Leonid Goldin | Foreign Idols

You shall have no other gods before Me…”; “You shall not bow down to them…”

Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 5:7

Within the Boundary of Genre

Shortly after arriving in New York, I walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan to save on the subway fare — my meager hourly wage as an adjunct lecturer didn’t allow such luxuries. On the way, I bought a book from a street vendor for one dollar: A Disturbance in One Place by Binnie Kirshenbaum. It was the first book I bought in America.

I don’t remember what moved me to spend the money. I had a list of the 100 greatest works of world literature, recommended by Barnes & Noble. I had read half of them during school and university, and was working through the rest at the public library. Kirshenbaum was not on that list.

Perhaps the title of the book caught my eye, along with the epigraph from The Brothers Karamazov: “Everything is like an ocean, everything flows and connects — touch it in one place and it echoes on the other side of the world.” Dostoevsky’s somber reflections on human nature and salvation in Christ seemed ill-matched with the rather frivolous design of the book cover.

At first glance, it was a confession by a young woman liberated by democracy and feminism from shores and boundaries, norms and traditions. Formally, it was a collection of short stories — light reading.

The confession genre is broad, from the confessions of Augustine, Rousseau, and Tolstoy to countless authors seeking attention with shocking details of sinful lives. In today’s liberties, the genre often drowns in pornography and psychopathology, surpassing Casanova and de Sade. Yet there are notable achievements even now, such as Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle — difficult to endure, but comforting in the reminder that one’s own life isn’t uniquely dull or meaningless.

A special place belongs to memoir confessions that place personal life within a broad social context — created not just to unburden the soul, but to enlighten and influence the public, and often, to achieve fame and fortune. Examples include Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump (a clinical psychologist) about her presidential uncle; Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in the Age of Scandal by David France; and Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman. Though Feldman’s book and the Netflix series relate to a small Jewish community, the theme sparked sensational interest.

In past Russian history, readers knew the genre through John Chrysostom and Simeon the Theologian. The revolution popularized it with How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky, and the dying days of socialism brought forth Edichka by Limonov and Venichka by Yerofeyev.

Confession is no longer a male privilege. Suffragists paved the way, and feminists — concerned less with rights than with settling scores with men — followed.

A vivid expression of American feminist ideology was Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, a manifesto advocating women’s liberation from traditional norms. Sexual freedom wasn’t enough — Freud needed to be merged with Marx. Marriage would be abolished, reproduction would become technological, and children would be raised communally and be independent of parents. These ideas weren’t entirely new; earlier revolutionaries like Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand had proclaimed similar views.

Freedom without borders and the “war of the sexes” devolved into sexual chaos. Anaïs Nin’s multivolume diary not only recounts endless affairs with literary and artistic celebrities but proclaims her philosophy: a woman’s life has meaning only through deep exploration of her inner self, with sexual experience as the primary path. Nin surpassed her teacher and lover, Henry Miller; compared to her Journal of Love, Tropic of Cancer seems modest and simplistic.

Feminist aggression produced more alienation than sympathy, even among women. Feminism has not birthed masterpieces of thought or literature. Women portrayed in the novels of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence are deeper and more interesting than those of George Sand or Simone de Beauvoir.

Not all confessional writing, especially where sex and pathology are central, can be considered literary art. Often it is hysterical outpourings, desperate bids for attention, attempts to boost sales. If this is unappealing, one should blame the demand, not the supply, as Anaïs Nin explained.

The Price of Freedom

Binnie Kirshenbaum distances herself from associations with feminism through her abundant self-irony and subtle humor. How could she be a feminist if her heroines’ lives revolved around relationships with men, bringing them more dependence and pain than joy?

She is a brilliant wordsmith, proving convincingly that no subject is forbidden in art when talent allows one to speak freely without vulgarity or pornography. Antiquity and the Renaissance demonstrated this possibility; democracy, while freeing expression from censorship, also opened Pandora’s box. Nowadays, freedom of speech mostly serves those defending terrorists and antisemites. Independent writers — those who are not tools of political utility — rarely find grants, awards, publishers, or wide readership.

Kirshenbaum’s books contain little politics or analysis of social antagonisms. Her heroine may mention that despite extensive sexual experience, she has never slept with a Republican — but based on how she describes liberals, it’s hard to imagine where she finds her partners.

Nevertheless, she finds them in abundance, though it brings little happiness. Short marriages lead to misunderstanding, hopelessness, and depression. In despair, she suggests to her best girlfriend, who is also stumbling from one idiot or pervert to another, “Let’s marry each other.” The friend replies sensibly: “You can’t cook, your house is a mess, and you’d cheat on me. Why would I marry you?”

Such a female fate evokes sympathy, but one hardly envies the men involved either. To constantly live under the spectral analysis of a sharp, observant, critical mind — and to meet the intellectual, emotional, physical, and financial demands of postmodern, sexually liberated women — is an impossible task. Everyone is free; everyone is unhappy.

Readers often struggle to separate a literary character from the author, forgetting that a talented writer has enough imagination to go beyond personal experience. Balzac and Maupassant wrote about courtesans and prostitutes more vividly than many women who had lived such lives. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones was written from the perspective of an SS officer responsible for Holocaust atrocities. Spy novelists like John le Carré and Ian Fleming didn’t need careers in intelligence services.

If one wants to know the real Binnie Kirshenbaum, one can consult Wikipedia, read her interviews, or attend her readings. She is a professor of literature, department chair at Columbia University, and author of eleven books, many translated into foreign languages. The workload for an American professor is heavier than it was for a Soviet one, with bureaucracy and obligations consuming most of the time. Finding time for free creativity is difficult; living freely, especially in an era of political correctness, is nearly impossible.

Her recent novel Counting Backwards is largely based on personal experience: her beloved husband, a talented scientist, developed dementia at fifty, leaving her with large professional responsibilities and modest income. Another novel published in Russia, Rabbit for Food, is a somber portrayal of clinical depression — something as familiar to the author as to her heroine, with parallel names and circumstances.

Additionally, Kirshenbaum lives and works under the strict regime of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” where appointments and promotions are dictated not by merit but by political correctness. She is not a lesbian, not a feminist militant, not a person of color, and, hopefully, not a pro-Palestinian activist signing open letters. The atmosphere at Columbia University is well known. Her surname speaks volumes; her books do not fit the “right” topics. Her life and fate are far removed from the outrageous existence of her scandalous characters.

These characters, even as they reject norms and decency, do not live in a vacuum. Their environment shapes their thinking and behavior more than their hormones or childhood experiences. Dostoevsky put it simply: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” Isaac Bashevis Singer said the same: “Modern society considers the concepts of virtue and sin unnecessary… These two words have almost been erased from the dictionary…”

The values and norms of Judeo-Christian Western civilization are collapsing under external attack and internal erosion alike. Although 92% of Americans claim to believe in some higher power, very few check their judgments and behavior against the Holy Scriptures.

Liberalism has triumphed in education, media, literature, art, and even religion, but the national ideology and psychology remain largely conservative. Recently, Philip Roth seemed to have cemented his place in the canon; now, he and his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, teeter on the edge of being expelled from curricula and libraries.

Roth’s brilliant biography, written by Blake Bailey, was put through public execution; allegations against Bailey coincided with the reassessment of Roth himself.

There is little hope that Kirshenbaum will find support among conservatives, but she doesn’t belong to the progressives either. They will condemn her for an “inappropriate” portrayal of women, for avoiding urgent socio-political issues, for not championing the poor and oppressed, for egocentrism, and for failing to offer a blueprint for a better future. Her talent serves no cause and inspires no struggle or resistance.

Nevertheless, even without party allegiance, Kirshenbaum has won recognition. The press and the internet are full of positive reviews, friendly interviews, and reader praise. Norman Mailer, who could hardly be suspected of generosity toward colleagues, especially women, wrote: “Few young female writers can deal with sex, appetite, and the loss of appetite for it with the frankness, lack of self-defense, and humor as Binnie Kirshenbaum.”

The New York Times reviewed her favorably, though classified her books as comedies — yet another symptom of the intellectual confusion wrought by liberal ideology.

To understand Kirshenbaum deeper and truer than reviews allow, one should turn to the classics: “There was never a great genius without a tincture of madness.” — Aristotle; “What is hell? The suffering of being unable to love anymore.” — Dostoevsky; “Life never fits the norms, values, expectations, and concepts we build around it. It is always more.” — Nietzsche.

On the knees

After reading Disturbance in One Place, I wrote Binnie a thank-you letter, promising to recommend to my Moscow acquaintances that they ignore copyright and photocopy the book widely for the enlightenment of socialist realism’s victims. Binnie responded warmly, sending me a gift copy of her new book, History on a Personal Note, but firmly asked me to abandon the idea of illegal photocopying. My attempt at a compliment and a joke failed — in Russia, at my time, only the most worthy, censorship-banned books were copied, but this was beyond the American author’s experience.

Binnie wrote that she was touched by my letter, in which I said that her characters felt more real and alive than many of the people I had met in America. She answered: “Americans are often banal and superficial, but fortunately not all. Sometimes it takes time to find one or two who are reflective, but it’s worth searching and believing that they are out there.”

She wrote about a possible meeting at a book presentation, but when I saw her, I decided that my interest might be misinterpreted. Her sex appeal matched her talent. A more serious obstacle to communication was her characters’ strict demands regarding language culture, undoubtedly reflecting Binnie’s views: “Arrogant asshole… You want to live in America? Then learn fucking language already.” Addressed to a character whose English was better than mine.

My interest in Binnie Kirshenbaum was not fueled by frustrated women’s confessions, brilliant humor, or masterful prose alone. In every book, her heroine never forgets to remind: “I am a Jew.”

Everyone in her family changed their surname and the shape of their nose to hide their Jewishness; her heroine restored her ancestral name, gained in the Russian Pale of Settlement — Lila Moskovitz — and categorically refused to “fix” her nose.

“If my family must identify with any Jewish group, it would be the Reformists, who have more in common with the Iroquois than with Orthodox Judaism.” Her parents, absorbed by assimilation, had no time or desire to engage with their daughter. In the family, she was a complete outsider. The family breakdown in mixed marriages went so far that Lila wasn’t even informed of her parents’ deaths, and could not attend their funerals.

Sometimes Lila lies about being half-Jewish, celebrating Christmas, and Christian Easter. But when she claims to be a righteous, nearly Orthodox Jew, that too is a lie. She doesn’t feel that way and wouldn’t be accepted as one.

In Jewish but Not Really Kirshenbaum writes: “We have assimilated. We not only neglect the faith but distance ourselves from Jewishness—language, culture, tradition, humor—as if it all smells like gefilte fish. When young Lila once saw a Hasidic boy, her mother warned her: “Don’t go near them. They’re dirty. They don’t bathe.”

I have little in common with Lila’s being and mindset — and yet, I too am among the Jews who would not be accepted by the strict guardians of the faith. I respect them, but I cannot and do not wish to live their way of life. Among the Reformists, Reconstructionists, and similar groups, I would find no home either. They have little in common with true Judaism. Their “religion” is liberal ideology — more invested in politics than in faith, more preoccupied with credit cards and stock market news than with the salvation of the soul and the endurance of the Jewish people against foreign idols.

To the collective antisemite, which today includes much of regressive and progressive humanity alike, all Jews are the same: they own governments, banks, media, and are tangled in global conspiracies. But in real life, Jewish communities are fractured, and even today’s bacchanalia of antisemitism have not unified them.

Jewish elites and intellectuals are mostly liberals, estranged from their roots and concerns for the fate of their people, often aligning themselves with their enemies. Most Jewish writers prefer not to be seen as “Jewish writers.” This desire stems from a longing to be citizens of the world, to avoid national constraints, to reach broader audiences, and to avoid dealings with antisemites. They certainly do not wish to be placed alongside Sholem Aleichem or Bernard Malamud.

Philip Roth, Howard Jacobson, and Binnie Kirshenbaum also do not belong to the traditional lineage, yet neither they nor their characters hide their Jewish heritage. To live and write as they do, one must be Jewish. They possess colossal analytical and satirical talent, unmistakably recognizable in their thought patterns and literary style. Their explicit Jewishness did not prevent them from winning widespread popularity.

Their work can be classified as existentialist, absurdist, or postmodern literature — but really, they fit no literary schools or rigid categories. Their main theme is the traumatized consciousness and incurable complexes of Jews, living in alien environments, lost in assimilation and adaptation to foreign circumstances. These writers will never be darlings of either Jewish orthodoxy or progressive activism. Their commonality ends there.

Orthodox Jews bitterly lamented that the talented Philip Roth’s works are antisemitic caricatures, cultivating negative stereotypes. Roth himself was emotionally and intellectually alien to Jews of faith, often treating them with disdain and polemical harshness. Yet he could never free himself from Jewishness. He spoke with anger and pain about the antisemitism he encountered while living in England, where it is deeper and more ingrained than in America. When his appearance revealed his origins and he faced prejudice, he reacted sharply. Still, Roth was not much concerned with the philosophical or political issues of antisemitism and Jewish identity crises.

Howard Jacobson, by contrast, delves deeply into these historical and psychological contradictions. He uses sarcasm, humor, philosophy, logic, and psychology with equal mastery. His sympathy toward Jews — both those lost in diaspora and those struggling to preserve memory and values is evident.

Binnie Kirshenbaum’s characters live non-kosher lives, do not attend synagogue, and replace the rabbi with the psychotherapist. Only on the analyst’s couch, during a 50-minute session, can they shed roles and pretenses, though even this rarely brings relief. In all other spaces, understanding is elusive. The “shrink” (slang for psychotherapist) becomes friend, confessor, judge, and adviser — both for Lila, the heroine of Pure Poetry, and for Binnie herself.

There are endless conversations about careers, relationships, family, and the meaning of life. “Ordinary life is a trap. I want to be free,” Lila proclaims during therapy. Her shrink, Leon, does not console or promise. He simply laughs at her childish naivety. The serious reader does not laugh. What kind of freedom is she lacking? She lives in a democracy — free to curse or praise anything and anybody, has free access to information and dating apps, able to do what she wants and sleep with whomever she pleases. Lila is a poet — free to write in free verse or ancient hexameter, to move to Canada if she dislikes the President.

Clearly, Leon, the therapist, also has his unsolvable traumas. He transitioned into a transgender identity — wearing long dresses, short skirts, earrings, bracelets, and high heels on size-11 shoes. It is his escape from the tragedy of his family, victims of the Holocaust, and from the knowledge that Freud and Prozac are powerless against certain realities.

Lila’s family was untouched by the Holocaust. They live in freedom and prosperity; assimilation is complete. And yet, from childhood, Lila has known neither peace nor belonging. As a little girl, she was once invited by neighbors to an Easter service at church. No matter how hard she tried to fit in, she was made to feel she was different.

And with partners, she cannot escape the “Jewish question.” One of them — not the worst — asks why Jews love jewelry so much. To him, Lila is a capricious “Jewish princess” — even though she is poor, dining on chocolate bars, and never held that “princess” status even within her family.

Her sexual odyssey began in school years. Today she still has plenty of admirers — yet for a belated marriage, she chose a German whose father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht. Their relationship is a turbulent cycle of love and hatred, sexual euphoria and dull, hopeless depression; crossing ancestral boundaries and triggering the explosive awakening of blood memory. When her German husband encounters a Hasid in a store, he loses his Teutonic self-control and insults him. Lila, seeing in the Hasid the ghost of a concentration camp victim, fiercely defends him.

After another marital quarrel, Lila goes to a hairdresser and shaves her luxurious hair. Victims were shaved before entering the gas chambers. The image that follows is devastating: Lila kneeling before her German husband in fellatio. It is a portrait of the collective masochistic subconscious of liberal Jewry — an image that Freud, even as a Nobel laureate, might have envied for its haunting power.

After emancipation, Jewish elites passionately sought a place in foreign houses, foreign cultures — often at the cost of changing their religion, names, entire ways of life. Yet conformism never granted true acceptance or security.

In America, Jewish emancipation was more successful than elsewhere — but even here, adaptation began by striving to imitate the masters of life: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Synagogues were built to resemble Gothic cathedrals; the God of the Torah — strict, demanding, a judge — was replaced by the Christian God of love and forgiveness. Mixed marriages, successful careers, philanthropy, names on theaters, museums, and hospitals — time to stop talking about antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Today — antisemitic protests, attacks on Orthodox Jews, harassment of Jewish students, demonization of Israel. Yet the main concerns of liberal American Jews — more than 70% of the community — are minority rights, illegal immigrants, LGBTQ causes, Palestinians, and loyal service to the Democratic Party, which increasingly harbors Jew-haters.

It is unlikely that Binnie Kirshenbaum consciously intended to make her heroine a symbol of Jewish humiliation and self-destruction. Literature does not always follow the author’s intentions. The artist creates a world — and that world, in turn, creates the artist.