“It all started on Tu B’Av, one of the weirder Jewish holidays.” Not even the yeshiva student Hoodie Rosen knows exactly what is being celebrated there. He’s not a model student anyway, but he doesn’t suspect that he could stray far from his previous life. His family is Orthodox, the Rosens are strictly practicing Jews, and they recently moved their congregation to the small town of Tregaron, USA, so Hoodie is studying the Talmud and struggling with his many sisters at home. “You may have imagined my family in your mind. If you orientate yourself on greatly exaggerated orthodox stereotypes, then you’re spot on,” he comments, proving to be an extremely funny, confident narrator who at the same time questions attributions by constantly outdoing them , and doesn’t really take anything seriously. Until it gets serious.
Because Tregaron rejects the Jewish community. The mayor is blocking the construction of new apartments, protest signs line neatly trimmed front gardens, and finally Jewish tombstones are desecrated in the cemetery. “Go home, Jews,” it says. A swastika is painted over it.
It’s the first time Hoodie has seen anti-Semitism with his own eyes. And it will be the moment when he finally falls head over heels in love. By then he had already broken countless Jewish laws, met and met Anna-Marie, even though she is not Jewish. The fact that Anna-Marie is the mayor’s daughter doesn’t make things any better, and yet the two will remove the anti-Semitic graffiti together. For Hoodie, it’s a good deed – for his family, his teachers, his friends, for the community, it’s a betrayal. But what’s wrong with fixing something bad? What’s wrong with falling in love?
He knows that there is always the “sitra achra”, the other side
“Judaism just has laws for everything (…) But the trick is that you only have to follow these laws if you know about them,” Hoodie tries with his motto, which has worked well so far. But Hoodie is not naive. He’s only young. And alive. He knows that there is always the “sitra achra”, the other side. Then, in the harmless case, a clamshell phone (by Hoodie) meets a smartphone (by Anna-Marie), then the two happily talk past each other. It’s slapstick quality. That’s a tradition.
How comical it can be when Jewish-Orthodox life meets the modern world was recently demonstrated by the internationally successful Israeli series “Shtisel” about a Jerusalem family. The memoir “Unorthodox” by Deborah Feldman described a struggle for freedom against fear and addiction. Isaac Blum has now set his own standards with his debut.
Isaac Blum: The Fame and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen. From the American by Gundula Schiffer. Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 2019. 224 pages, 15 euros. 14 years and older.
(Photo: Publisher)
He lets extremes meet and develops a lot of situational comedy from this, but also throws wide open the windows to a new image of his community. Because he wrote an adolescent novel, the youthful urge for freedom fundamentally opposes any narrow-mindedness: religious, secular, between the generations. And because the author keeps “sitra achra” as the starting point of all thinking, something like reconciliation even arises. After all, depending on your point of view, there is always another side.
The author also keeps an eye on them when the conflict escalates at all levels, when Hoodie is excluded and punished by the community and an anti-Semitic terrorist attack blows up everything that was previously valid on all sides.
With his debut, Isaac Blum wrote about the attack on a supermarket in Jersey City in 2019. Above all, with him and his hero Hoodie Rosen, his own, idiosyncratic voice speaks out. In search of a new position, an individual life plan, she breaks taboos if necessary to show that many opposites can be reconciled. At the end of this impressive novel, that’s a start.