Sunday Jews - Hardcover

Calisher, Hortense

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151009309 ISBN 13: 9780151009305

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

A family saga considers the issues of national and religious identity and how they impact one Jewish-American family, from Charles, who hopes to become a Supreme Court Justice, Zipporah-Zoe, who cannot let go of her past, and Bert, who becomes a rabbi despite his ambivalence toward Jewish institutions. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Authors

Hortense Calisher is past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN. Three-time finalist for the National Book Award, she is the author of many novels and short stories. She lives in New York City.

Hortense Calisher is past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN. Three-time finalist for the National Book Award, she is the author of many novels and short stories. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Like Edith Wharton and Henry James, Hortense Calisher finds the drama of fiction as much in the analysis of motive as in the various excitements of action. Her newest novel might be said to have a Wharton-ish feel to it¢if, that is, Wharton had written about assimilated Jews rather than status-conscious WASPS. The Jewish family at the center is named, surprisingly, Duffy. Zipporah Zangwill's marriage to Peter Duffy is mixed not because they come from different faiths, but because they disbelieve in different deities¢Zipporah in the Jewish God, Peter in the Catholic one. The first third of the book, which is marvelously felt, tracks Peter's mental degeneration. After retiring from the university where he had been a philosopher, Peter becomes absentminded, then feebleminded, and finally physically debilitated. Zipporah, a nonacademic anthropologist and mother of five, takes him to Italy to hide his condition. Zipporah is helped by a mysterious nurse, Debra Cohen, an awesomely cool Israeli sabra who disappears when Peter dies. The novel's middle section portrays Zipporah in the autumn renaissance of her widowhood. She inherits a fortune from her neighbor and friend, Norman, and takes a lover, the mythically wealthy Foxy Mendenhall. Calisher shows Zipporah's five children creeping into a professionally respectable middle age, while their children zoom through their 20s. Zipporah is particularly close to her grandson Bertram, who is waiting for a project to happen. He has studied to be a rabbi, but avoided a post. Ten years after Debra Cohen's vanishing act, Bert finds a clue to her whereabouts and tracks her down in Europe. While Calisher's novel is much too baggy, it is also majestically persistent, with an old-fashioned faith in the novel's ability to make worlds.
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(*Starred Review*) Calisher, Jamesian in style and intent, traces the meshing of inner and outer worlds with voluptuous precision. Truly a grande dame of letters, she remains intrepid, demanding, and indefatigable in her fifteenth novel, a riverine family saga. Its source is the loving marriage of Zipporah Zangwill, a Jewish anthropologist, and her lapsed Catholic philosopher husband, Peter Duffy. Their large and elegant old New York apartment has been home to six children and the scene of ever-swelling Sunday family gatherings as these complicated individuals--some tall and blond, others short and Brillo-haired, some gay, some straight, some artistic, some theological, some professional--extend the family circle with friends, lovers, spouses, and children. Calisher's approach is spiraling rather than linear, and much is conveyed through brilliantly witty conversations performed in scenes as beautifully composed as paintings. Marvelously piquant, Zipporah, the heart of the novel, is fluent in the deep meaning of ritual and family ties, and as she and her colorful progeny make their improvised way in the crazy world, Calisher offers profound reflections on religion, identity, sexuality, age, illness, and our tenacious attachment to life in all its misery and joy. Subtly and incrementally powerful, this phenomenal work astutely illuminates the myriad dualities of existence. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In her mid-sixties, Zipporah Zangwill, born in Boston to longtime residents of that name, for over forty years married to Peter Duffy, who teaches philosophy in New York, and herself well-known as a "social" anthropologist, has informed her family, a large clan, that from now on she wishes to be known as Zoe-sending out cards to that effect, along with an invitation to a celebratory party.

To Peter, who has perhaps been aware of her progress toward some decision that will mortally affect their lives, if not this one, she has merely shown the cards, ordered from the same stationer who had always supplied the formal announcements the years had required: engagements and weddings of the children, anniversaries of all kinds, plus bids to those coveted "theme parties" she threw when some professional or affectionate interest erupted. And of course the two change-of-address announcements, of yore.

These newest cards, thinner than any of those and modest in size, say simply "One of our Sundays," giving the date. The time would be known by custom as afternoon, the eats to straggle along with individual noshing, and focus hard as dusk falls. A footnote, lower left, in small but legible print, says: "From now on Zipporah asks to be known as Zoe..." It's not certain whether the reason for the party is this.

Few phone to inquire. For some grateful elders in the circle, she is their only fount of surprise. The Duffy children-Gerald, Charles, Nell, Erika, and Zachary, all grown now-do mildly mention it, in no order of age status except whoever had the smarts and the sass to speak up first. They chat constantly, over a sibling network maintained either coast to coast from their homes or now and then from sites no longer as strange as those their mother had all their young lives gone to. Their feeling on her travels had long since been expressed by Mickey, a former youngest son, whose age was fixed, he having died at twelve: "She never really leaves us. And she always comes back."

The network isn't kept out of duty. All the Duffys have the kind of family feeling that filches away their attention even from those they are married to. Charles, an academic always somewhere in the middle of the country, is also their median voice. "They're so close a pair. They never skimped us. But it helped us close ranks." His puns, as a part-time lawyer as well as a physicist, make Nell sigh. "A pun should be more illegal, Chuck. But I hear you."

Nobody in their immediate family is a naysayer, though Erika tends to marry them. "Maybe Ma just wants to shed her identity. I do now and then."

Gerald, who has a wife who does that constantly, keeps quiet.
Zach, now the youngest, speaks for all of them. "Hope not."
Peter, when shown the cheaper cards, merely quirks: "Wise of you, not to jump to Tiffany."
"One hundred sixty-four of them? Would've cost the earth."
"Will you tell them why?" He's looking at the footnote.
Her answer, with her handsome eyes wide: "I don't have to tell you."
"No."

They kiss. She's as intense, he as genial, as on the day they met in front of the Alma Mater statue on the Columbia campus, where she'd lost the very high heel of one shoe, and he'd picked it up. The legend is that in trying to fit the heel on her shoe again, he'd knelt, but saying carefully, "This means nothing." Yet then offered his arm, so that she could hop to the shoe-repair shop across Broadway. Instead, she ran barefoot across the hot macadam, he following.

Waiting for the shoemaker, they exchanged:
"Zangwill? Any relation to Israel Zangwill who wrote the Melting Pot? English Jew, 1914."

If they were, her father had said, they were very collateral. "No. But we did come from England, and are Jewish, of course...You in History?"..."No. Philo." By that time they were outside the shop door. "And you?" he'd said..."Anthro. So I can travel." Three years older than she, he had already done some, promising himself more..."You're Catholic, of course," she'd said; "'Duffy.'"...A smile from Peter. "Of course. Lapsed." Wiggling the foot in the repaired shoe, she'd said to that, half-smiling: "Lace curtain?" A Boston term he hadn't known, having grown up in the Bronx. "We're 'lace curtain Jewish,'" she'd joked. "Still morally Jewish, though we don't go to synagogue more than once a year. And we don't say 'lapsed.' Our word for it is 'reformed.'"

Before they slept together that very night, a fact not in the legend, they'd agreed that whatever their families had or had not declined to, it was impossible for either an anthropologist or a philosopher to believe in God. "Not a personal one," Peter had said. "We must leave ourselves some room. For-uh." He'd meant to spend the rest of his career defining that "uh."

"Oh sure," she'd said. "Impersonality is in."

The family, as all within refer to it, is now very large, but considers itself to be the opposite of that chill term "extended."

The outsiders' opinion of the Duffy-Zangwill ménage is: "Close. Ve-ry close. By joint intention, no doubt. But the flavor is Jewish. Peter's the one living son of a stray Irish couple emigrated from Dublin. Had a brother who died. After Peter's marriage, the two older maiden sisters wouldn't speak to him. But you know Zipporah." Or Zippy or Zee. "She's won them over, don't ask me how...Ever been to one of her and Peter's Sundays? Friends welcome."

"Not a lot of our Duffys in the States when I was your age," Peter says to his youngest grandson, Bert, on one of those Sunday afternoons. "All must have stayed back home. You might see your very earliest ancestors in some remains at the British Museum. Called 'the Sutton Hoo treasure,' if you really want to check."

"But there're lots of us Duffys now," Bert said.

"Did my best." She and he had had four early on, then two more, when near that age called "menopause" by the less sexually interested.

The Boston Zangwills had been amused. The Long Island and Westchester ones, younger connections in Roslyn, Manhasset, Mamaroneck, had been appalled. Such large broods were out of fashion, and not practical if a woman wanted to keep her waistline or a man hoped to send his kids to private school. And hadn't past generations of Zangwills done well enough? Since Zipporah's own maternal grandparents had had nine, she'd had nearly that many surviving aunts and uncles and fourteen first cousins. Her own children were providing young Bertram with nearly the same.

"If we still did math with multiplication tables," Bertram says, looking over the crowded living room he has known since a toddler, "I could just multiply cousins. But that wouldn't be very modern either, would it."

"I'm leaving room for you to say what's modern, m'boy."

"You never called me that before." Bert is now past sixteen.

"Seen it coming," his gramps said.

Copyright © 2002 by Hortense Calisher

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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151009309
• ISBN 13: 9780151009305
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 694