A Jewish 'Da Vinci Code'?

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Last update - 12:27 03/06/2008     
       
A Jewish 'Da Vinci Code'?
By Esther Solomon

"The Genizah at the House of Shepher" by Tamar Yellin, The Toby Press, $13.89

A confession: Not having read Dan Brown's 2003 best-seller, 'The Da Vinci Code,' I cannot judge whether Tamar Yellin's "The Genizah at the House of Shepher" is a Jewish-style variant of the publishing hit, as some reviewers have suggested.

What is certain is that Yellin's book - the debut novel by an author who has focused until now on short stories - is an intently observed, fluent and inventive work. "The Genizah at the House of Shepher" genuinely deserves the epithet "a multi-layered work." It juggles several different narratives at the same time, and the family saga encompasses four generations, two countries, several frustrated love stories, a mystery, conflicts of identity, themes of exile, longing and belonging. And Yellin still does not lose touch with the array of characters she has built and whose lives she describes with care and illuminating detail. Due to considerations of populism and publishing economics, this book is unlikely to garner even a tiny percentage of the marketing bonanza enjoyed by "The Da Vinci Code," but it merits far more than a niche readership.
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Yellin integrates in a highly creative way traditional Jewish texts within a modern work of fiction. She mines the Bible, Jewish liturgy, midrash (commentary) both traditional and newly created, Zionist writings and her own family history to create a rich and substantial read. Its wealth of detail and allusions means that "The Genizah at the House of Shepher" is a self-conscious work of fiction, aware of the pedigree of its sources and reveling in its textual density, perhaps a result of the many years of work Yellin dedicated to its writing and rewriting. Although sometimes her allegories and analogies leave too little work for the reader, the book is also full of quiet moments of insight, in particular the exploration of the curious dependencies and frictions that make up family life, sibling relationships and our sense of self and belonging.

Family feud
The main plot can be summarized simply: Shulamit "Shula" Shepher, a biblical studies scholar born in England, is called to the soon-to-be-demolished family home in Jerusalem for a last farewell. The potentially nostalgic Shepher get-together is overshadowed by a family feud already several generations old, but which has been reinvigorated by a dispute over the fate of a codex (an ancient biblical manuscript) acquired by the founder of the dynasty, Shula's great-grandfather.

The codex was rediscovered in the family home' attic, which has functioned as an informal and makeshift genizah, or storage space for worn-out or damaged biblical texts inscribed with the name of God that cannot, according to Jewish law, be thrown away or destroyed. The codex carries much historical and intellectual baggage. To whom does it belong and should any family member benefit financially from its rediscovery? What is its significance to Shula's academic and personal identity and aspirations? Who else has an interest in its existence and contents; and do they have prior or superior rights of ownership, or at least guardianship over its contents? What effect would the discovery of a "perfect" biblical text have on a Judaism that has been based on a variant text for hundreds of years? Is the search for perfection antithetical to finding satisfaction in day-to-day life? Whose version of history - particularly with respect to the mythical space of family history - is authoritative?

Shula's journey into the history and meaning of the codex is the trigger to discovering the motley treasury of her own family history and heritage "a swagbag of offcuts and end-of-line traditions, bits and pieces that would never fit together: no whole cloth, no finished garment, but the remnants of exile, snatched up and handed on in a sort of desperation." Her male antecedents, who carry the Shepher name and whose personal and genetic legacies are perhaps followed with more care by Yellin than the female characters, all seem to live with a strong sense of dissatisfaction and dissonance between their dreams and the mundane reality of their lives.

The generations are distinguished by a fraught connection to the world of writing: a ritual scribe forced by necessity to transcribe and not compose, frustrated novelists and poets, obscure and sometimes unpublished academics. Their creativity is stifled by the hard slog of making ends meet and their accomplishments are often ephemeral. Shula's father Amnon is a typical example. A life full of paths missed or not taken, a poet at heart who manufactures furniture for suburban homes rather than ever writing poems, he is ground down by regret and disappointment: "Life, which had seemed so broad and full of choices, had chased him down into this narrow place. A narrow, chafing place from which he could not extricate himself ... What more did he want other than the impossible ... to go back and unmake the fabric of his life"?

Hero or thief?

Only Shula's great-grandfather Shalom manages to evade the inevitability of serial compromises with dreams and submission to the demands of conventional domesticity. He does so, spectacularly if not fantastically, by setting off to find the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel and returning several years later with the codex in tow, as well as hours of storytelling about the wonders he has seen across the legendary river Sambatyon. But in later years Shalom becomes an introvert, obsessed with the precise dating of the coming of the Messiah. Generations later, questions about the codex's provenance - concerning whether it was found, bought or stolen -threaten to vanquish his heroic reputation and to recast him as a common thief. Shula herself is sure she will not have children; her brother has already renounced his family, and thus ironically the family chronicler may well be the last of her branch of the Shepher line. Family history as epitaph.

Yellin's descriptions of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the north of England are persuasive and atmospheric. England is hard, green, grassy, full of vistas and of Jews assimilating commonplace English xenophobia. In scenes set in Israel, Yellin flows better when she deals with images from the past: The descriptions of Israel in the modern era sometimes slip into stereotype, such as the caricaturish sketch of Shula's army-age cousin, monotonic, dark, heavy and "a member of an alien race." The sense of Israel's loss of innocence, idealism, even beauty, is palpable: Even Shula's former lover, Daniel, who left England to found the egalitarian state of Palael, is now living in a "dead, peaceful" bourgeois moshav-suburb. Interestingly enough, England is not scrutinized to the same extent. Perhaps this is because Yellin is expressing the anticlimax that many Jews, particularly in the Diaspora, feel when today's Israel is compared to the nostalgic vision of an idealistic and idyllic "old" Israel.

The codex amasses not only narrative but also symbolic importance as the novel progresses. Yellin offers engrossing meditations on the authority of religious texts. Her protagonist Shula recognizes that the codex is not just the Bible's "authorized version," but its solitary and perfect version; the "ur-text" that ends discussion and interpretation. Although for Shula the codex is the scoop her academic career sorely needs, the act of publicizing the codex would strengthen the idea of the absolutism of a specific text, even if it is the Bible, and its claim to embody a fixed and unmodifiable truth.

Using traditional Jewish ideas and sources about the desirability of textual interpretation and debate, Yellin suggests through Shula that the codex - in spirit at least, if not in law - belongs more to the mythically tranquil and timeless land from whence her great-grandfather acquired it and not to Shula's - and our - world where variations and uncertainties are essential to life and where the codex would only offer "the deadness of an immaculate mandate." Indeed, it seems that the disappearance of the codex and of others before it for so many centuries in fact provided the intellectual and theological space for debate to flourish.

'Dominant' narrative
Yellin opens up the idea of the need for interpretative space and breadth to relate to other areas of writing beyond the codex. Just as Jewish tradition documents, along with the "dominant" narrative, a whole parallel culture of alternative views and dissenting opinions, so when Shula recounts her own history, along with the dominant "plot-line," she acknowledges the potential for other stories, for other interpretations, based on the material in her own emotional and intellectual experience.

Shula is helped by her decision not to be bound by historical fact and to craft instead a "mythical history," integrating her family's dreams, letters, obsessions and poems to give life to these other potential directions and decisions. The beauty of fiction for Shula is that her "history" can encompass "a mass of conflated texts and contradictory traditions ... a ramshackle narrative, stuffed with trivia and repetition, stitched together with hearsay and anecdote and perhaps lies." A list of ingredients that rings true as the description for many of the sagas and anecdotes related within a family about itself.

For Shula's relatives, the knowledge that other lives could have been lived and other choices made is debilitating. Disappointed with the choices in life that they make, they are tormented by the desire to "remake" their lives, like a potter beginning again with his once-used clay. But Shula, family chronicler but also family creator, offers consolation: By the act of writing, she can "remake" their lives from the clay of the stories left behind. And Yellin herself, whose writing marries fact and fiction, sacred and secular, self and community, is also involved in "remaking," in expressing a new creative Jewish voice that is embedded in the historical and literary genizah of Jewish culture. For her readers, that is more than consolation. It is a refreshing change to read an author who moves with ease not only through modern literary conventions, but also through Jewish sources, not to serve a traditionalist agenda, but rather to reclaim access to and enjoyment from the textual wealth of Jewish writings through the ages

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/675759.html

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22 March 2007
The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin

Jeff VanderMeer has reported that Tamar Yellin is the first recipient of the $100,000 Jewish Book Council Award for her first novel, The Genizah at the House Of Shepher. This is excellent news, indeed, and I thought I would take the opportunity to reprint here a review of the book that I wrote for the Summer 2005 print edition of Rain Taxi:


Now that we live in an age when all codes decipher to Da Vinci, it is difficult to approach a novel like The Genizah at the House of Shepher on its own terms, because here we have a story of religious scholars and lost Bibles and intrigues of mysticism, the bare plot of which might suggest the author was gunning for bestseller lists and Hollywood. But Tamar Yellin's first novel is not a thriller, nor will it appeal to anyone looking for grand conspiracy theories. It is, instead, a family memoir wrought in fiction, a contemplation of history and fate, a mishmash amalgam of memories and myths.

"Genizah" is the Yiddish word for a place where manuscripts (generally defective or damaged) are stored. Shepher is the name of the family whose history is chronicled by Shulamit, great-granddaughter of Shalom Shepher, the greatest corrector of scrolls in Lithuania and a man who may have made contact with one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Shulamit, a British biblical scholar, returns to her family's home in Israel to learn about the codex that has been discovered in the attic of the house, a codex that may be the most perfect extant text of the Hebrew bible, or it may be a fake. She lays out the family history in glimpses and puzzle pieces, paralleling the story of her visit to Jerusalem with shards from the Shepher past.

Early in the novel, Shulamit says, "The line of tension between choice and chance is the thread by which the miracle of existence hangs," and this idea becomes the foundation of each of the novel's short chapters, as Shulamit explores not only her family's history, but her own relationship to it. She is a curiously hollow person, someone who has fought against the emotions of her life by drowning herself in the minutia of scholarship, afraid of her sense of dislocation and longing, unsure of her own motivations and desires. It is only toward the end of the book that Shulamit's own personal history is revealed in any detail, though by then it is too late, because having been merely a conduit for her family's story up to that point, it is difficult for her to attract much attention, and so she dissolves into the haze of the book's last pages.

The Genizah at the House of Shepher is a magnificently crafted novel, with each paragraph seemingly placed with tremendous care, each sentence polished to a metallic shine. It is not a difficult book to admire, but the hollowness at Shulamit's core prevents much emotional connection to her or the story, and so the reader is placed in Shulamit's own position, left to analyze and weigh the evidence presented, to sift the stories and weed through the myths with even more objectivity than Shulamit herself possesses (being, as she is, a part of the tale). Unlike a mystery story where the resolution provides the most pleasure, here we have a story where few mysteries are definitively resolved, little is truly in jeopardy, and the pleasure comes not from the cessation of suspense, but from the intellectual journey offered.

Posted by Matthew Cheney

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2007/03/g ... tamar.html