Jewish Writers Remembrances of Articles of Jewish Faith

THE NEW YORK TIMES | OP-ED
By Dara Horn

NEW YORK---Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person’s hand, turned into stories. The idea that largely nontraditional or even secular Jewish writers today would draw on a religion they barely observe may seem far-fetched. But the Jewish practices most rooted in collective memory, which are coincidentally those most accessible to the least observant (family-oriented holidays and text study in various forms), are less about believing in a supernatural reality than about appreciating the metaphor of the past’s presence. For those with vivid imaginations, that metaphor easily comes alive. [link]

• In January, The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs blog serialized a lighthearted novella called “Sell Out,” by Simon Rich.
• Steve Stern’s marvelous novel “The Frozen Rabbi” (2010), about a Jewish teenager in Memphis who discovers a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi in his family’s basement freezer. 
• “The Last Jew” (2007), by the Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk — about a Jewish man who, through a surreal combination of trauma and magic
• Joshua Cohen’s novel “Witz” (2010) — which features an apocalyptic scenario where the main character, born as a fully grown and bearded man, becomes the world’s last Jew. 
• Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today’s mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O’Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can’t do this all by herself!) But there doesn’t seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. 
• In his book “Zakhor” (1982), the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed the roots of Jewish collective memory and its odd staying power (“zakhor” is an order to remember). 
• In his essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James provided many a future writing instructor with a handy opening-day quote: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” 
• The British novelist Naomi Alderman put it bluntly in a recent interview with Tablet magazine, when she traced the anxiety that often accompanies Passover preparations back to a time when the holiday coincided with Easter-inspired persecutions. “Each Passover is more like other Passovers than it is like the day that came before it or the day that comes after it,” she said while discussing her novel “The Liars’ Gospel,” a book about Jesus, the world’s most famous death-defying Jew.