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Friday January 19, 2007

Charming ‘Temporary Life’ touches close to home

by rachel sarah
correspondent

In “The Temporary Life,” a beautiful collection of 11 short stories, Eric Wasserman brings a host of Jews to life with a self-mocking intelligence that will charm you.

Wasserman — who’s in his early 30s and lives in Los Angeles — has an uncanny way of depicting the secularization of American Jews as they try to figure out how to live to their fullest in our assimilated society.

In the opening story, “Next Year in Kona,” almost-40-year-old Gabe has mixed feelings about flying to Los Angeles for his nephew’s bar mitzvah. He’s always been fond of his nephew, Jeremy, but has “no wish to even see the family” with whom he’s disconnected. His sister, for example, is a member of the lost tribe of New Age Jews. Worse, during the flight, the kosher meal that his travel agent had recommended sends him to the bathroom again and again.

When it’s time for Jeremy’s bar mitzvah, Wasserman gives readers a sardonic and very accurate portrayal of how materialistic our society’s mitzvah circuit has become. The theme is the Titanic, “with an enormous black and white photo of Jeremy dressed in a tuxedo positioned at the ship’s bow. Gabe thought that his nephew looked more like the main attraction at a gay nightclub than Leonardo DiCaprio.”

To make matters worse, “placed on each table were plastic souvenir replicas of the small wooden tefillin boxes that Orthodox Jews prayed with each morning. The boxes themselves contained pieces of parchment with selections of scripture. These spun open with potpourri instead.”

Exaggerated? Sure. But don’t some of you relate?

The way that Wasserman writes about how self-conscious — and sometimes desperate — these Jews are draws you right in. In one of this reader’s favorite stories, “Layla Tov,” Oakland high school teacher Nathan runs into his ex-girlfriend, Carol, at the grocery store. They haven’t seen each other for nine years, ever since he “realized that he did not want to marry this woman he had jokingly referred to as a ‘half-breed’ since meeting her at a Grateful Dead concert at the Greek Theater.

“Nathan told her that he would not marry a woman who had a Jewish father and a gentile mother … He even went so far as to say that since Carol’s father was Jewish and her mother wasn’t, she really wasn’t Jewish at all.”

Ironically, Nathan isn’t much a Jew himself, except by blood: “Nathan had always been more inclined on Friday nights to light his bong than Shabbat candles.”

Carol is now the single mom of 7-year-old Katie, and she’s eager to date — not Nathan, however. He’ll make a better babysitter.

The Jews in “The Temporary Life” are often lonely and detached, but Wasserman writes with such tenderness and empathy that you can’t help but commiserate with them.

In the title story, Benjamin, a teenager, is psyching himself up to tell his parents he’s refusing to attend Yom Kippur services with them. He’s tipsy from drinking with his best friend, but wonders if he should be more concerned that his mother will smell the bourbon on his breath, “or even worse, smell the bacon cheeseburger I ate with Ari three hours ago?”

When he finally gets the guts to tell his mother “I’m not going to services,” however, she’ll hear none of it.

“Oh, yes, you are,” she shouts, before laying the guilt on thick: “You don’t care about anything at all, not even your own mother. I only carried you for nine months. I endured 31 hours of labor for you. And this is how I’m rewarded?”

You get the picture.

In Wasserman’s stories, many of them previously published in literary journals, Bay Area readers will surely relate to the characters’ struggles to hold tight to everything Jewish, as others stray around them. Hey, you might even find yourself in between the lines.

“The Temporary Life” by Eric Wasserman (201 pages, Questa Press, $13).

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