MIRIAM COSIC talks to Mount Scopus graduate ASHLEY GOLDBERG about the (mostly) fictional Jewish school graduates at the centre of his first novel Abomination

Abomination, Ashley Goldberg’s first novel, is a startling and impressive debut.

It tells the story of Ezra and Yonatan, best friends at Yahel Academy, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne, which is rocked by sexual abuse.

The abuse, beyond their immediate circles, affects them quietly and peripherally, but sends their lives on different paths. Confident Yonatan becomes a good husband and an Orthodox teacher in his old school, socially awkward Ezra leaves the school early to become an atheist and a public servant.

The two renew their friendship years later - the one, an extroverted rabbi and husband, the other a bureaucrat and drifting lover. 

Alternating chapters between the two boys/men, the novel is a quietly dramatic development between the phases of their friendship, their romantic partners, and their eventual coming to terms with the half-hidden events in their school: the flight of the offending teacher and the slow chipping away by parents behind the official screening of his transgressions.

It is about families, shyness, power plays, the dreadful molestation of children and, indeed, the full repertoire of interpersonal struggles.

Through deft handling on Goldberg's part, is it also a thought-provoker and a page-turner.

Goldberg has been a writer of short stories to date and even those tentatively. He has clocked up publications in New Australian Fiction 2021, Meanjin and Chiron Review, among others.

But he didn’t start writing properly until he moved from Melbourne to Canberra to do a post-graduate degree and he was 35 when he wrote this first novel. He is a slow writer, who wrote a series of short stories for his creative writing thesis rather than a novel.