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A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF |
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Jonathan Rosen's monumental and meaningful new book The Best Minds feels fundamentally Jewish from the first to the last of its 500-plus pages. It opens in New Rochelle, that heavily Jewish suburb north of New York City, introducing Rosen's mother, Norma, and her friend Cynthia Ozick as feminist writers with “a dark awareness of the Holocaust.“ It ends with a rabbi showing Rosen a memorial plaque in a synagogue lobby. The rending narrative of friendship and illness and competition and loss is littered with Jewish psychoanalysts and Jewish law professors. The author ends up marrying a rabbi; the protagonist — or is he the villain? — becomes a bit of a ba'al teshuvah, donning a yarmulke and diving deep into Torah. But when I asked Rosen what actually makes the book a Jewish book — what makes any book a “Jewish Book” — he seemed surprisingly stumped. “In a funny way, I don't think books are Jewish,“ he began. And then things got somewhat Talmudic. “I did grow up believing the world exists to be put into a book,” Rosen told me, “and I couldn't have written this book, if I still believed that.” |
(Photos courtesy of Penguin Press, collage by Matthew Litman) |
The Best Minds is a memoir and also much more. It is a deeply reported story about Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, who beat him at basketball and many other things before succumbing to schizophrenia and, somewhat famously, killing his pregnant fiancée. It is a meditation on mental illness and also something of a cultural, intellectual and legal history of deinstitutionalization. Rosen, now 60, was the first culture editor of the Forward when the English edition started in 1990; created the Jewish Encounters Book Series and ran it until 2014; has served as a judge of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; and just last night was talking about The Best Minds at a Jewish Book Council event. His other books include a novel called Eve’s Apple and a memoir of sorts called The Talmud and the Internet. So his windy non-answer about what makes this book Jewish felt at once a bit heretical and deeply, essentially Jewish. “When you have a baby and you're holding your baby in your arms, you don't feel the baby is incomplete for not being in a book,” he pointed out. “And you are perfectly happy if the name you give your child is a biblical name, and is part of a story that isn't an original story you're telling.” Then he talked about his father, a professor of German literature who had escaped Nazi-controlled Vienna at age 6. “My dad was always saying ‘Choose life’ in a deeply complicated way,” Rosen said. “Because it really could just mean, ‘Don't go to the prom with her because she's not Jewish.’ But the largest sense is that it’s not a story. And that you don't have control over the story. “The horror of eugenics for Jews and everybody else who suffered because of it was that people thought they could control nature itself,” Rosen went on. “That what nature does brutally, and slowly, we can engineer. And a story is a little bit like that. “Although I did write a story in a book, I kept realizing that I didn't need to, and that I was never going to do justice to it.” It took Rosen a decade to write The Best Minds, longer than any of his previous books. He said he resisted writing about Laudor's 1998 murder of Carrie Costello and their unborn child for years, rejecting offers from The New York Times and other publications, refusing even to talk to reporters about the case. The killing “had a very profound effect on me almost as if we were brothers,” he explained. “I didn't know if I was protecting him or myself. Something terrible had happened. And I didn't have a way of thinking about it in any, you know, detached, removed way.” It was only when Rosen’s daughters, who are now 20 and 23, “reached the age I was when I met Michael,” he said, that that changed. He realized that the pain of what had happened, and his questions about it, “didn’t go away whether I stopped thinking about it or not.” So he went to visit Laudor in the psychiatric hospital upstate where he had been confined after the killing. “Being a father changes a lot of things — I was old enough to be the father of kids who had met when they were 10,” Rosen explained. “She had a really good, close friend" that reminded him a bit of himself and Michael, he added, “and you realize her whole world is shaped by her friendship.” The girls had not yet read The Best Minds when Rosen and I spoke a few weeks ago, but he said they “grew up with the story,” as he would sometimes stop to see Laudor en route to a family getaway to the Berkshires or the Hudson Valley. “They both had very different reactions,“ Rosen recalled. “One daughter guessed right away that he had killed somebody. Why is he there? It looks like a prison. Well, it's a hospital. But what's the wall? Well, did he kill somebody?’ Yes. Was it somebody he knew? Yeah. Was it a woman? Yes. “The other one was just like, well, isn't anybody who kills somebody crazy? Nice to think so. Maybe. I don't know. “I think it will be very interesting for both of them to read it,” he added, because of how much the book reveals about himself. “I really did feel that I needed — in a way I hate, but there I did it, so I shouldn't even say that — to stand as naked as anybody else in the book.” |
“I did grow up believing the world exists to be put into a book, and I couldn't have written this book, if I still believed that.” |
Indeed, Rosen went back through his childhood journals and interviewed his own family members and friends to reconstruct painful experiences of being beaten up by bullies and struggling through his bar mitzvah. He was brutally honest, in the book and in our conversation, about the perhaps misplaced jealousy he felt towards Laudor. He likened their intense and fraught relationship to Jacob and Esau and to Cain and Abel — the biblical text Laudor wanted to study with Rosen during his first hospitalization, years before the murder. “Which of course is a very supercharged thing to study with someone, simply because we were always competing,” Rosen said. “And I was always Abel, I mean, I was always losing. Why, as he asked me, would Cain's sacrifice get rejected? Does Abel lose because he dies? He wins, because God likes his sacrifice. “I mean, the funny thing is, I don't think of it as winning and losing. But maybe that's because I don't want to think of it that way,” Rosen added. “One of the law professors said to me: You won. And it mortified me. I was also embarrassed. “I was so used to being the tortoise to his hare, that I was still thinking, ‘He's just going to be resting and I've got to hurry up.’ But meanwhile, the hare had, like, run off a cliff. The race was over. I was embarrassed that I was still conditioned to think that way, but that's how we are.” Laudor's illness, itself, had a Jewish flavor — he was haunted by hallucinations of being hunted by Nazis. And in the months before the murder, Michael and Carrie began going regularly to Shabbat services at a synagogue in Hastings-on-Hudson, another New York suburb, and grew close to its rabbi. But none of those things, to Rosen, are what makes this a Jewish book. He finally got to an answer to my question, and it was about the ways people around Laudor fooled themselves and each other about the severity of his illness. “We do live in a moment of narratives told at the expense of truth, told at the expense of individual suffering, often told at the expense of the very group of people that others are pretending to champion,” Rosen said. “And I feel that that is the number one takeaway from all of this. That you're not helping people by disguising reality on their behalf. “I can't undo the bad things that happened. But I can say: Don't lie if you can avoid it. Don't lie just because it makes your life easier, because that’s not helping people. I know that seems like a cheap and easy thing to say. But if you ask me, ‘What makes it a Jewish book?’ it would be that.” |
Thanks to Matthew Litman for contributing to this newsletter, and Adam Langer for editing it. Shabbat Shalom! Questions/feedback: rudoren@forward.com |
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