Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant is a thematically complex novel examining the lives of three Jewish Americans who have traveled to Israel. All three find themselves in Israel because they seek atonement in varying forms, but often atonement must be made with sacrifice. The book examines both political and religious extremism as it collides with democracy in the Middle East, but perhaps even more importantly the book examines the overwhelming human need to feel accepted, to feel like we belong to something bigger than ourselves. Leegant’s prose is beautiful and her knowledge of Israel makes this novel come alive.
Yona Stern travels to Israel to seek forgiveness from her sister for a past sin. The book opens with Yona’s arrival at the airport, and the novel in many ways is about why Jewish Americans travel to Israel. “The metallic clanging. The loudspeakers blaring in five languages. The luggage carousel coughed up its half-digested suitcases.” Leegant is masterful with descriptions throughout the novel, and this opening scene will undoubtedly be familiar to many readers who have made the journey.
This is not Yona’s first trip to Israel. In fact, her grievous sin against her sister was committed on a past trip. The reader learns from the customs agent that the name Yona means dove in Hebrew. Her sister’s name, Dena, means judgment. Dena, a mother of five and pregnant again, is part of the settlement movement, which is viewed as radical by some. She is stoic and unrelenting. The symbolism in the novel is clear.
The second character the novel follows is Mark Greenglass, an ex-drug dealer turned talented Talmud teacher. While the novel opens with Yona arriving in Israel, the first time the reader meets Mark he is stepping off a train in New York having come from Israel to deliver a series of lectures. Leegant writes:
He was a fake. An imposter. It was all falling apart and he couldn’t stop it. He ought to pull off the yarmulke, the tzitzit fringes, throw them into the trash. Everything was unraveling and he didn’t know why, only that it was slipping away from him like so much water from his fingertips. One day it’s the organizing principle of your life, and the next it’s nothing. Gone, evaporated.
Mark is struggling with his faith, but like Yona, the internal struggle is tied to the aching need for atonement. As he thinks about how he has skipped the morning and afternoon prayers, he muses:
And now he was going to skip them all again. In the place where the whole business began. New York. Where he’d descended with Regina and climbed back out alone. The irony was not lost on him. He was giving it up in the place where all that hot desire for the holy had first taken root.
While in New York, Mark wants to help Regina, his first love. Religion saved him, but he left her behind. She is caught in the nightmare of drug addiction, and now he is wavering in the very thing that took him away.
Also like Yona, Mark feels ostracized by his family. Mark’s father, Lenny, is all business and money. He has no interest in religion or art or anything remotely emotional. Yona and Dena are polar opposites, as are Mark and his father.
The third main character in the novel is the one that ultimately brings them all together. Aaron Blinder is a young college dropout, lost and lonely in the world. As I said before, the symbolism is clear. Aaron is appropriately named.
He, like Yona and Mark, is a family outcast. His lack of ambition and series of failures embarrasses his father, a famous Jewish American writer whose books focus on the Holocaust. Aaron desperately wants to be a part of something important. He wants to be a success. He wants his father to look at him with pride. While living in an extremist commune on the edge of Israeli territory, not fitting in, not respected by the Israelis:
He felt the hand of the almighty Avenger guiding him, touching him on his very shoulder, looking down at him from this cracked ceiling in this miserable outpost on the edge of the scorpion desert where a hundred battles had been fought and where so much blood had soaked into the earth that even the mountains had turned red.
Aaron’s naiveté and desperation blindly leads him to violence, which brings the characters together and becomes the denouement of the novel.
I really enjoyed the novel because there are so many layers of themes, symbols, and character conflicts. There are the main characters with their personal conflicts and stories- the theme of atonement through sacrifice. On another level they represent Jewish Americans who feel drawn to Israel for political and religious reasons. They want to be a part of something bigger and more important than themselves; yet, as a taxi driver tells Yona in the novel:
“Americans will always be new. No matter how long they’re here… They could be here thirty years, even fifty, and they’ll still be new. Except maybe if they shed blood. Then maybe someone might say they belong.”
At one point Eyal, an Israeli, tells Yona:
“The radical settlers I know, and believe me, I have a few in my family closet, they need black and white. They don’t like the gray… they like absolutes. And drama. They don’t want to be ordinary people thinking about car payments and bank overdraft. They want a big life. Historical, theatrical.”
And this ideology drives Aaron to action. It is the tension between the epic history of the land and everyday life in a democracy. Leegant captures the nuances and themes in beautiful prose.
Wherever You Go was published in paperback in July 2011 by W.W. Norton. Leegant won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best book of Jewish American fiction for her collection of short stories, An Hour in Paradise. She lives half the year in New England and half in Israel where she teaches at Bar-Ilan University. I look forward to reading more of her work.
