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Sunday Jews
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Sunday Jews Trade cloth - 2002

by Calisher, Hortense


Summary

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "incisive, intricate and fiendishly intelligent" (The Nation) and "among the most literate practitioners of modern American fiction" (Saturday Review).
In this new novel, Calisher explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. The elder son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; the family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; the art expert Erika has altered her appearance but still insists on being custodian of the family's Jewishness; and Zach, the artist and manipulator, has two wives. The mother of these disparate siblings is Zipporah-Zoe, an academic, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich. She is intellectual, yet bound by memory to the past, a past that never quite dies.
Challenging them is Bert, the grandson, who becomes a rabbi despite his ambivalence toward Jewish institutions. The buried history of their most significant Sunday visitor, Lev, resurfaces when he brings Debra, the young Sabra nurse and war veteran, to them as his wife--and then vanishes.
A compelling family saga that resonates with today's issues of national and religious identity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

From the publisher

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "incisive, intricate and fiendishly intelligent" ("The Nation") and "among the most literate practitioners of modern American fiction" ("Saturday Review").
In this new novel, Calisher explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. The elder son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; the family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; the art expert Erika has altered her appearance but still insists on being custodian of the family's Jewishness; and Zach, the artist and manipulator, has two wives. The mother of these disparate siblings is Zipporah-Zoe, an academic, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich. She is intellectual, yet bound by memory to the past, a past that never quite dies.Challenging them is Bert, the grandson, who becomes a rabbi despite his ambivalence toward Jewish institutions. The buried history of their most significant Sunday visitor, Lev, resurfaces when he brings Debra, the young Sabra nurse and war veteran, to them as his wife--and then vanishes.
A compelling family saga that resonates with today's issues of national and religious identity, "Sunday Jews" is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

Details

  • Title Sunday Jews
  • Author Calisher, Hortense
  • Binding Trade Cloth
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 704
  • Language EN
  • Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ny
  • Date 2002-05-09
  • ISBN 9780151009305

Excerpt

In her mid-sixties, Zipporah Zangwill, born in Boston to longtime residents of that name, for over forty years married to Peter Duffy, who teaches philosophy in New York, and herself well-known as a "social" anthropologist, has informed her family, a large clan, that from now on she wishes to be known as Zoe-sending out cards to that effect, along with an invitation to a celebratory party.

To Peter, who has perhaps been aware of her progress toward some decision that will mortally affect their lives, if not this one, she has merely shown the cards, ordered from the same stationer who had always supplied the formal announcements the years had required: engagements and weddings of the children, anniversaries of all kinds, plus bids to those coveted "theme parties" she threw when some professional or affectionate interest erupted. And of course the two change-of-address announcements, of yore.

These newest cards, thinner than any of those and modest in size, say simply "One of our Sundays," giving the date. The time would be known by custom as afternoon, the eats to straggle along with individual noshing, and focus hard as dusk falls. A footnote, lower left, in small but legible print, says: "From now on Zipporah asks to be known as Zoe..." It's not certain whether the reason for the party is this.

Few phone to inquire. For some grateful elders in the circle, she is their only fount of surprise. The Duffy children-Gerald, Charles, Nell, Erika, and Zachary, all grown now-do mildly mention it, in no order of age status except whoever had the smarts and the sass to speak up first. They chat constantly, over a sibling network maintained either coast to coast from their homes or now and then from sites no longer as strange as those their mother had all their young lives gone to. Their feeling on her travels had long since been expressed by Mickey, a former youngest son, whose age was fixed, he having died at twelve: "She never really leaves us. And she always comes back."

The network isn't kept out of duty. All the Duffys have the kind of family feeling that filches away their attention even from those they are married to. Charles, an academic always somewhere in the middle of the country, is also their median voice. "They're so close a pair. They never skimped us. But it helped us close ranks." His puns, as a part-time lawyer as well as a physicist, make Nell sigh. "A pun should be more illegal, Chuck. But I hear you."

Nobody in their immediate family is a naysayer, though Erika tends to marry them. "Maybe Ma just wants to shed her identity. I do now and then."

Gerald, who has a wife who does that constantly, keeps quiet.
Zach, now the youngest, speaks for all of them. "Hope not."
Peter, when shown the cheaper cards, merely quirks: "Wise of you, not to jump to Tiffany."
"One hundred sixty-four of them? Would've cost the earth."
"Will you tell them why?" He's looking at the footnote.
Her answer, with her handsome eyes wide: "I don't have to tell you."
"No."

They kiss. She's as intense, he as genial, as on the day they met in front of the Alma Mater statue on the Columbia campus, where she'd lost the very high heel of one shoe, and he'd picked it up. The legend is that in trying to fit the heel on her shoe again, he'd knelt, but saying carefully, "This means nothing." Yet then offered his arm, so that she could hop to the shoe-repair shop across Broadway. Instead, she ran barefoot across the hot macadam, he following.

Waiting for the shoemaker, they exchanged:
"Zangwill? Any relation to Israel Zangwill who wrote the Melting Pot? English Jew, 1914."

If they were, her father had said, they were very collateral. "No. But we did come from England, and are Jewish, of course...You in History?"..."No. Philo." By that time they were outside the shop door. "And you?" he'd said..."Anthro. So I can travel." Three years older than she, he had already done some, promising himself more..."You're Catholic, of course," she'd said; "'Duffy.'"...A smile from Peter. "Of course. Lapsed." Wiggling the foot in the repaired shoe, she'd said to that, half-smiling: "Lace curtain?" A Boston term he hadn't known, having grown up in the Bronx. "We're 'lace curtain Jewish,'" she'd joked. "Still morally Jewish, though we don't go to synagogue more than once a year. And we don't say 'lapsed.' Our word for it is 'reformed.'"

Before they slept together that very night, a fact not in the legend, they'd agreed that whatever their families had or had not declined to, it was impossible for either an anthropologist or a philosopher to believe in God. "Not a personal one," Peter had said. "We must leave ourselves some room. For-uh." He'd meant to spend the rest of his career defining that "uh."

"Oh sure," she'd said. "Impersonality is in."

The family, as all within refer to it, is now very large, but considers itself to be the opposite of that chill term "extended."

The outsiders' opinion of the Duffy-Zangwill ménage is: "Close. Ve-ry close. By joint intention, no doubt. But the flavor is Jewish. Peter's the one living son of a stray Irish couple emigrated from Dublin. Had a brother who died. After Peter's marriage, the two older maiden sisters wouldn't speak to him. But you know Zipporah." Or Zippy or Zee. "She's won them over, don't ask me how...Ever been to one of her and Peter's Sundays? Friends welcome."

"Not a lot of our Duffys in the States when I was your age," Peter says to his youngest grandson, Bert, on one of those Sunday afternoons. "All must have stayed back home. You might see your very earliest ancestors in some remains at the British Museum. Called 'the Sutton Hoo treasure,' if you really want to check."

"But there're lots of us Duffys now," Bert said.

"Did my best." She and he had had four early on, then two more, when near that age called "menopause" by the less sexually interested.

The Boston Zangwills had been amused. The Long Island and Westchester ones, younger connections in Roslyn, Manhasset, Mamaroneck, had been appalled. Such large broods were out of fashion, and not practical if a woman wanted to keep her waistline or a man hoped to send his kids to private school. And hadn't past generations of Zangwills done well enough? Since Zipporah's own maternal grandparents had had nine, she'd had nearly that many surviving aunts and uncles and fourteen first cousins. Her own children were providing young Bertram with nearly the same.

"If we still did math with multiplication tables," Bertram says, looking over the crowded living room he has known since a toddler, "I could just multiply cousins. But that wouldn't be very modern either, would it."

"I'm leaving room for you to say what's modern, m'boy."

"You never called me that before." Bert is now past sixteen.

"Seen it coming," his gramps said.

Copyright © 2002 by Hortense Calisher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed
to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.HarcourtBooks.com

About the author

Hortense Calisher is past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN. Three-time finalist for the National Book Award, she is the author of many novels and short stories. She lives in New York City.
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