Two Jewish books, and writers, that make me proud

It used to irritate me how my mother couldn’t enjoy a book or a painting without first enquiring about the writer or artist: “Is s/he Jewish?” Myself, I’ve never been into so-called “Jewish pride”. Such emotional and linguistic bouquet hasn’t been my way of perceiving the world. I’ve never felt the need to be proud of any of my inherited characteristics. Fond of them, maybe. But why pride? Pride is generally not a virtue I admire, when it is self-directed.

But lately I’ve had to reconsider this position.

Since October 7, the Australian literary world has become obsessed with the same question as my mother, but for different reasons. Is this writer Jewish? Then where do they stand on the Palestine question? (Can you imagine a Chinese-Australian author being asked to publicly declare their stance on Uighurs?) And, increasingly, it’s been more straightforward: Jewish? Then let’s shut them up…

I am not being sarcastic, merely transcribing the new reality. On multiple occasions I’ve heard of Australian Jewish writers being told that “now is not the time for Jewish stories”. The tellers are never the readers, but professional gatekeepers – publishers, literary agents, grant assessors, festival organisers.

This state of affairs runs contrary to the current emphasis on diversity in the arts. Jewish authors, a tiny-tiny minority in this country, are the exception. Not only are we denied representation in cultural conversations, but often the denial is explicit. Some literary publications even make it their stated policy not to publish “Zionists”, meaning Jews who haven’t publicly denied Israel’s right to exist. Meaning most Jews.

The silencing of Jewish voices is particularly terrifying now, at the time when university students chant “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; when leading feminists deny or “contextualise” rapes of Israeli women; when many pro-Palestinian activists are riled by any suggestion that antisemitism might be a serious issue in Australia.

It is precisely now that it feels urgent to get our stories into the public sphere to remind the world of our humanity. While we must keep fighting to get new Jewish books published, we can also draw attention to the great reserves of Jewish books that already have a proven appeal to broad audiences.

In this spirit, I’d like to recommend two books that do a great job of “re-humanising” our tribe. These suggestions are in no way “the best” but reflect my whimsies and obsessions.

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel

Chekhov isn’t the only Russian writer who “owns” the short story genre. There is also Isaac Babel. I read him first as a child when, just like him, I lived in Odessa, known as Ukraine’s “capital of humour”. Babel’s small but significant oeuvre, however, was more tragic than comic – particularly concerned with Russia’s bloody revolution and civil war, and antisemitism.

Several particularly heartbreaking stories about the brutality of the Red Army, like the famous Salt, imprinted themselves on my psyche, interfering with any flights of sentimentality I otherwise might have been prone to.

Babel’s tales sometimes gave me nightmares, yet I kept reading and re-reading them, because they felt oh-so-real amidst the sugary gaslighting that Soviet literature was. Moreover, Babel’s dark universe was frequently illuminated by the beauty of his language.

The striking imagery and hypnotic beats made even the toughest passages bearable, like this description of Polish Jewry’s dire state in The Tachanka Theory: ‘The prophetic peacock, a passionless apparition in the blue vastness, glitters on brick walls. The synagogue, enmeshed in a tangle of huts, crouches eyeless and battered, round as a Hasidic hat, on the barren earth.’ On

Babel’s pages, the barbaric and the poetic were bedfellows.

But not all Jews in his fiction were victims. There were Odessa Stories that broke the tragic mould. This cycle of stories, where the prevailing mood was comedic, was my first introduction to Jews who had teeth. The characters were gangsters, tough Jews, and I liked them for their flaws moderated by a strong moral code. They were the kind of Jews I sorely needed, being the child of refuseniks, exposed to government-led and individual antisemitism from a young age.

Although Babel wrote through the prism of his “Jewish soul”, he was a universal writer, too, equally at home in French classics and Yiddish and Hebrew texts. He wasn’t known in Russia as a “Jewish writer”. His Jewish criminal Benya Krik joined the Russian literary canon of anti-heroes, and Maxim Gorky, Babel’s celebrated contemporary, described his work as “the best Russia has to offer”.

Yet Babel was also problematic for the state where writers were expected to adhere to socialist realism, a form of writing that photoshopped Soviet reality. During Stalin’s purges Babel, merely aged 45 then, was executed on fabricated charges of Trotskyism and espionage.

Decades later, British translator Peter Constantine described the writer's murder as “one of the great tragedies of 20th century literature”. To date, Babel is read worldwide and many notable writers, such as Grace Paley and George Saunders, have cited him as an influence. Babel’s stories are powerful proof that, no matter what today’s publishers say, Jewish stories can hold universal appeal.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Fear of Flying, which I first read in my twenties, was a revelation. That one could write about tragic aspects of Jewishness, like the legacy of the Holocaust in one breath, and about hot sex in the next, felt real to my experience as well as deliciously sacrilegious, guiding me to create my own writerly map. Gratitude, Erica!

It wasn’t just me who was shaped by this dazzling novel. Fifty-odd years after its release, this unashamedly Jewish book has sold more than 27 million copies in many languages, and is taught in universities as a feminist classic.

In 1973 America, good girls didn’t write about their sexuality, but good-Jewish-girl Jong stunned the public with her frankness about the intensity of female desire with the publication of Fear of Flying.

The protagonist Isadora, whose tale resembles Jong’s life, is a poetess and an unhappily married chronic consumer of psychoanalysis. She entertains a fantasy of wild, non-consequential sex with a stranger for which Jong coined a term that is now a part of American lexicon – the zipless fuck.

She meets Adrian, seemingly the perfect Zipless Fuck, and runs away with him, embarking on a drunken trip around Europe. Yet the sexual excitement Isadora hoped to find with Adrian turns out to be just another path toward misery. As she parts from him, she also frees herself from her conviction that romantic love is the ultimate redemption.

The Jewish girl turned out to be a universal girl. Men everywhere read the book to understand women, women identified with Isadora, and psychotherapists recommended it to their female patients. And as well as being daring, the book had intellectual heft. Henry Miller, in typical self-aggrandising style, called it “the feminine counterpart to my own Tropic of Cancer”. John Updike sang similarly intense praises.

But Fear of Flying is also a quintessential Jewish story. Isadora struggles with her family’s legacy of the Holocaust. She meets Adrian in Vienna, the city that in 1938 banned Freud’s writings because he was a Jew. Being there triggers in her memories from a year she had spent living in Germany, where she researched Jewish history, and witnessed the hypocrisy and denial with which Germany was dealing then with its Nazi past. It was there that she realised that despite her blonde Aryan looks and largely gentile upbringing, the famed Jewish neuroticism was embedded in her too, perhaps passed on genetically.

In the post-October-7 world, Fear of Flying seems particularly important. It offers readers not only entertainment and titillation, but also an experience of the “Jewish condition”, immersion within Isadora’s restless consciousness, where the present awareness is never too far from the dark side of history and the undercurrent of existential anxiety murmurs constantly.

The list of books that contain insights into Jewish lives as well as holding universal appeal is long, but the word count for my column was exhausted a while ago. So I’ll stop here, but not before saying that if you haven’t read these two books, I’m jealous, as reading them for the first time can be a euphoric experience, perhaps akin to a zipless fuck...