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December 2000 Issue

Judaism, Dysfunction, and Spelling Bees
Myla Goldbergís Bee Season: A Novel

By Gayle Horwitz

Pity Jewish parents. In the pantheon of cultural stereotypes, they've set a golden standard as neurotic and overbearing, doomed to forever mar the children they love by noodging them into an early grave. This popular--if often exaggerated--artistic scenario is played out yet again in Bee Season, the first novel from 28-year-old New Yorker Myla Goldberg.

The book chronicles a revelatory year in the life of the Naumann clan, a quirky (to say the least) nuclear family of four. For years they've cycled through their lives together, safe in their unchanging personas. Miriam, the mother, is a compulsively efficient attorney whose chief hobbies are penning argumentative letters to obscure magazines and scrubbing the kitchen in the middle of the night.

Her husband Saul is a new-age cantor at the family's synagogue. When he's not leading services on his guitar, he locks himself in his cavernous study to pore over ancient texts of Jewish mysticism. He imparts much of his learning to his teenage son Aaron, who has hoped to become a rabbi since his bar mitzvah day. Relegated to the bottom of the family heap is daughter Eliza, biding her time in a class of fifth-grade students "from whom great things should not be expected."

But the family's rigid structure cracks the day Eliza wins her schoolís spelling bee. For her, the victory is a chance to rise from the ranks of the average, and maybe sit with the smart girls at lunch--but Saul sees the hand of God at work.

Certain that his daughter is a spiritual prodigy who is able to reach a sort of nirvana through the recitation of letters, Saul becomes consumed with nurturing Eliza's skill. By using the techniques of a thirteenth-century Jewish mystic, he promises his daughter, "You're able to remove yourself entirely from your daily life and brush against the limitless."

The titular spelling bees provide a handy backdrop for the author's investigation of the oft-addled parent-child dynamic. Ironically, Saul and Eliza are most functional in spelling bee mode. Together they are a father-daughter duet of achievement and kvelling rights that is, for the most part, mutually beneficial. The message to parents is clear enough: Tell your children you are God and they will believe you; give them room and they will eagerly set out to find their own deities.

Meanwhile, submerged in study with Eliza, Saul practically abandons his son and grows ever more estranged from his wife. Without him, Aaron and Miriam easily drift toward other sources of comfort. Aaron finds shelter in a decidedly un-kosher temple, while his mother slips deeper into a fantasy world that has consumed her since her youth.

There's no real star in this story. Instead, all of its characters barrel along, pursuing their own compelling and distinctly odd futures. The lessons they learn have less to do with the pain of their lives intersecting, than the pain of running parallel--fully visible to each other, but always refusing to touch.

Bee Season makes ample reference to Judaism, mysticism, and spiritual matters, but rarely in a way that's simplistic or doting. Saul, the Jewish die-hard, came to mysticism after one too many LSD trips failed to satisfy his post-graduate curiosities. Miriam, on the other hand, could clearly care less about Judaism in the traditional sense. She forgets that Shabbat exists the one Friday Saul isn't home to prepare the wine and challah, and she rarely appears at synagogue with her family.

Yet her dangerous compulsions are spurred by a Jewish imperative, tikkun olam, the repair of the world. When Saul first teaches her the concept, she "realizes she is a broken vessel pieces of herself scattered everywhere." From then on, her mission is to find those pieces and put them back together.

One of the story's most unique elements is its sensitive portayal of children searching for God. Eliza and Aaron both treat their quests with an earnestness uncommon to fictional youths (although probably not to real ones).

Aaron's search, which begins on a night-time airplane flight at age eight, is particularly affecting. "With each pulse of light the cloud is transformed into something magical," he observes of the night sky. "Aaron wonders if God lives in all clouds or if his plane just happened to pick the right one."

Aaron's investigation continues as he struggles through a terrain of genuine intellectual, emotional, and spiritual longing. His ultimate rejection of Judaism is so pure-hearted and innocent that it's difficult to root for his return to the religion of his father.

Though some aspects of the book verge on unbelievable (neither child has a single friend at school, and Miriam appears never to communicate with any member of her family for much of the book, yet no one seems to mind), Bee Season is still a tremendous read.

With a welcome lack of sentimentality, it coasts through a series of powerful family ruptures that jolt new life into old questions about why we believe what we do and who makes us the way we are. In the end, this Bee packs quite a buzz.

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