National Yiddish Book Center - Bad Jews and Other Stories by Gerald Shapiro

Bad Jews and Other Stories is a nuanced and comic vision of life, love and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. Cut off from the array of character-building hardships their parents and grandparents endured, unable to reach the safety and comfort of faith because of their inability to believe in much of anything, the characters of Bad Jews and Other Stories meander through the moral landscape of their lives in a kind of loopy navigation of the Children of Israel’s route home. Along the way they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And, as often as not, they find redemption as well as disaster.

Selected Passages

“I’m a lawyer – legal aid for the homeless, mostly.”

There it was – one of those starving-African-orphan jobs! He should have known; in high school Betsy Ingraham had worn her hair long and straight like Joan Baez and played guitar in the yearly variety show; one year she sang “Kumba Ya,” another year “Blowin’ in the Wind.” She wasn’t just beautiful, she was noble too. Spivak could hardly stand it. He bit his lip. “That’s very admirable,” he said.

“I hate it actually,” she said. “Homeless people are pretty depressing. Most of them are crazy. I spend a lot of time talking to people who think that God talks to them through the toilet – that kind of thing.” (p. 13)

I told myself hey, maybe this is progress, this invitation to the Royals game. The fact that Tammy wanted me to get to know her folks had to be a good sign – it meant she thought I was at least presentable, I guess. Like I wouldn’t start smelling bad by the fourth inning, or drool into my popcorn, or anything like that. Maybe the end of her history course didn’t mean the end of us. I thought about that awhile, trying to get some sense of my own feelings.

It was like trying to pick up radio signals from Mars. I heard faint rustling sounds that might have been pleasure, but I couldn’t make out any words at all. (p. 70)

When I was a child in elementary school, every year around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I had to stand up and give a little explanation of Jewish holidays for my class. My teachers meant well, but it made me uneasy, having to do it. Kids stared at me like I was talking about some remote tribe of cannibals in the wilds of Borneo. Their eyes grew wide with alarm as I told them about the Days of Awe – about the Book of Life, in which all names are written; on a certain day, after God considers everyone’s deeds over the past year, He decides who’s going to be written in the Book of Life for the new year, and then once He’s done with that, He shuts the Book (here I’d demonstrate with a textbook, slamming shut my copy of, say, Friends Around the World with a sharp crack), and that’s that – you’re either written in the new Book of Life, or you’re not. One year when I got to that point – I think it was the third grade – a girl in the back of the class began to cry.

I loved that part. (p. 189)

The only person who didn’t seem much impressed with his newfound success was Lenore, his ex-wife, who lived in Spokane now with her second husband, a twenty-two-year-old disk jockey named Roy. Over the five years since their divorce, Lenore had communicated with Rosenthal exclusively through a series of instructive treatises (The Value of Ethnic Identity, or Why You Shouldn’t Be Such a Smart-Aleck All the Time, and Get Over It: How Ken Rosenthal Needs to Shape Up and Stop Being So Angry). The treatises came every three months or so, like quarterly reports. The latest of them, a lengthy manuscript titled So Big Deal: Why Ken Rosenthal Shouldn’t Get Such a Swelled Head Just Because He Got a Prize, arrived just days after he’d discovered the Metcalf’s sign, and Rosenthal spent days puzzling over it. Her prose style suggested late nights and large pots of coffee; the sentences tumbled over one another in a welter of dependent clauses. But the points she made were often insightful, and occasionally even brilliant. The simple unavoidable fact was, Lenore was always right. (p. 227)

Review Essay by Laura Sheppard-Brick

This aptly titled collection of short stories portrays the world of assimilated Jews with both humor and depth. Most of the characters in these stories are “bad Jews”: they date non-Jews, create heretical works of art, and cheat on their wives. Even their valiant attempts at connection with the Jewish world fall flat. On the whole, they are not likeable characters, but they are interesting and nuanced. Perhaps what makes this collection most valuable as a Jewish text is that these characters are not the stereotypical New York Jews that seem to pervade popular culture today, but they are still recognizable as culturally Jewish.

Shapiro begins his collection with “Worst Case Scenarios,” in which we meet Leo Spivak, marketing director for the Flaxman line of products, including the Flaxman Voice Transformer Deluxe, which makes nervous women sound like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird when they answer the phone. Spivak markets this line of products for the paranoid by scaring little old ladies with his worst-case scenarios; “It’s nighttime. Very late – one, two in the morning…. Okay – the telephone rings.” Leo is very good at selling pencils that test the lead content of tap water and special socks that retard the growth of plantar warts, but away on business in San Francisco he meets up with his own worst-case scenario. His high school crush, Betsy Ingraham, passes him on the street, and despite the fact that both are married with children, he convinces her to join him for an afternoon of what he hopes will be passionate, fantasy-fulfilling sex. Things don’t turn out exactly as Leo has planned in his hotel room, or in a visit he later pays to Betsy’s husband, and the story leaves Leo pathetically apologizing to his wife, on the phone, using the now completely useless Voice Transformer.

We next meet Kenneth Rosenthal, who has just won the Rivka Hirschorn Kissner Prize for his series of paintings, “The Twelve Plagues.” Rosenthal has added call-waiting and lack of available parking to the flood and frogs of the biblical stories, and the sponsors of the prize are not particularly pleased with the decision of the independent judges who made the selection. We, the readers, inaugurated into the vagaries of Rosenthal’s Jewish experiences, have more sympathy for his ambivalence for (or perhaps distrust of) the Jewish establishment. Rosenthal recounts his experience when he came home from college having a spiritual crisis. “I think I’m turning into an atheist,” he tells his rabbi who replies, “This is a terrible week for me. God exists. Trust me on this one.” It is not just the rabbi’s callousness, but also the fact that Rosenthal’s family sees Jewishness primarily as a cause of suffering. “When I was a child, we were so poor we ate grass…. I never tasted sugar until I was thirty-one years old. That’s because we were Jewish. Nobody wanted us to have anything,” says Rosenthal’s Uncle Irwin.

Some characters in this collection have a more positive perspective on Judaism. In “The Feigenbaum Foundation,” Stanley and the eleven other Jews of Pinkney, Nebraska (population 4,570) are charged with the creation of a foundation for Jewish culture, Milton Feigenbaum’s reward to the town for a hot meal he once received on his travels through the Mid-West. The foundation is given an initial gift of seven thousand dollars, which they quickly use to hire rabbis for Shabbat, orthodox Rabbi Albert Millstein alternating with reform Rabbi Sheldon Yaffe. They show Fiddler on the Roof, host a lox-and-bagel brunch, and convince the local grocer to stock a small selection of kosher foods. Spurred on by their success – people begin to call out “Good Shabbos” to Stanley as he walks to shul on Saturday morning, and others hum “If I were a rich man” on their way to work – the foundation gets ambitious. When they learn that the Feigenbaums will be returning to check on their progress, they decide to stage a town wide seder. The preparations are heated: the Balabusta Committee puts together the feast, Stanley finds Haggadahs and convinces the Lutheran choir to sing traditional Passover songs, and both rabbis are invited to take part in the festivities. This last step turns out to be the foundation’s undoing; the two rabbis start to argue, and the argument turns into a food fight that rapidly engulfs the entire room. When the donors finally arrive late in the evening, Mr. Feigenbaum is hit square in the nose with a matzah ball. The outcome of this fiasco isn’t all negative; although the money for the foundation never comes, the Jews of Pinkney do end up with weekly services, and as Stanley says, “I don’t care what anybody says – it’s a miracle.”

Perhaps the most poignant story in the collection is “Rosenthal Unbound.” Here we rediscover Kenneth Rosenthal after his receipt of the Kissner prize. His new-found glory has won him more respect at the Oregon Institute of Fine Arts where he teaches, but it does not impress his ex-wife Lenore. It has, however, piqued the interest of his neighbors, the Metcalfs, who, though elderly, spend days building and reinforcing a sign which says, “Treasonous Jewish Swine out of Oregon. Take Back Our State. This Sign is a Lone Voice of Truth Amidst the Chorus of Lying Traitors and Vermin Among You.” Rosenthal feels that he ought to do something about the sign, and asks the advice of his barber and a colleague. Neither is very helpful, but suddenly Rosenthal is swamped by people who want to help him, all on their own terms. A reporter calls to ask about the cross that was burnt on his lawn, and a man from the Anti-Defamation League offers to take his case. A group of women begin to keep a candle-light vigil at the sign. None of his supporters will accept that he doesn’t want their help or even listen to his side of the story. Ultimately, Rosenthal decides to confront his neighbors, but on the way across the lawn, he steps on a rake and ends up with broken glasses and a swollen nose.

“Rosenthal Unbound” veers into dangerous territory, exploring the truth about anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in contemporary America. Shapiro makes a number of suggestions that are close to heretical to the Jewish establishment: that anti-Semitism is not a physical threat to American Jews; that there are people who have a vested interest in exaggerating incidences of anti-Semitism; and, perhaps most profound, that Jewish identity cannot survive except in the face of suffering. Rosenthal (and perhaps Shapiro) is both attracted to and repulsed by the idea of suffering. He cannot stop himself from painting the Akedah (the scene of Isaac’s near sacrifice), and yet he finds the concept hideous. Rosenthal refuses to get swept up in the fury over his neighbor’s sign, but at the end of the story, we find him reveling in his swollen and now overtly Jewish-looking nose. These are difficult but important tensions, and the hilarity of Shapiro’s satire allows him freedom to explore that would be impossible in non-fiction.

Bad Jews is at once funny, compassionate, and probing. Shapiro’s characters are often comic failures in their own estimations, but despite sometimes unflattering attributes, most are allowed a day in the sun. This book can be seen as a celebration of contemporary Jewish culture, and proof that such a culture still does exist in this country. One of Shapiro’s most powerful techniques is to weave characters from one story into another: Leo Spivak, the amorous salesman in “Worst Case Scenarios,” is the son-in-law of Sheldon and Bernice Sperling, who award the Kissner prize in “The Twelve Plagues”; Shifman, the scrappy Hodgkin’s disease patient, is Leo’s assistant. In this way the reader gets the sense of a larger community of people, even a Jewish community. For community, in all its forms, is one of the most vibrant, irrepressible aspects of Jewish culture.

Author Interview: Laura Sheppard-Brick speaks with Gerald Shapiro

Laura Sheppard-Brick: What influenced your decision to create interconnected short stories rather than a novel?

Gerald Shapiro: If the interconnectedness of the stories (especially the Leo Spivak-Ed Shifman stories) had occurred to me as I began to write them, perhaps I would have tried to make them into a novel; but that interconnectedness only presented itself to me gradually (that is, the story that became “Bad Jews” wasn’t a “Leo Spivak story” until I’d written it a couple of times, and I didn’t realize that Ed Shifman worked for Leo Spivak until I’d written quite a bit about Ed). The version of Bad Jews that you read was the result of a five-year process that saw each story go through a number of versions. Every story in Bad Jews was published separately before the book came out, but each story was revised for the book, and in some cases that revision took the form of strengthening the interconnectedness, making more direct links from one story to another.

LS: Your book is entitled Bad Jews, and you give us models of this as well as ambiguous models, but what, for you, is a good Jew?

GS: I don’t have any interest in defining “goodness” in terms of religious observance. If I cared about that, I doubt that I’d be a fiction writer. To be perfectly honest with you, I think some of the “bad Jews” in Bad Jews would qualify as good Jews in my estimation. Elliot Suskind, for example. He is an unobservant Jew and most likely a non-believer, but he understands his duty, his knows the terms of his contract with the world, he does what needs to be done, despite his failings and his weakness. That, to me, is the mark of a good man. And ultimately, that’s what matters to me, rather than the idea of being a good Jew. The book’s title is meant to be considered ironically rather than taken literally as a judgment of the characters.

LS: What role does humor play in your stories and in how your work is viewed?

GS: I try to write about the most important things in the world – the things that matter most to me. Humor helps me write about those things that might be too difficult for me to talk about otherwise. As to how the humor impacts the way in which the work is viewed, I’m not sure. Some people like my writing and some don’t, and I think the ones who do generally think I’m funny, but I hope they also think there’s something to the work beyond the jokes.

LS: Many of your characters seem to be failures in their own estimation. In what way is this a reflection of your own world view?

GS: I don’t find success very interesting, from a dramatic standpoint. I think we find our humanity most profoundly in our moments of failure. We get to heaven not by what we achieve but by what we yearn for, I think. So it’s in the yearning that we become ourselves, not in the achievement. I hope my characters are interesting failures, because I think that’s the best that most of us can hope for.

LS: What writers or other artists, Jewish or non-Jewish, have influenced your work or do you see as your forbears? Are there any artists you see as your contemporaries?

GS: Influences would be Bernard Malamud, Dostoevsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Joyce Cary, Roth and Bellow, Salinger, Anne Tyler, Charles Baxter, Steve Stern, Chekhov (the plays, not the stories). I read a lot of contemporary fiction and like a lot of what I read, but nobody except Steve Stern would come to mind as a big influence right now. I’m learning about omniscient narrative from Richard Russo’s novels, especially Empire Falls.

LS: What role did Judaism and/or Jewishness play in your upbringing, and what is your relationship with the Jewish community now?

GS: I was raised in a traditional Conservative Jewish household, quite religious and observant, in the midst of a very vibrant and cohesive Jewish community in Kansas City, Missouri. My brother and I attended Hebrew school and Sunday school, went to Jewish summer camps and were very much involved in Jewish activities. I’m a member of a Jewish Renewal congregation in Ashland, Oregon, the town where my wife and I spend our summers. In Lincoln, Nebraska, where we live during the school year, I’m the director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Nebraska, but I don’t feel connected to that local Jewish community.

LS: Your characters are incredibly vivid, unique and complex. Where do you draw from in creating them?

GS: I’m glad you think the characters are vivid, etc. Most of them are the product of my imagination, though some (the father in “Bad Jews” and the mother in “Suskind, the Impresario,” for example) are taken from people I’ve known.

LS: Your portrayal of the Jewish establishment is, at the least, quite critical. What sort of response have you received from different segments of the Jewish community?

GS: Actually I think my first collection, From Hunger, drew more criticism from Jews than Bad Jews did, though of course I was worried that Jewish readers would be offended by the characters in Bad Jews. I’m pleased, in general, by the response the book has gotten.

LS: What effect do you think assimilation has had on the way that your generation connects with Judaism and/or Jewishness?

GS: It’s hard for me to know how to answer that, since I’m so much a part of my generation that it would be difficult for me to imagine another way to be Jewish, another kind of American Jewish experience. I know that my experience of the world is vastly different than my parents’ experience was – doors were open for me, opportunities were available, that simply weren’t for them. But again, I think my imagination is limited in terms of my ability to conjure up an alternative way of being Jewish in America.

LS: Your work speaks very directly to Jews who are removed (psychologically or physically) from the “New York Jewish” experience, yet many of your characters only grope at connections with Jewishness. In what ways do you think it possible for non-mainstream Jews to find meaningful Jewish identity?

GS: That’s a very good question. I think it’s important to say up front that my definition of “meaningful Jewish identity” is probably not the same as yours, simply because I’ve lived the majority of my life in the Midwest, where Jewish life is very different from Jewish life in New York. I do like your phrase “grope at connections with Jewishness,” because it’s in the groping, I think, that my characters find their redemption. My feeling is that the “New York Jewish” experience is no nearer the heart of what it means to be Jewish than the “Kansas City Jewish” experience is. In fact it’s probably the other way around. Sholem Aleichem’s Jews weren’t living in Warsaw, they were in the hinterland, in the middle of nowhere, struggling to find meaning surrounded by Gentiles, strangers in a strange land. As far as I know, that has been the norm for Jews since the very beginning. The New York Jewish experience, which seems to us to be the “norm” for life in America, is more a historical anomaly than a norm. So here’s my answer to the question you pose: how can a “non-mainstream” Jew find “meaningful Jewish identity”? By being a non-mainstream Jew. That phrase “non-mainstream” is itself the essence of Jewishness for me. The most meaningful Jewish identity I can imagine is the identity of a stranger in a strange land.

Questions for Discussion

The Akedah, the account of Isaac’s near sacrifice at his father’s hand, is one of the most problematic scenes in the Torah. Does “Rosenthal Unbound” help you understand this biblical passage? What is suggested by the title of the story?
Shifman seems almost overjoyed when he is fired. Why? What is Shapiro saying about suffering?
Do you think Shapiro accurately portrays suburban life in “The Tutor”? Does his use of comedy and parody allow you to see aspects of the suburban experience that would otherwise remain hidden?
In “The Tutor,” is Tammy merely using the narrator to pass her history test, or are there other reasons that they don’t stay together?
In “Suskind The Impressario,” Miriam Suskind fails to find her father’s town in Eastern Europe, but on her deathbed, she says that she is there. The story ends with homing pigeons who return home. Is there then hope that Elliot Suskind will find his way back to a place where he belongs?
The night his mother dies, Elliot Suskind is lured out to a wild party. Is it wrong of him to go? What do you think of his behavior once there?
In “Worst-Case Scenarios,” Leo Spivak goes to Betsy’s house after their ill-conceived afternoon dalliance? Why does he do this?
Are the paintings in “The Twelve Plagues” sacrilegious? If so, why do they win the Kissner Prize? If not, what do they say about Judaism and contemporary American life?
Does “The Feigenbaum Foundation” present an encouraging picture of the possibilities for small town Judaism, or is Pinkney’s Judaism too watered down to be meaningful?
Does Leo Spivak make the right choices about his father’s funeral in “Bad Jews”? Is he really “a schmuck”?
What does this book suggest about the relationship between Judaism and suffering? Do you agree with its perspective?
Overall, does Bad Jews present a gloomy or hopeful picture of contemporary American Judaism?

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