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 'IN-- O FF L, SLAB OF RIBS FOR TWO BBQ CHICKEN FOR TWO ALL DINNERS INCLUDE* SALAD DR COLESLAW POTATOES AND GARLIC BREAD Exp 11/30/04 al • rass Pointe Joshua Braff speaks 10 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. (248) 432-5577. West Side Carpet.. at East Side CeS PRIVATE BANQUET FACILITIES FOR ALL OCCASIONS 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. ❑ -1 24234 Orchard Lake Rd., N.E. corner of 10 Mile • 476-1377 '01 902800 20750 Hoover Road (3 miles south of 1-696) Open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. and by appointment. Call Mickey at 586-756-2400. Flooring Warehouse We set the floor on prices.