Jewish Book Fair
Another Braff Tale Of Jewish Ennui
Like his filmmaker brother in "Garden State," Joshua Braff turns to Jewish family life in New Jersey
for his first novel.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
W
hile fidgeting at Shabbat din-
ner, Jacob Green decides to
play a game he calls "The
Unthinkable" — imagining blasphemies
that would infuriate his super-strict
father.
Like hurling the challah football-style
at the fridge. Or making it drop from
his tush. Or putting it in his mouth and
thrashing his head like a Doberman.
"Or if I molded it into a big breaded
schlong and bumped it repeatedly against
[my brother's] forehead," he says to him-
self
If Green sounds like every teenager
who's hated mandatory Shabbat dinners,
he's also the protagonist of Joshua Braff's
viciously witty and poignant new novel,
The Unthinkable Thoughts offacob Green
(Algonquin Books; $22.95). It's a thorny
coming-of-age story set in New Jersey
suburbs, a trend recently proffered by
Jewish artists such as filmmaker Todd
Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) and
writer-director Zach Braff (Garden
had to be written and proofed; the
teenage Braff had Conservative Hebrew
school three times a week and an older
brother who scribbled sardonic drawings
behind the rabbis' backs.
"His bitterness toward it all was kind
of attractive," the mild-mannered Braff
said. "I was kind of the middle, sensitive
child, so I looked up to my brother and
was proud of his ability to rebel."
Although Braff repressed his own
rebellious thoughts as a boy, he lets loose
in Unthinkable, which he describes as
"perhaps a bit of a primal scream, albeit
highly fictionalized." His protagonist
imagines bar mitzvah thank-you's detail-
ing his lust for the nanny.
"I had no idea that they made book-
ends out of Jerusalem stone," another
imaginary note says. "We were able to
hoist them up on my bookshelf yester-
day. They looked really great up there
before my shelving collapsed into a
cloud of snapped particleboard."
Green's older brother, meanwhile, gets
busted for the "disturbingly accurate
State).
Zach, also the star of NBC's Scrubs, is
Joshua's younger brother, so its perhaps
not surprising the siblings' debut efforts
share emotionally repressed youths and
ambivalent attitudes toward Judaism.
In State, Zach Bran character
ridicules the moveable walls shuls erect
to accommodate High Holiday Jews and
professes, "I'm Jewish, but I'm not really
Jewish."
Unthinkable is Joshua Braff's edgier
answer to a childhood in which ritual
wasn't a choice, but an obligation.
'Although Abram Green wasn't my
father, luckily, there were certain rules,"
the 36-year-old novelist said.
Churlish rabbis supervised tzitzit
inspection at his Orthodox elementary
school yeshivah; bar mitzvah thank-you's
Joshua Braff on
"Unthinkable":
"Perhaps a bit
of a primal
scream, albeit
highly fictionalized."
pencil drawing of Rabbi Belahsan
found pinned up in the yeshiva library.
In it, the rabbi was in a consensual
threesome with a lobster and an erect
pig.
How have readers responded to the
lobster and the pig?
"I've gotten a lot of reaction to that —
so far, all good," Braff said.
Yet, he concedes others may not be
amused as he participates in the Jewish
book-fair circuit.
"I wrote the novel, especially the reli-
gious stuff, with a certain amount of
reckless abandon," he said. "If I offend
anyone, I'll certainly apologize, but I
don't think the book is self-hating. It's
just kind of rebellious, kind of a shout
out — like that Woody Allen scene
where the rabbi is on a game show and
his wife force-feeds him bacon.
It's twisted, and out of context, ridicu-
lous, but at the same time kind of
shocking and funny."
The darkly comic novel began,
innocuously enough, with musings
about Braff's yeshivah lunchbox several
years ago. Having written myriad short
stories also featuring "unheard, preco-
cious children," he hoped to create a
book "that was not a memoir but that
drew on real emotion and memory," he
said.
Stream-of-consciousness writing exer-
cises helped, notably a drill in Anne
Lamott's Bird by Bird that suggested jot-
ting items remembered from one's
grade-school lunchbox.
Braff's thoughts drifted back to his
yeshivah's cafeteria and to his kosher
lunch ensconced in a Waltons box. Of
why he preferred that treacley drama to
The Incredible Hulk," he says in an essay,
"Sensitive and troubled middle child of
early 1970s New Jersey vintage stares
longingly at the sleepy ease of this
unconditionally 'normal, 1940s family.'
"I certainly had warmth and affection
TRY—
CAL B-
,
11/ 5
2004
56
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Joshua Braff speaks 10 a.m.
Thursday, Nov. 11, at the Jewish
Community Center in West
Bloomfield. (248) 432-5577.
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r
in my home," he said, "but I would
have loved to have had the freedom of
being on Walton's Mountain at times
instead of being in a place in which
there was quite that much ritual. At
yeshivah, I always felt like I was fum-
bling those rituals, and that there was
always a rabbi who was not interested in
explaining anything but who just kind
of barked at me."
Braff dropped Judaism when he left
home to attend New York University; he
began his return during a college trip to
Israel in which the culture "for the first
time was on my terms," he said. "I
remember being at the Wailing Wall and
absorbing [it] in a different way than I
had before."
Now he has a Jewish wife and chil-
dren: "We have fun with the holidays,"
he said. "It's been reinvented, in a way."
Since Braff revisits touchier years in
Unthinkable, he was understandably
nervous about showing a draft to his
parents before publication. Turns out he
need not have worried: "They're sup-
portive, so they were encouraging," he
said. "My dad did say, 'The father figure
is terrible,' and he wanted to know if it
was him. I told him, 'Certainly not.'"
Yet that character and others are so
vividly drawn, IGrkus Reviews noted that
Unthinkable is "compulsively readable,
in a horrifying sort of way. What will
Braff do next now that he's gotten that
off his chest?"
The author's answer isn't unexpected.
"I think I'm probably going to write
about a family, and I think they're going
to be Jewish," he said. ❑
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