Books: Family angst, a synagogue murder and being alone

Sandwich - Catherine Newman (Penguin) family humour

Rachel, aka Rocky, is a woman in her fifties. “She is halfway in age between her adult children and her elderly parents. She is long married to a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says.” We learn all of this in the prologue before the story gets going, with Rocky herself as the narrator.

atherine Newman has set all the action of her novel Sandwich during one week at the slightly run-down but comfortable Cape Cod beach house in Massachusetts where Rocky’s family has vacationed for the past 20 years. It has been the setting of so many treasured memories of her children growing up, of favourite swim spots, local haunts and big cook-ups.

This trip is special. Rocky’s daughter Willa, son Jamie and his girlfriend Maya are there. They’ll be joined by Rocky’s parents. The kids are embarking on lives of their own so who knows how much longer they’ll tag along on family holidays? And her parents won’t be around forever either. Could this be their last golden summer together? 

Rocky has to navigate the family relationships and her changing role within them. All this while facing down menopause, which is “KILLING ME,” she admits. She is frank, fearless and funny about the ravages that time is wreaking on her body. “How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” 

Newman’s story is about being both the parent and the child, the meat in the generational sandwich, told lovingly with wisdom and humour. You get a sense of this in her dedication: “This one is for my parents, whom I love so immoderately.”

Tokyo Noir - Jake Adelstein - (Scribe) True corporate crime/memoir

The title of Jake Adelstein’s latest book, Tokyo Noir, promises a hard-boiled, gritty detective novel, and it certainly delivers. Except, instead of finding our trench-coated Sam Spade character walking the mean streets of Japan’s underworld, Adelstein is doing due diligence for large respectable companies on their potential business partners, to check they aren’t fronts for the yakuza, Japan’s version of the mafia. 

That mainly involves office admin work and chasing paper trails. But when Adelstein has to pound the pavement, he wears his knife-proof vest and takes his unbreakable umbrella which doubles as a weapon. After all, yakuza gang boss Tadamasa Goto, his “personal Voldemort”, has made it known he wants him dead.

In Adelstein’s tale we learn about the corruption at the Japanese power corporation that led to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; discover that the Yakuza’s nimble humanitarian assistance after the Kobe earthquake put the government’s inadequate response to shame; and that just publishing an incriminating photo in the media can get you a kneecapping. It also delivers an ending you won’t see coming, as Adelstein decides to rethink his life as a “daredevil man-whore”. 

This book is a sequel to Adelstein’s 2009 Tokyo Vice, a memoir of his first 21 years in Japan, including his time as a police reporter on one of the country’s largest newspapers, Yomiuri Shimbun, and working for the US State Department investigating human trafficking in Japan. That book has been turned into a TV series which you can watch at SBS On Demand as a teaser or chaser to this read.

The Wolf Hunt - Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Pushkin Press) Psychological thriller

When a young woman is murdered in a synagogue attack in Silicon Valley, the Jewish and expat Israeli community are on high alert for any signs of antisemitism. As the narrator Lilach says, the attack united them, “because even though nothing happened to any one of us individually, something had happened to all of us together.”

It is in this emotionally charged environment that a black teenager, Jamal, dies at a house party attended by Lilach’s only child, Adam. There has been bad blood between the two boys and it’s not long before suspicion falls on the shy, reclusive Adam who, in the wake of the synagogue attacks, has taken up military-style defence classes with the charismatic Uri.

From the opening lines of this novel, the sense of suspense is unrelenting. Lilach is a furious defender of her son’s innocence and is hyper-vigilant about the threats facing her small family. But how much of her speculation is the result of overwrought maternal fear and how much is insightful recognition of the truth? Has she lost her grip on reality? Even after you turn the last page, you will be left guessing.       

A practising psychologist, Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has the professional insight to make the relationship dynamics of this thriller zing. She has received many accolades for her previous novels, including the Sapir Prize and the Wingate Prize.

There is much about Gundar-Goshen’s book which is reminiscent of Hila Blum’s How to Love Your Daughter (reviewed in September) - both, narrated by the anxious protective mothers of an only child about that primal relationship gone awry. And both beautiful and spare in style.

One Day We’re All Going to Die - Elise Esther Hearst (HQ) Humorous Jewish Angst

“‘Your mother was murdered and now she’s dead, darling. That’s what I said to her. Exactly.’”

So opens the debut novel by Melbourne-based author and playwright, Elise Esther Hearst. The words are spoken by Cookie, Holocaust survivor and grandmother of 27-year-old Naomi, the book’s narrator. Cookie, who doesn’t mince words, is recounting her conversation with a dementia resident at her nursing home where everyone “has parents who’ve been murdered”.

Naomi is a dutiful Jewish girl, regularly visiting her grandparents - but secretly hoping they might be unavailable, perhaps asleep in front of a film - and going to her childhood home for Friday night dinners. Even her job, curating at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, shows just how much she has taken on the values of her parents who met at Jewish club at university and honeymooned in Israel.

But for all her efforts at pleasing her family, Naomi is failing. Her love life is a mess of bad dates and bad sex, and the one Jewish man she’s drawn to is her unavailable married boss. Perhaps she needs to break free of her family’s expectations and choose a path for herself. 

Hearst is a sparkling young creative whose work is worth following. She was involved in the excellent stage adaptation of the Bashevis Singer novel Yentl for Kadimah Yiddish Theatre (link to your article?); curated and hosted this year’s Melbourne Jewish Book Week’s opening night gala Of Ghosts and Golems; and with TJI’s Tami Sussman, performs short Instagram comedy skits as Shar and Bar, two South African Jewish mavens. 

The History of My Sexuality - Tobi Lakmaker (Granta) Humorous fictionalised memoir

Meet Sofie Lakmaker, a twenty-something who has grown up in Amsterdam’s trendy Oud-Zuid neighbourhood where only two types of people live: “the nouveau riche and intellectual Jews”. Sofie is definitely interested in the mind - “When I was about 17, I decided I wanted to be a genius” - but she is mostly concerned with the difficulties of being a woman, and wants to be “less girl, more boy”.

Trans author Tobi Lakmaker did, in fact, start out as Sofie, and shares much of his protagonist’s life, including an interest in philosophy. Indeed, the book’s title is a cheeky nod to Michel Foucault’s four-volume study, The History of Sexuality. Unlike that tome, Lakmaker’s writing is the vernacular of disaffected youth. It brings to mind Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye.

Sofie is a detached observer of her life, and her love life in particular. Her first two boyfriends are referred to dismissively as “Walter the Recruitment Consultant” and “Douchebag D”. Even when she moves on to women, she’s still disengaged. She’d rather just sit back and watch sex happen, like at the cinema. “I really hate participating in sex. . . I don’t really care what happens in sex - as long as I’m not there.” 

The novel is full of very dry and sometimes black humour. Sofie dispenses advice and insights such as, “a little tip for first dates: don't go to a Sonderkommando movie” or “promising young men are incredibly exhausting. What exactly they promise, no one knows”.

After re-reading The Trial by Kafka, Sofie is struck by how funny he is. “People are always trying to overcomplicate Kafka, but if you ask me, they just don’t understand him. He was just this guy with no talent for punchlines trying to crack a joke.” Now that’s a thought.  

The Secret Life of You - Kerri Sackville (Panterra Press) Personal development/life advice

During the Covid lockdowns, Australian columnist Kerri Sackville found her life had come to a standstill. Work dried up, likewise dating and socialising, and she felt isolated and lost. “I realised I couldn’t outrun my own company. If I was ever to be okay in myself, I had to figure out how to be alone.”

Sackville’s treatise on the importance and benefits of alone time, The Secret Life of You, delves into the social and psychological research around this topic, as well as looking at philosophical attitudes. As she writes, “Plato offered a very poetic definition of solitude: he wrote that being alone is the condition in which we can think, in which we can hear the silent dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’.”

Sackville’s endorsement of “me time” is definitely not a call for spa treatments and self-indulgence. Nor is it about ‘time out’ of our busy schedules, but rather a call for ‘time in’ our own headspace. She acknowledges that the biggest enemy of solitude is technology and social media, because we can always resort to texting, games apps and internet rabbit holes to block out our thoughts. We fill up our time, reluctant to sit with ourselves, learning to be bored, to muse, to contemplate. 

While she makes strong claims for the value of solitude - the cover of her book says that it can change your life, relationships and maybe even the world - perhaps just the possibility that it will simply enhance your satisfaction with life is reason enough to give it a go as we head into the holiday season and start making New Year’s resolutions.