklyn Talmudic Academy, aka Yeshiva University High School of Brooklyn. Yossi writes about it in his Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.
The lead Jewish characters in this novel have meaningful interactions with non-Jews. Their worldview divides people not just along Jew and non-Jew, but most significantly along the lines of moral and immoral. The Jews learn from the goyim and vice versa. The Jews constantly face pressures for which they know no immediate halachic answer, but instead have to search themselves and their sacred texts for direction.
[This is the opposite of the fretful Orthodoxy embodied by Gil Perl and Yaakov Weinstein, graduate students at Harvard and MIT respectively, in their pamphlet “A Parent’s Guide to Orthodox Assimilation on University Campuses,” which warns Jewish parents of the moral and spiritual corruption that awaits their children should they send them to elite secular universities.]
Because they live in the real world, the Jews in the novel sin. They're real. They're not cookie-cutter characters like much religious fiction for teens.
Three years ago, Robert told me he could never write a novel.
Three years ago, Robert didn't have a son who was dying.
As he worked on this novel, Robert used to read portions to Ariel, who laughed when he had the strength.
