The Red Heifer
Novel by Leo Haber
Reviewed by Tom Janulewicz
What does America mean, and what does it mean to be an American? These
are complicated questions with a multitude of possible answers. We
can't open a newspaper or magazine, or turn on the television or
radio or browse the Internet without exposing ourselves to the
symbols, images, myths and messages of America.
Those of us who were born in this country begin assimilating these
messages at an early age. For immigrants, the meaning of America can
be as challenging and frustrating a lesson as the grammatical and
syntactic peculiarities of the English language. An even more daunting
challenge faces first-generation Americans, those for whom the
American experience is a synthesis, a difficult, occasionally forced,
reconciliation of the symbols and myths of America with their
parents' customs and traditions.
The Red Heifer tells the story of a young Jewish boy's
search for his unique American meaning in the New York City of the
1930s and 1940s. He grows up against the backdrop of the Great
Depression and the Second World War in an environment bounded on one
side by the customs and lessons imparted by his father, a Talmudic
scholar, and on the other by the secular, profane and often confusing
world of an America that offers the lures of baseball, penny candy and
the first rumblings of adolescent sexuality.
The titular Red Heifer refers to a seemingly illogical Jewish
purification ritual. The ritual cleanses a person who has become
unclean by coming into contact with the dead. At the same time, the
priest who performs the cleansing rite becomes temporarily unclean.
This strange duality becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience
in America and the ease with which immigrants can lose their identity
by coming into contact with habits and traditions that seem at once
liberating and unclean.
next >>
|
