OMNI DE 1 1 ROIT Ho 1EL

RIVER PLACE

•

Birnbaum's wife gets her own story,
"Ruth's Story," in which she unsenti-
mentally looks out through the lens of
a fatal illness. In the book's title story,
Birnbaum visits David and his family
in Oregon after his wife's death, but
father and son stumble, halting any
modest steps toward reconciliation.
Through the sequence of stories,
life's details, loyalties and complica-
tions unfold, creating a multigenera-
tional portrait; Havazelet explores the
meaning of home
when family ties are
severed. His charac-
ters have long mem-
ories, always looking
back, repeatedly
missing opportuni-
ties to express love
and gratitude. The
reader is made to
understand and feel
for them, even if
they don't under-
stand each other.
Havazelet is
skilled at taking on
the voices of men
and women, young
and old. In "Leah,"
David's sister Rachel
tells the story of her cousin, who was
"preparing herself for marriage" from
the time they were children. Leah,
always full of fears and rules and
prayers, is the obedient cousin, in con-
trast to the rebellious Rachel and
David.
Years later in her third marriage,
she finds happiness, leading an
Orthodox life modeled after her child-
hood. Leah tells Rachel, who's mourn-
ing her last boyfriend, an anti-Semitic
Romanian taxi driver who fled the
country, that the difference between
them is that she, Leah, understood
"what would be enough" for her, while
Rachel has never known that.
Talking to the 43-year old author,
it's tempting to connect his life with
his fiction — the points of his and
David's journeys seem to overlap.
Although he protests that the book
isn't autobiographical, he indicates that
some clues to his life are in its pages.
Like David, Havazelet has a distin-
guished rabbinic background: His
grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Mirsky, led
the Young Israel of Borough Park and
was a prominent scholar at Yeshiva
University. His other grandfather,
Rabbi Zisha Brandwein, a descendant
of the Ba'al Shem Toy, lived in Israel
and was "a character straight out of
Sholom Aleichem."
He had rabbinic ordination but

never a congregation or a job as far as
I could tell," although when he died,
more than a thousand people came to
his funeral, says the author.
Havazelet's parents met and mar-
ried in Israel and came to the United
States when he was 2. His father stud-
ied at Yeshiva University and the
Jewish Theological Seminary and has
doctorates from both.
"I grew up under the aegis of my
grandfather," he explains, referring to
his Mirsky side. The
privilege and burden
of the family name
were constant mark-
ers. My own determi-
nation was simply to
fit in, to be an
American boy."
After attending a
series of yeshivas and
graduating from
Columbia University,
he studied music in
Boston with the
hopes of becoming a
jazz guitarist. After a
year, he found out he
wasn't good enough
— but also discovered
that if he had the
patience to practice, he could also sit
and write, which had been his earlier
dream.
He studied creative writing at
M.I.T. with novelist Frank Conroy,
attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop,
then taught at Stanford and now
Oregon State. His first book, What Is
It Then Between Us? was published in
1988.
It seems that like David, Havazelet
also left his Orthodoxy in Queens.
"I'm not a practicing Jew," not affiliat-
ed with any synagogue, he explains.
"I'm proud to be Jewish. I'm affiliated
to culture and history and nation-
hood. In terms of being an Orthodox
Jew, it's not ever the direction 1 was
heading in."
The father of a 10-year old son, he
admits that the Judaism is starting to
come back."
Does Havazelet have a message he
wants to impart to readers? "I don't
want them to come away with
answers. Joseph Conrad said a writer's
responsibility is not to answer but to
raise more interesting questions.
"I would like them to come away
with a sense of the difficulty but
absolute necessity of love and relation-
ships. That's what the stories are
about. You have to keep trying. You
have to keep believing even in the face
of disappointing realities." 1 -1

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Detroit Jewish News

8/13
1999

81

