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August 28, 2009Gila Heller
Special to the Jewish Time
Chandler Burr
Ecco 2009, 336 pages (hardcover), $25.99
In his debut novel, Chandler Burr addresses the controversial topics of intermarriage and assimilation. His protagonist, Anne, is a Christian woman from England, who is married to an assimilated American Jew, Howard Rosenbaum. A fault line appears in their sound relationship when their teenage son, Sam, returns from a trip to Israel coping with the newly acquired knowledge that he is not considered Jewish from a halachic standpoint.
However, this promising beginning sours when Mr. Burr transforms the novel into a platform for his political views.
“The country [Israel] has a poisoned soul,” he writes in Anne’s voice, “an ideology of xenophobia that has traveled forward five thousand years like an unkillable ancient virus…[Jews create] a cultural immunological system of breathtaking strength, a higher moral standard that axiomatically means for everyone outside the tribe a moral standard that is lower.”
Although Mr. Burr establishes Anne as a likable character at the beginning of the novel, the reader loses faith with her when her husband leaves her and she begins to rail against Judaism and the State of Israel.
She blames Jews and Zionists for his sudden distance and refuses to accept that Howard made his own decision to return to his Jewish roots. As her once-thoughtful monologues become pedantic rants, the book’s tone changes from a contemplative work of fiction to a poorly concealed display of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
In Israel, Sam meets an outreach rabbi at the Western Wall and accepts an invitation to visit an Orthodox yeshiva, but is unceremoniously kicked out when the rabbi discovers that he is the child of a non-Jewish woman. Mr. Burr reveals in an author’s note that this experience actually occurred to him many years ago.
Mr. Burr’s prose is occasionally poignant and gripping, yet the novel’s central point is flawed. One man’s rudeness, however it may have hurt Sam (and Mr. Burr), does not justify an unequivocal hatred of an entire religious group.