Letty Cottin Progrebin

Book Review: ‘Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate’: Does being Jewish matter?

Pogrebin raises the most central questions about coming-of-age. Who am I? What do I owe my parents? What do I owe myself? Must I live the life others could not?

SJM_Seeking_Cover-0Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

A novel by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

2015, Feminist Press, City University of New York

296 pages   $27.95

When I was sixteen, I dated a boy in my high school. He was smart, good-looking, and pretty nice to me. Only problem was, he wasn’t Jewish. My parents must have noticed but probably decided that giving me a hard time about it would have made the relationship last even longer. My mother was simply going to wait it out. My best friend’s mother was another story. A Polish survivor of the Holocaust, her parenting style was exactly the opposite of that of my mother. She had one daughter — my best friend — whom she considered both a miracle and redemption. I was like a second daughter and therefore subject to the same love and smothering concern. Mostly I loved it and her. Until she sat me down to interrogate me about “the boy.” She had no interest in his fine qualities. He would hurt me, he would leave me, he wasn’t good enough for me — she went on and on, her voice becoming more insistent and she demanded that I end the relationship immediately. The idea that a child of hers — even a surrogate — would date someone who wasn’t Jewish wasn’t an intellectual issue for her. It was simply not going to happen.

So I understand Zack Levy, the protagonist in Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s timely and provocative new novel, Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate, (The Feminist press). He has a problem. He has one foot firmly cemented in the 20th century, filled with the horrors of his parents’ experiences during the war, the dead brother he never knew, the loss, the sadness, and the “promise.” The other foot, well, it’s treading gingerly into the 21st century, filled with joy and struggle, and, of course, breaking the ”promise.”

Pogrebin’s description of Zack’s childhood is both familiar to anyone who grew up around survivors and, to her credit, filled with nuance and details that make Zack’s parents not just stereotypes but real people. “I can’t understand why the two of you keep blessing a God you don’t believe in,” Zack comments early in the novel. “We believe in him,” replies his father, Nathan. “We just don’t trust him.”

Trust is a big issue for Zack as he struggles with adolescence, searching for an identity that makes sense both of his parents’ suffering and his own reality. And always, there is the “promise” lurking in the background and in the foreground. “Remember what you promised me?” his mother Rivka asks on her deathbed. “You’ll do it? You’ll make up for the ones I…” And just as he had promised her on the night before his Bar Mitzvah, Zack promised his mother he would marry a Jew and raise Jewish children.

This beautifully written story takes us through Zack’s attempt to honor that promise, to honor his parents’ memory, and to live his own life, as though that is ever really possible. Pogrebin raises the most central questions about coming-of-age. Who am I? What do I owe my parents? What do I owe myself? Set in the shadow of the Holocaust, these questions have added significance because of an additional burden: Must I live the life others could not?

When his attempts fail and he falls in love with Cleo, an African American woman, the full weight of his dilemma is presented. Because his is not the only tortured past; Cleo has her own ghosts and her own heritage, which Pogrebin honors with sensitivity. Both of them have to figure out what century they are living in and how to honor the one left behind.

Some readers might question whether Zack’s mother had a right to extract that promise and certainly every parent wrestles with how to ensure that the values we hold so closely get passed on through our children. I suspect that whether we are as direct as Rivka Levy or my best friend’s mother, all parents do this one way or another. We bequeath or burden or both, and our children have the task of figuring out what to do with all of it.

What makes this novel work is that it doesn’t settle for easy. But what makes it beautiful is that it is ultimately hopeful—about the journey, about the possibilities, and most of all about love.

Oh, and by the way, I broke up with the boy. He just wasn’t that interesting.

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Letty Cottin Pogrebin will be speaking about her new novel at the Lenox Library, Friday, July 24, at 6:30 p.m.