What this book does well:
This novel is a prime example of “Pedestrian realism” in literary fiction, the type of tale that isn’t so much about solving problems as it is about acceptance. Here the prolific Jewish author Howard Fast present snapshots of what it meant to be Jewish after WWII in America.
It’s a fortunate coincidence that the movie Oppenheimer (about the development of the first atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project) just came out earlier this month because Oppenheimer is also referenced in this book.
Oppenheimer himself was Jewish, although he’d been quiet about it, until WWII broke out. That gave him all the reasons he needed to risk everything to build this bomb. Many other brilliant Jewish scientists had already fled from Germany and other parts of Europe to New York while Hitler was rising to power, and of course, they wanted to stop the madness they saw and end the war.
Both the Oppenheimer film and this book ask a highly controversial question:
Is it wrong to pretend to have faith when people trust you with their lives?
✡Meet the Rabbi:
In “The Outsider,” the main character is Rabbi David Hartman. He was an Army chaplain in WWII, there to comfort and assist Jewish soldiers and refugees. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that David vowed to remain a Rabbi for the rest of his life because when his brigade liberated the Dachau concentration camp, they saw the star on David’s uniform and learned he was a Jewish chaplain:
“Then they gathered around me, close, these poor, emaciated people, touching me, calling [me] a dumb, twenty-eight-year-old American kid abba, the Hebrew word for father. Goodman, the Jewish kid from the Bronx, was still crying, and the other kid with me, who wasn't Jewish, he was crying too, and then one of the men, one of the concentration camp men, he said to me, in Yiddish:
*Please, Rabbi, please, will you say the Kaddish with us for the dead?' [the Kaddish is an ancient prayer spoken for the dead.] I took out my tallis, put it over my shoulders, and I led them in the Kaddish.
“It was then that I put aside other things and became a rabbi.” (pgs. 40 -41)
As many Jewish men did after the war, naturally David found a nice Jewish girl he fancied (who’s actually an atheist, but still proudly Jewish) and set about to get a congregation to spread his faith and have children. Many survivors supported him as he gradually found a small town where the few Jewish families there were outcasts, bullied and discriminated against by others. David feels like an “Outsider” (hence the book title) not just because of his heritage as a minority here, but also because no one can help him make peace with the traumatic things he saw during the war that he can’t forget. No one can understand his nightmares or the survivor’s guilt he feels whenever he starts to feel happy because he believes he doesn’t deserve it.
David begins spiraling down into depression as more and more people come to him with bigger problems that he doesn’t have answers for. Yet, he is a Rabbi, the one responsible for having all the answers, so he swallows his doubts, pretends his faith is not in tatters, and continues trying to lead his congregation and preserve his heritage.
⚖️Then a Jewish judge comes to him privately for advice.
The judge is presiding over the case of the “atom spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the book, the judge admits the evidence against them seems to prove they were guilty, yet he can’t bring himself to sentence them to death. While the Rabbi himself is a fictional character, this Jewish married couple were real people sentenced to the electric chair after the trials of 1950 proved they were Soviet spies as the Cold War was beginning (see photo:)
photo credit Times of Israel
The Rosenbergs sent information related to the development of the atomic bomb to the Soviets — at a time when no other country had developed a fully operational nuclear weapon yet — which enraged many people. Simultaneously, the judge and many Jewish protestors didn’t want to execute them because so many Jewish people had already died in WWII less than a decade ago. Besides, it was hard to believe that information about the same weapon that helped to end the war and liberate Jews from concentration camps would be given away to enemies of the United States by other Jewish people. Still, the couple was found guilty, and thousands of people mourned their execution, especially considering the anti-semitic accusations against many innocent Jewish people during those times. This trial divided the entire American Jewish community.
In the end, it was eventually confirmed that:
In 1997, Alexander Feklisov, a retired KGB colonel, said that Julius Rosenberg served as an undercover agent for the Soviets between 1943 and 1946. Feklisov also said that Rosenberg had recruited other spies for the Soviets. Indeed, he even called Rosenberg a hero of the Soviet Union and "a true revolutionary who was willing to sacrifice himself for his beliefs." Feklisov added, however, that as far as he knew, Ethel Rosenberg was not an active agent for the Soviet Union. Despite Feklisov's claims about Ethel Rosenberg, many feel that her reluctance to acknowledge her husband's role as a Soviet spy still made her compliant in his espionage.
More details about this trial here:
https://www.history.com/news/rosenberg-sons-admit-father-julius-guilty
Their execution infuriates our Rabbi David, both because he knew they could be guilty and thus traitors of the Jewish community, and also because he knew it’s possible that they could be innocent victims of anti-semitism that was still unfortunately prevalent in America.
The following dialogue seemed to encompass the biggest struggle of the Rabbi throughout the whole novel as he discusses what’s just happened with his friend, a Christian minister. David is losing his faith and struggling to carry on as a rabbi after all the death and corruption he has seen, so he asks his friend the priest:
(pgs. 183 - 184)
“For the love of God, what kind of a game are we playing?"
*We pretend. But we're not the only ones. I try to work it out some way, David. If I did not believe in God, if I lost my faith–”
"You do believe?"
"Yes, I believe. Do you know, when they were ready to test the first atom bomb, Fermi and Oppenheimer and the other great minds, as we've been told, they raised among themselves the question of whether the explosion might not ignite the atmosphere and, in one horrible moment, extinguish all life on earth. They took bets, and then they exploded the bomb. Is there any doubt in your mind that these so-called great scientists were criminally insane?"
"No, no doubt," David said bleakly.
"I can say this to you, David, but not from my pulpit. So I pretend, so I'm a fraud and a coward, and I ask God to forgive me. I am only one human being at a point in history where mankind's madness has been combined with enough scientific knowledge to destroy the entire human race in moments. If I didn't believe in God, David, I would find the world meaningless and intolerable."
"And you find meaning in it?"
"I try, David. You understand that, because you also try.”
"Yes, I try."
“So we are what we are, ministers of a time so awful the mind rejects it."
"On the other hand –”
"I know," Martin interrupted, "on the other hand, life goes on as if nothing were any different, and we play our games. David, we are necessary, believe me. If I didn't feel that, I’d throw up the whole thing tomorrow. Maybe not honest, but necessary. Aspirin is necessary. Same thing. Liddy Delman is a parishioner. Fifty-two years old, intelligent, attractive woman. Husband passed away from a heart attack last year.
“Now she's dying of cancer in Danbury Hospital, a week or a month left. I get to see her at least every other day. I hold her hand and tell her that she will live again, that Jesus will receive her in his arms, that she will see her husband and loved ones. Am I telling her the truth, David?"
David was silent.
"No answer, my friend? The rabbi will not commit to the Christian minister. But damnit to hell, I give her peace! David, I give her peace! I take away the fear of senseless disease and meaningless death. I help her to depart this life with some dignity. Is that wrong?"
There is the ultimate dilemma:
Is it wrong to pretend to be a leader when people trust you with their lives?
Was it wrong for Oppenheimer to convince people to follow his lead and build the first atomic bomb, even though he didn’t know if it would kill them all in the process? Yet he chose to go on, to at least pretend he had faith in the science even when on the inside, he couldn’t know if it would work or be worth it.
Here I must add that I’ve met one of the Jewish children (recently deceased now) of the scientists on the Manhattan Project. Their family had absolutely no idea what their father was working on because it was top secret. They only learned what their father had done after the bombs were dropped in the war. They were so angry at their father for having designed this weapon of mass destruction that they disowned him; the whole family left when his wife divorced him, and none of them ever spoke to him again. So you see, while the weapon succeeded in ending the war and helping to liberate Jewish people from those camps, I don’t want anyone to be misled into thinking that all the Jewish people were celebrating the successful design of the atomic bomb. In fact, many regretted having ever created it because of the arms race that followed and all that happened since.
Like Oppenheimer, the Rabbi David clings onto his post in the pretense of having faith even when his depression overwhelms him and he at last considers him a complete fraud of a Rabbi because he doesn’t believe in anything anymore. This position makes him feel more guilty because even when a suicidal woman comes to him for advice, and he feels wrong trying to advise her on anything because he agrees with her that the world is generally shit.
He depresses his atheist wife and has a “mild” affair, so his wife leaves him and takes the kids. (I have a lot more to say about this, but that’s a bit further down in the next section, so hang on…)
The crux of the matter happened with this question:
A woman of his congregation asked:
pg.173
“The Lord of the universe watched the gas chambers and stood by? And he watched what happened in the Warsaw ghetto and just shrugged it off? But why does it say in the Bible that in the battles, he helped the Jews? He made the sun stand still. He made the walls of Jericho fall down.”
At this question, he mumbles “That was another time” and swallows back his tears, because the truth is that he feels the same way and doesn’t have an answer.
Finally back home, he can’t keep it in and shouts at his wife:
pg. 175:
“I'm a rabbi who has lost his belief in God."
"You feel that? I mean, when did it happen? Can something like that happen, just all of a sudden?"
"It's been adding up, one thing and another. Then that talk about shared premises. My own premise was a fraud. I've always counted myself a person of reason and intelligence, and all the horror and cruelty and duplicity I have seen, I've always explained with the handy proposition that God gives man free will. Tonight it didn't work. I drove that poor woman home, and she asked me about God, and all my thoughts and beliefs and devotions turned into a miserable and shameful farce."
"You've never done a shameful thing in your life!" Lucy protested.
"Endless numbers, Lucy." He got up and began to pace the room.
"Standing at that pit of horror at Dachau with a full stomach, a well-dressed, well-fed American officer, top of the world, what fine liberators we are when we're not atomizing Japanese cities, and then ten years here in this safe little nest of white Protestant middle-class comfort, where they don't murder Jews and are mostly quite nice to them…Oh, my God," he whispered, dropping down on the bed again. "I'm not talking sense, am I?"
And yet…
The bit where my philosophical side comes out:
Yes, I sympathize with these feelings. The world doesn’t often make sense when we look at all the suffering everywhere, and of course, these feelings are valid.
At the same time, this logic is full of holes.
When things go great in life, how many people say, “I did such a great job. Look at me and everything I accomplished.” (As if no one ever helped you.)
But when things are terrible, who is the first one that gets blamed? God. Fate. Always someone or something else. Why didn’t THEY do something to stop it?
Hypocritical much?
Blaming God for “standing back and allowing Jews to be killed” ignores the other side of the story. If someone believes in God, then why can’t they say God was helping them to end the war? So many millions of people fought and died to help get survivors out of those camps, and who helped them? Why can’t God’s hand be seen in all those little miracles along the way?
Furthermore, why should anyone wait around and pray for help about anything while ignoring the powers we have right now to make changes? Prayer can be a great thing certainly, but we need to take responsibility for what we have done and not done. We as people need to stop waiting around for help when we can act to save ourselves.
An insane amount of people — 6 million — Jewish people died in camps. This event should never be taken lightly. To stop WWII from happening again, we need to break out of that fear that kept people silent when they most needed to speak about what was happening in the shadows. We need to keep open the communication channels that allow us to speak when so much is being done to censor and hide facts.
Can you guess what 6 million people have died from more recently?
COVID. Although some sources say that number is more likely 15 million people depending on whose data you rely on and how many countries you include.
Did you know that respiratory pollutants and the lack of clean air to breathe in major cities contributed greatly to the spread of COVID — (seriously, even the New York Times covered the links between air pollution & COVID, as well as other scientists I’ve read)
…and these issues aren’t being taken as seriously as they should.
Did you know that having plants indoors actually decreases COVID risks due to the essential oxygen and air purification they provide?
🪴More on how plants save lives here at:
How plants disinfect the air, including removing air-borne COVID here.
SciTech Daily on plants & air purification
Why do you think I keep houseplants everywhere and continue planting trees?
Alright, let’s continue with what happened to David in the story…
David moves on…
Gradually, David comes out of his depression as he becomes more of a civil rights activist. (See, he took my advice that we need to act 😉).
Rabbi David Hartman goes on to participate in leading a Civil Rights march in the South with black Christian ministers, and they are beaten and arrested for their efforts by the police. The author Howard Fast drew on inspiration from real-life events here as well, for the biggest group of Rabbis ever arrested actually happened during the Civil Rights movement. These Jewish leaders, having survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, would not stand for racism of any kind within their country. They came from as far away as New Jersey to join the marches. See this clip:
Later in the book, following in his father’s own footsteps of protest, the Rabbi’s son goes to jail for 5 years because he refused to be drafted into the Vietnam war.
At last, David says on pg. 298 about faith that:
“There is an old rabbinical belief that the only proof of God is in our own actions, and I most often feel that is sufficient."
Is he doubt-free by the end? No. Is his life problem-free after he decides to marry again? No. But he does begin to accept things and slowly take more responsibility for what he can do.
🖋️The writing structure analysis bit:
Let’s talk about ➡️conflict without consequences ⬅️
Ideally, every scene needs to have consequences on the plot and/or characters, otherwise, it doesn’t need to be in the book. An extraneous scene is entertaining at best and annoying/distracting at its worst. A reader who gets annoyed by a scene that distracts is a reader who will put down the book. This is probably the number one reason I put down a lot of books that I never finish, and I know I’m not the only one when I read other book reviews. This point is especially true when the thing that happens really should have big consequences, but nothing happens. You can skip right over that bit without missing anything in the story.
I almost put down this book because of this plot deviation:
The scenes where our married David falls for another woman.
I had many issues with this because:
David starts seeing the other woman within 24 hours of his wife leaving town with their kids for a short family trip. It’s like he was dying to hook up with another woman, any woman really, despite all his narrative of “how much he loves his family and wife.” This portrayal of David is really cringe-worthy. Everyone has a flaw, sure, but this one felt like too much.
The woman he’s seeing came to him for advice, consulting him as a Rabbi, because she’s suicidal. And he still takes advantage of her. I’m not ok with this. Even if David feels somewhat suicidal himself, no, that kind of predatory behavior is really not ok.
The affair is very short because his wife and the kids were only out of town for a few days, and it’s left rather ambiguously about how much they did or did not consummate the fling. The other woman calls it off, not David (so of course I dislike him even more for not ending it himself), and she begs David not to call her or return her calls from now on.
Then the other woman actually does kills herself.
The worst part is, with all this, there were no big consequences. David hears the news, cries in a bathroom, and then goes on as if nothing happened.
All I got was a brief moment where his wife brings up his affair in one of their fights suddenly:
“Maybe she would be alive today if she could have been your wife.”
"My God," David whispered. "How long have you known?"
“Since last year. I never meant to tell you. Sarah told Mile, and Millie talked to me about it. Millie thought it would go on and make mincemeat out of our lives and our marriage, but then that poor woman killed herself - and all I knew was that I still had you, and David, I love you so much. so much - " She was crying again. He took her in his arms and held her tightly.
It snowed that night,… [pg. 140]
Yes, the text really continues with descriptions of snow and then no reflection about this fight anymore. David never tells his wife he was sorry about the affair. She never brings it up again.
Even worse, I could’ve skipped that whole chapter and not missed anything because the story afterward is completely unaffected by it.
When David’s wife leaves him several chapters later, part of me felt “It’s about damn time,” because they never seemed very compatible, and yet even when discussing divorce later, this other woman and what had happened never comes up as one of the reasons David’s wife leaves. Yet that’s completely unrealistic. Fidelity issues always completely change a relationship and are never forgotten — this was the 1950s; they didn’t have an open marriage, especially not for a Rabbi!
I am going through revisions on my own novel now, and believe me, I’m taking plenty of time to make sure every scene has obvious long-term consequences.
What did you think?
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