// literary & arts //
Fall 2016
The Disorientation of the American Jew
A Review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am
Max Finkel
“Hineni, hineni [here I am, here I am], I’m ready, my Lord,” Leonard Cohen sings in the lead-off single “You Want It Darker,” of the eponymous album. Cohen, who passed away on November 7, 2016 at the age of 82, bore witness to the lives of multiple generations of North American Jewry. Though he spent time far away—on a Greek island, then in India, and finally cloistered in a Buddhist monastery just outside San Francisco—his latest record gives listeners the sense that he was here, living the Jewish American dream all along, feeling the ebb and flow of the diaspora Jewish experience. Not only has he been here, but he also has something to say about who he is, where he is, and what it means to be there, too.
Just a few months before Cohen released his single, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third and latest novel, Here I Am, hit the shelves. Both Cohen’s song and Foer’s novel draw from the same seminal biblical allusion, the distinctive affirmation of presence spoken by Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, identifying themselves before God. But where are Cohen and Foer identifying themselves now? And in front of whom?
Cohen makes his case decisively, citing the Kaddish prayer time and again in his simultaneous indictment of the violence he sees in humanity and in divinity, specifically in Scripture’s sanction of cruelty and religious violence. In the midst of all this, Cohen dismisses the demons he himself struggled with as “middle class and tame.” To Cohen, these tests were a distraction from what really matters. For Foer, though, the triviality of these demons is up for debate. Set alongside religious violence bearing concrete, dangerous implications, the middle class demons afflicting his middle class characters seem anything but tame.
A 571-page brick of a book, Here I Am follows the Bloch family of Washington, D.C. as Sam—the eldest child of Jacob and Julia, grandson of Irv, great-grandson of Holocaust survivor and former partisan Isaac, and older brother to Max and Benjy—approaches his bar mitzvah. The Bloch family has endured the horrors of the Holocaust, the challenges of making a new life in the United States, and now, in the early 21st century, its youngest generation confronts puberty, Model UN, and the challenge of choosing the right avatar online.
As three generations of Blochs help the first of a new generation approach the ritual age of agency over spiritual destiny, their own struggles with agency and action—spiritual and otherwise—form the central tensions of the novel. Some of these struggles have geopolitical implications. Others only matter to online friends. The most salient of them have the potential to tear family bonds apart. All of them, though, bring questions about the integrity of identity—Jewish, class, family—to the forefront. Foer further pushes his characters to consider personal challenges in light of and despite messy and sometimes conflicting identities, desires, strengths, and weaknesses.
The novel’s protagonist, Jacob, suffers from a chronic aversion to physical and mental exertion. He perennially stands on the cusp of action, but ultimately retracts in fear and seeks immediate comfort upon reaching the moment of truth. Jacob tells himself that he is ready—for crisis, for challenge, for opportunity. But while he might imagine or even thoughtfully describe these opportunities and confrontations, he recoils and conceals himself from them, leaving space for the fantasy or nightmare to steep within him. The ultimate undoing of Jacob and Julia’s marriage might have been prompted by sexual indiscretion, but even while the affair lasted, it was one without action, only descriptions of fantasies never fulfilled and detailed imaginings of what other people might have actually done.
Jacob, the rest of the Bloch family, and Foer himself strive to find meaning in the details. They cling to bespoke cabinet hardware, obscure yet canonical literary references dropped into conversation, and rituals modified just-so to fit into contemporary lifestyles. For the Blochs, these small points are a distraction from the gravity of the fissures distancing them from one another. As a television writer, Jacob slaves over “the bible,” a guidebook of miscellaneous tips for production and for the actors of the successful series he writes. Every emotion must be tied to a short vignette, each lifecycle event references some outside experience, written up by Jacob for his actors to meditate on and reproduce. Even with these layers of detail, Jacob is perpetually fearful that his work will come across as thin and banal. He fears that the real emotion derived from his life experience is simply not enough.
Jacob’s anxieties about the necessity of depth within his work seem to be reflected in the way that Foer fills the gaps between his characters. The Bloch family members—and most of the characters with whom they interact—are emotionally complex. Enveloping them are details upon details about their daily routines, from the brand of snack food Jacob feeds his son to model names of the fighter planes involved in combat over Israel that are shown on television. For Foer, the details are an attempt to add texture, but texture matters little when it fails to give nuance to the emotional weight beneath it. In another narrative, the trappings of an upper-middle class D.C. lifestyle might fill the spaces between the relationships that drive the story, contextualizing the characters’ introspective and external struggles for the reader. But here, the name-checked brands and descriptions of modified Jewish traditions obscure and, more importantly, dilute what really matters. Given the length of his work and the weight of the issues it attempts to tackle, Foer owes his readers a reprieve from distraction.
The thickness of Foer’s detail draws out the Bloch parents’ excruciating downward spiral towards divorce. As they contemplate the mechanics of separation in fits and starts punctuated by bar mitzvah preparations, Foer introduces Jacob’s foil, Tamir. A successful businessman, Jacob’s Israeli cousin Tamir is a clear favorite of Jacob’s right-wing blogger father, Irv. In Jacob’s view, Tamir, a combat soldier and startup millionaire, represents the kind of confidence that he himself could never embody. Tamir’s imposing presence at first ignites a kind of self-loathing in Jacob that transforms into self-reflection in the face of his divorce and the other major tensions of the novel.
Aside from Jacob and Julia’s impending divorce, the bombastic central crisis of the narrative is the destruction of the State of Israel by a combination of seismic and hostile military activity. As their marriage dissolves and the Blochs gather for Sam’s bar mitzvah, both the family and the reader witness the slow, stilted descent of Israel into violent chaos. The fissure between the Bloch parents holds the attention of all until it becomes clear to Jacob that while family integrity has been totally compromised, the integrity of the Jewish people just might be salvageable. Tamir’s presence forces Jacob to consider his Jewish identity more seriously, even while his family falls apart.
One of the most poignant segments of the book depicts Jacob and Tamir commiserating over their mutual inability to act in the face of the twin catastrophes at the center of the narrative. As they reminisce about the one adventure they had shared before, on the eve of Jacob’s own bar mitzvah, Tamir challenges Jacob to act: to join him in Israel and fight to protect the country against the impending invasion. Jacob accepts, but only to renege at the last possible chance. Guilty of avoiding action his entire life and of shirking responsibility for his family, Jacob nearly acts.
But, to the momentarily optimistic reader’s dismay, he doesn’t. Jacob’s dissatisfaction with his family, his career, and his way of life cannot outweigh the comfort these things nonetheless provide him. The decision not to act proves inconsequential. Staying does not save Jacob’s marriage. It does not determine the fate of Israel. But the character’s decision nevertheless reflects his dedication to a lifestyle that Foer evidently decries, given his critical descriptions of Jacob’s routine, interests, and values.
As other reviewers have pointed out, in this novel, Foer has toned down the stylistic and structural flexibility found in his previous two works of fiction--Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. When he does twist and stretch the narrative beyond convention, it is to support the weight of his depiction of the apocalyptic destruction of Israel. A virtual news-ticker (and a cameo by our very own Columbia/Barnard Hillel) carries the reader through the initial stages of an unprecedented catastrophe in the Levant, and subsequent chapters feature speeches from the unnamed Prime Minister of Israel and the Grand Ayatollah, as well as one delivered by Sam on the occasion of his bar mitzvah. These mid-narrative contortions of style were once a hallmark of Foer’s writing. Foer mobilizes these devices to make his authorial mark on a form he has previously mastered. Here, though, the speeches seem too structured. The allusions within them are predictable, and, while poignant on their own, feel overly formulaic when read together.
Still, Foer has one trick up his sleeve that does resonate, transporting the reader to spaces rarely reached effectively in novels. Most of the chapters that focus on Sam take place inside Other Life, a vaguely described massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Lines of chat dialogue are interspersed with short descriptions of what is occurring on Sam’s iPad screen. These chapters allow Foer to explore Sam’s anxieties to great effect, centering on a rehearsal of his bar mitzvah in a synagogue he digitally built himself. The imaginary space of Other Life gives Foer an opportunity to play out the challenges facing his characters in front of the world. The chat dialogue Foer includes is like a blog commentary for an adolescent’s emotional turmoil. When Sam gives a practice bar mitzvah speech to his friends online, unnamed strangers share their support, hostility, and raw curiosity with Sam as well as with the reader. In this space, Sam is at once comfortable in his surroundings yet exposed to the outside world, his identity affirmed by control of his digital surroundings, yet fragile in its immateriality. These informal, anonymous interactions are new ground for a novel. They are difficult to recreate on the page, but they have come to be a major part of the social life of young people. The online spaces in which these interactions occur have real bearing on what happens outside of them, but they nonetheless remain imaginary.
Sam is not unique among the Bloch family members in his reliance on imaginary space as a setting for exploration of self-identity. The Bloch parents each encounter imaginary spaces that force them to consider the nature of their relationships and identities. Even prior to Jacob’s indiscretion, before the tensions in the marriage come to the surface, Julia, an architect, would design houses for herself, only herself. These plans, no more than blueprints, are fantasies of what she could have achieved without Jacob or her children. Similar to Sam’s game, they provide a place to explore her individuality, independent of the family she has actually built with Jacob. The blueprints are never detailed in the way Jacob’s fantasies are plainly written on the page, but the readers are nevertheless aware of the fantasy of solitary life that Julia imagines for herself in places that are not and cannot be made real.
While Sam and Julia’s imaginary spaces provide refuge from their personal struggles, Foer uses imaginary space to force Jacob to directly address his passive relationship with his Jewishness. When confronted by Tamir about the centrality of Israel in the American Jewish consciousness in light of the final words of the Passover seder, Jacob flippantly replies that "Le-Shana Ha-Ba’a” [Next Year (in Jerusalem)] is said by diaspora Jews “because Jerusalem is an idea.” The notion that Jerusalem, and Israel as a whole, could be mere abstractions comes as a shock to Tamir; yet this perspective would hardly rock most American Jewish readers at all. This abstraction of a space so spiritually pregnant might be the key to identifying where the subject of Foer’s title finds himself.
Foer and his characters certainly do proclaim their presence, but, unlike Leonard Cohen, they do so half-heartedly. The author and his protagonists recognize their place as diaspora Jews—living mostly in comfort, but wholly uncomfortable with who they are. In contrast, Cohen directly confronts his spirituality when he proclaims “Hineni.” His song, like those he wrote in the past, exudes a confidence of self-orientation. In his death, he knew very well what challenges, internal and external, Jewish Americans face. Foer’s characters, however, cannot seem to self-orient decisively, and in a text as dense as this one, it would be refreshing to have at least one character successfully root himself in a landscape beset by the breakdown of individual identity, family cohesion, and peoplehood. But maybe this is too much to ask for. With Cohen’s passing and the tumult of the presidential election, the status quo of Jewish life in the United States seems uneasy and unstable. Perhaps, with that in mind, we cannot really tell ourselves and others just where we are right now, to say nothing of where we are going next.
Just a few months before Cohen released his single, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third and latest novel, Here I Am, hit the shelves. Both Cohen’s song and Foer’s novel draw from the same seminal biblical allusion, the distinctive affirmation of presence spoken by Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, identifying themselves before God. But where are Cohen and Foer identifying themselves now? And in front of whom?
Cohen makes his case decisively, citing the Kaddish prayer time and again in his simultaneous indictment of the violence he sees in humanity and in divinity, specifically in Scripture’s sanction of cruelty and religious violence. In the midst of all this, Cohen dismisses the demons he himself struggled with as “middle class and tame.” To Cohen, these tests were a distraction from what really matters. For Foer, though, the triviality of these demons is up for debate. Set alongside religious violence bearing concrete, dangerous implications, the middle class demons afflicting his middle class characters seem anything but tame.
A 571-page brick of a book, Here I Am follows the Bloch family of Washington, D.C. as Sam—the eldest child of Jacob and Julia, grandson of Irv, great-grandson of Holocaust survivor and former partisan Isaac, and older brother to Max and Benjy—approaches his bar mitzvah. The Bloch family has endured the horrors of the Holocaust, the challenges of making a new life in the United States, and now, in the early 21st century, its youngest generation confronts puberty, Model UN, and the challenge of choosing the right avatar online.
As three generations of Blochs help the first of a new generation approach the ritual age of agency over spiritual destiny, their own struggles with agency and action—spiritual and otherwise—form the central tensions of the novel. Some of these struggles have geopolitical implications. Others only matter to online friends. The most salient of them have the potential to tear family bonds apart. All of them, though, bring questions about the integrity of identity—Jewish, class, family—to the forefront. Foer further pushes his characters to consider personal challenges in light of and despite messy and sometimes conflicting identities, desires, strengths, and weaknesses.
The novel’s protagonist, Jacob, suffers from a chronic aversion to physical and mental exertion. He perennially stands on the cusp of action, but ultimately retracts in fear and seeks immediate comfort upon reaching the moment of truth. Jacob tells himself that he is ready—for crisis, for challenge, for opportunity. But while he might imagine or even thoughtfully describe these opportunities and confrontations, he recoils and conceals himself from them, leaving space for the fantasy or nightmare to steep within him. The ultimate undoing of Jacob and Julia’s marriage might have been prompted by sexual indiscretion, but even while the affair lasted, it was one without action, only descriptions of fantasies never fulfilled and detailed imaginings of what other people might have actually done.
Jacob, the rest of the Bloch family, and Foer himself strive to find meaning in the details. They cling to bespoke cabinet hardware, obscure yet canonical literary references dropped into conversation, and rituals modified just-so to fit into contemporary lifestyles. For the Blochs, these small points are a distraction from the gravity of the fissures distancing them from one another. As a television writer, Jacob slaves over “the bible,” a guidebook of miscellaneous tips for production and for the actors of the successful series he writes. Every emotion must be tied to a short vignette, each lifecycle event references some outside experience, written up by Jacob for his actors to meditate on and reproduce. Even with these layers of detail, Jacob is perpetually fearful that his work will come across as thin and banal. He fears that the real emotion derived from his life experience is simply not enough.
Jacob’s anxieties about the necessity of depth within his work seem to be reflected in the way that Foer fills the gaps between his characters. The Bloch family members—and most of the characters with whom they interact—are emotionally complex. Enveloping them are details upon details about their daily routines, from the brand of snack food Jacob feeds his son to model names of the fighter planes involved in combat over Israel that are shown on television. For Foer, the details are an attempt to add texture, but texture matters little when it fails to give nuance to the emotional weight beneath it. In another narrative, the trappings of an upper-middle class D.C. lifestyle might fill the spaces between the relationships that drive the story, contextualizing the characters’ introspective and external struggles for the reader. But here, the name-checked brands and descriptions of modified Jewish traditions obscure and, more importantly, dilute what really matters. Given the length of his work and the weight of the issues it attempts to tackle, Foer owes his readers a reprieve from distraction.
The thickness of Foer’s detail draws out the Bloch parents’ excruciating downward spiral towards divorce. As they contemplate the mechanics of separation in fits and starts punctuated by bar mitzvah preparations, Foer introduces Jacob’s foil, Tamir. A successful businessman, Jacob’s Israeli cousin Tamir is a clear favorite of Jacob’s right-wing blogger father, Irv. In Jacob’s view, Tamir, a combat soldier and startup millionaire, represents the kind of confidence that he himself could never embody. Tamir’s imposing presence at first ignites a kind of self-loathing in Jacob that transforms into self-reflection in the face of his divorce and the other major tensions of the novel.
Aside from Jacob and Julia’s impending divorce, the bombastic central crisis of the narrative is the destruction of the State of Israel by a combination of seismic and hostile military activity. As their marriage dissolves and the Blochs gather for Sam’s bar mitzvah, both the family and the reader witness the slow, stilted descent of Israel into violent chaos. The fissure between the Bloch parents holds the attention of all until it becomes clear to Jacob that while family integrity has been totally compromised, the integrity of the Jewish people just might be salvageable. Tamir’s presence forces Jacob to consider his Jewish identity more seriously, even while his family falls apart.
One of the most poignant segments of the book depicts Jacob and Tamir commiserating over their mutual inability to act in the face of the twin catastrophes at the center of the narrative. As they reminisce about the one adventure they had shared before, on the eve of Jacob’s own bar mitzvah, Tamir challenges Jacob to act: to join him in Israel and fight to protect the country against the impending invasion. Jacob accepts, but only to renege at the last possible chance. Guilty of avoiding action his entire life and of shirking responsibility for his family, Jacob nearly acts.
But, to the momentarily optimistic reader’s dismay, he doesn’t. Jacob’s dissatisfaction with his family, his career, and his way of life cannot outweigh the comfort these things nonetheless provide him. The decision not to act proves inconsequential. Staying does not save Jacob’s marriage. It does not determine the fate of Israel. But the character’s decision nevertheless reflects his dedication to a lifestyle that Foer evidently decries, given his critical descriptions of Jacob’s routine, interests, and values.
As other reviewers have pointed out, in this novel, Foer has toned down the stylistic and structural flexibility found in his previous two works of fiction--Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. When he does twist and stretch the narrative beyond convention, it is to support the weight of his depiction of the apocalyptic destruction of Israel. A virtual news-ticker (and a cameo by our very own Columbia/Barnard Hillel) carries the reader through the initial stages of an unprecedented catastrophe in the Levant, and subsequent chapters feature speeches from the unnamed Prime Minister of Israel and the Grand Ayatollah, as well as one delivered by Sam on the occasion of his bar mitzvah. These mid-narrative contortions of style were once a hallmark of Foer’s writing. Foer mobilizes these devices to make his authorial mark on a form he has previously mastered. Here, though, the speeches seem too structured. The allusions within them are predictable, and, while poignant on their own, feel overly formulaic when read together.
Still, Foer has one trick up his sleeve that does resonate, transporting the reader to spaces rarely reached effectively in novels. Most of the chapters that focus on Sam take place inside Other Life, a vaguely described massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Lines of chat dialogue are interspersed with short descriptions of what is occurring on Sam’s iPad screen. These chapters allow Foer to explore Sam’s anxieties to great effect, centering on a rehearsal of his bar mitzvah in a synagogue he digitally built himself. The imaginary space of Other Life gives Foer an opportunity to play out the challenges facing his characters in front of the world. The chat dialogue Foer includes is like a blog commentary for an adolescent’s emotional turmoil. When Sam gives a practice bar mitzvah speech to his friends online, unnamed strangers share their support, hostility, and raw curiosity with Sam as well as with the reader. In this space, Sam is at once comfortable in his surroundings yet exposed to the outside world, his identity affirmed by control of his digital surroundings, yet fragile in its immateriality. These informal, anonymous interactions are new ground for a novel. They are difficult to recreate on the page, but they have come to be a major part of the social life of young people. The online spaces in which these interactions occur have real bearing on what happens outside of them, but they nonetheless remain imaginary.
Sam is not unique among the Bloch family members in his reliance on imaginary space as a setting for exploration of self-identity. The Bloch parents each encounter imaginary spaces that force them to consider the nature of their relationships and identities. Even prior to Jacob’s indiscretion, before the tensions in the marriage come to the surface, Julia, an architect, would design houses for herself, only herself. These plans, no more than blueprints, are fantasies of what she could have achieved without Jacob or her children. Similar to Sam’s game, they provide a place to explore her individuality, independent of the family she has actually built with Jacob. The blueprints are never detailed in the way Jacob’s fantasies are plainly written on the page, but the readers are nevertheless aware of the fantasy of solitary life that Julia imagines for herself in places that are not and cannot be made real.
While Sam and Julia’s imaginary spaces provide refuge from their personal struggles, Foer uses imaginary space to force Jacob to directly address his passive relationship with his Jewishness. When confronted by Tamir about the centrality of Israel in the American Jewish consciousness in light of the final words of the Passover seder, Jacob flippantly replies that "Le-Shana Ha-Ba’a” [Next Year (in Jerusalem)] is said by diaspora Jews “because Jerusalem is an idea.” The notion that Jerusalem, and Israel as a whole, could be mere abstractions comes as a shock to Tamir; yet this perspective would hardly rock most American Jewish readers at all. This abstraction of a space so spiritually pregnant might be the key to identifying where the subject of Foer’s title finds himself.
Foer and his characters certainly do proclaim their presence, but, unlike Leonard Cohen, they do so half-heartedly. The author and his protagonists recognize their place as diaspora Jews—living mostly in comfort, but wholly uncomfortable with who they are. In contrast, Cohen directly confronts his spirituality when he proclaims “Hineni.” His song, like those he wrote in the past, exudes a confidence of self-orientation. In his death, he knew very well what challenges, internal and external, Jewish Americans face. Foer’s characters, however, cannot seem to self-orient decisively, and in a text as dense as this one, it would be refreshing to have at least one character successfully root himself in a landscape beset by the breakdown of individual identity, family cohesion, and peoplehood. But maybe this is too much to ask for. With Cohen’s passing and the tumult of the presidential election, the status quo of Jewish life in the United States seems uneasy and unstable. Perhaps, with that in mind, we cannot really tell ourselves and others just where we are right now, to say nothing of where we are going next.
\\MAX FINKEL, GS/JTS '16, is a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He can be reached at mdf2155@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.