THE RABBI’S DAUGHTER

author:
REVA MANN

Non-fiction
368 pages
Dial Press Trade

Children veer from one extreme to another; it’s to be expected. When adults do it, it’s fascinating, troubling—and more than a little annoying.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, try as I might, I never warmed to Reva Mann over the course of her autobiography. The daughter of a progressive yet devout Orthodox rabbi, Mann spent her teens and early adulthood rocketing from the arms of gentile to the closeted life of a seminary in Israel. She abandons her life of rebellion in an episode, which is almost certainly partly invented, where her gentile ex-lover invites her to the Kind David Hotel and she declines to rejoin him for another hedonistic fling. Why do I think it’s partly invented? Because he’s staying in room 613—famously the number of laws to follow in the Torah—of the most famous hotel in Israel; I smell more than a whiff of poetic license here, which, to her discredit, surfaces repeatedly throughout the book.

The sense of laboured coincidence plagues the whole of this book, though it is not entirely without merit. Mann’s portrait of her ultra-Orthodox husband, who will not touch her when she is menstruating and whom she sometimes accuses of lacking in tenderness towards her, is refreshingly three-dimensional. Although she concedes that she is unable to share his unwavering observance of religious duty—screaming aloud when her son’s hair is ceremonially cut, as if it were his throat—she does make sure to stress his equal devotion to his children and to living a good life.

One certainly can’t accuse Mann of a lack of honesty. Sometimes, however, it’s as if she has mistaken being frank for the necessity to share every single sexual detail. Far from being shocking, it becomes a bit tiresome and unnecessary; like the gratuitous flash of the leading lady’s cleavage, it ceases to be of interest after the first coy revelation.

Mann manages to frustrate right to the end, by going through this cycle from rebel to frum and back again only to end up with roughly the same outlook as her father and grandfather before her: one of dedication to Judaism but an understanding of the way that modern life must impact on it. Her mellowing seems to occur only as the result of a devastating illness, and it is during these passages that she is at her most accessible. Finally, she seems human, no longer the caricature of an extreme. The only other times she comes close to this are in exchanges with her sister, who is a resident in a home for people with fairly severe disabilities.

The Rabbi’s Daughter is an exhausting litany of misunderstanding, where minor quibbles are dressed up as monolithic problems and major episodes are strangely unimpressive. Perhaps this is a true picture of real life, where most of us make mountains out of molehills yet deal with difficult, uncontrollable situations by displaying remarkable calm. Even if it is, it’s really quite irksome to read.

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