WE ARE
OPEN
MONDAYS
CLOSED
SUNDAYS
his study, poring over obscure
rabbinic texts, in search of a
religious high.
His wife, Miriam, a high-
strung lawyer obsessed with
household cleanliness, at first
seems merely eccentric.
Gradually, we see just how thor-
oughly possessed she is by inner
demons who command her to
break into, enter and steal a
bizarre array of objects from an
equally bizarre array of
strangers' houses.
Alas, such narcissistically self-
absorbed, socially challenged
parents set the family stage for
awkward, outcast offspring.
Indeed, neither 16-year-old
Aaron nor his 9-year old sister,
Eliza, can claim a single friend
or confidante. So agonizingly
lonely are they that they cannot
reach out even to each other.
What they share is a longing
for recognition — a sign of uncondi-
tional love from their father, or, bar-
ring that, a signal from God.
In fact, religious ecstasy of one kind
or another is the goal of each of
Goldberg's characters. Miriam's com-
pulsive kleptomania is driven by a pas-
sion to "gather ... up the broken ves-
sels to make things whole again." For
his part, Saul yearns to solve the
secrets of Kabbala — a quest that the
earnest, love-eager Aaron pants to join
him in.
As for the unprepossessing, unreli-
gious Eliza, her lack of any singular
compulsion makes her, depending on
one's point of view, either the ugly
duckling — or the lucky one — in the
family.
Then Eliza wins her class spelling
bee, aces the area and state champi-
from talking to a friend who had her
own fairly traumatic spelling bee expe-
rience and reading an essay about
spelling bees in Granta, a British liter-
ary magazine. In 1997 Goldberg trav-
eled to Washington, D.C., to observe
the national spelling bee herself
"I realized that part of my own fas-
cination with the spelling bee lies in
the fact that it is so easy to recognize
ourselves in these kids. We have all felt
the desire to please or to succeed
against irrational odds. We have all felt
what it is like to fail," says Goldberg.
It was the universals of this
human drama that powered her
through the 18 months it took to
create Bee Season.
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Spellbound: "Bee Season" has received
uniformly rave reviews.
onships, and makes her way to the
national finals. And whatever tenuous
surface unity the Naumann family
once possessed, now shatters com-
pletely.
In a chain reaction of events, Eliza's
surprising string of victories propels
her father to new heights of mystical
hope; apparently, Eliza's mannerisms
when concentrating at these contests
duplicates exactly the state of medita-
tive transcendence described by the
12-century Kabbalist Abraham
Abulafia.
With the fervency of a fanatic, Saul
30995 Orchard Lake Rd.
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to,
`BEE SEASON' on page 88
Diane Cole is the author of the memoir
`After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges"
and is the book editor of the health
magazine "In Touch."
f.,v4A-uop4,
Goldberg now lives in Brooklyn
with her husband, Jason, and writes
full time for a living.
Our sister paper, the Atlanta Jewish
Times, recently spoke with Goldberg
about her novel.
JT: Bee Season is a powerful and
compelling book What kinds of
feelings or experiences were you hop-
ing to provoke in the reader?
MG: Ideally, a book works on two
levels. There is the purely escapist
level in which a book transports its
reader to a different world, and then
there is the deeper level in which the'
Barbie, Maureen, Deborah,
Harold and Rebecca
Jewish
CONVERSATION on page 88
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87