Do you have a good novel to recommend for readers of this site? Novels get classified this way and that, literary, genre, experimental, rollicking good read and what have you. I’m no lit crit guy, just someone seeking help to lead my life. Trying to understand the world, people, nature; how to lead a good life; change the world; small stuff like that. What are we trying to do here? Support each other. With experience, ideas, images — so let’s add novels to that list — that help us get up in the morning to follow our quests.

My sister says she needs her fix of story. When she first said that, the older, wiser sibling, I thought: wow, that’s right, I need that too. I am drawn to the conceptual — socio-economic analysis, scientific results, spiritual insights — but I need to see them in the stories of people’s lives to really get the feel of them, to make them part of my life.

So please use the comments to make your own recommendations. And other Tikkun Daily bloggers, please post about your own recommendations now and then if you have them (tag them “recommended novels” so we can find them when story-hungry later). I’ve got my library card. I’m ready.

Here’s my first one, chosen because it’s so well suited to Tikkun and the San Francisco Bay Area, and because it had an impact on my own life. Ruhama Veltfort’s The Promised Land, published by Milkweed, is a story of Hasidic Jews from Poland trekking across America to San Francisco in the 1840s. This is what I wrote about it on the Amazon site eleven years ago and I find I can’t do better now:

This is a most beautiful and original book. I have never read one quite like it, but would greatly like to. The narrative line is strong, the characters very real, the places come alive in all their smells and sights, and it is a fine piece of storytelling. One has to say this up front, because this is a book about mysticism, about the experiences and ecstatic knowledge that lie beneath the forms and rules of a religion, and about how a creative spirituality can arise in individuals that leads them to break out of the boundaries of their inherited culture. In other words it is an intellectually serious book. It steers clear of sentimental spiritual claptrap. In the story, terrible things happen to people we have grown to love. But it is neither an `intellectual’ book (i.e. inaccessible, hard work to read) nor a grim one. The narrative is strong because we care about these people and they are on a great quest, but also because the earthy details of their lives are as important to the author as their mystical experiences.

One of the joys of the book is to look at a familiar scene — the American South and the frontier West — through unfamiliar eyes. E.g. Chana, the leading female character, only slowly understands that the black women with whom she does the chores in a rich Jew’s house in St. Louis are slaves.

The most terrible thing for these believers is not perhaps the pogroms or the starvation or the Indians, but the dangers inherent in the freedom and prosperity of the new land. “How am I to raise my sons here…?” asks one father. “Here there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, and all are gone to the devil in their crazy pursuit of riches.” And the elder son himself says, “I ain’t a Jew! … I don’t have to be nothin’ I don’t want to be. What else are we going West for?” If I have any criticism of the book it is that the ending, which brought tears to my eyes, nonetheless seemed to half-sidestep some of the issues raised about prosperity and keeping the faith. The beautiful spareness of the language of the book, without a wasted word, was too spare for me at the end. But perhaps, then what I really want is the sequel, about the survivors and their granmdchildren, and how they preserve the unity of body and spirit in the dangerously prosperous times in which we live.

I want to explain why this book meant so much to me.

I was raised Christian, knew nothing about the history of the Jews, knew no one who celebrated Jewish holidays (and into my twenties did not know the words Chanukah or Yom Kippur or seder), went to a high school rife with anti-Semitic jokes that I joined in with and that I am sorry to say seemed benign to me (in my last year I discovered to my surprise that there actually were some Jewish boys at the school, doing their best to be invisible as such, no wonder; and I started to rethink). Where could this have been? Not America, where the Hallmark card rack at very least will alert you to Chanukah. It was middle and upper class England.

I emigrated to America, to the Bay Area, and worked as a carpenter to fund my efforts at writing novels. A friend of my wife’s invited us to their seders and I almost fainted at their son’s bris (watching the circumcision). But this was not, so far as I could see, mystical or life-changing religion, nor was it in much tension with the American world. I had had enough of world-changing religion in my upbringing anyway. I met Ruhama Veltfort in a fine writers’ group I was lucky enough to join. Here was someone who was a Jew, a feminist, a Sufi, a critic of American society, a mother, a writer, and soon a friend, who understood the Left and the world of religion with a great deal of accumulated wisdom. But for that contact I would not have read this novel, which was then in progress. Without this novel, would I be working at Tikkun? There are other reasons why I was drawn here, but nothing came close to this in preparing me to appreciate and respect Michael Lerner’s neo-Hasidism. And there’s something that was of more general effect on me that I am finding hard to express: about respect for spirituality and belief that is so radically opposed to the norms of the surrounding culture, about mystic experience as a deep source for social change.

Thinking of posting this as we come to the High Holidays, I asked Ruhama about the first celebrations of the holidays in the Bay Area. She replied:

There is no doubt that Yom Kippur fell on September 26, 1849, and historical sources agree that this marked the first Jewish religious services held in San Francisco.

From here, however, accounts diverge. There were 30, 40, or perhaps 60 men present, and the services were held on the second floor of a building on Montgomery Stree, or in a tent.

Most interesting of all, according to Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, quoted in “The Jews in the California Gold Rush” (Robert E. Levinson, Ktav Publishing House, 1978) there were actually TWO services held, in two separate tents – one for Jews from Germany and the other for Jews from Eastern Europe!

The German Jews of mid-19th century San Francisco formed the nucleus of what would become Congregation Emanu-El, while the “Polish” Jews – Hinterberliner, or ‘Jews from East of Berlin’ – formed the more orthodox Congregation Sherith Israel. Both synagogues were founded simultaneously in 1851 because the community could not agree on which prayer customs to follow.