Good Heart by Alan Newman, Gefen Publishing House, © 2018, ISBN 9789652-299550; 251 pages including acknowledgments, glossary, and author’s biography, $15.95.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO –An interesting aspect of this multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and dual religious novel is that love, rather than conflict, pulls the plot along. Among the central characters in this ode to Israel and brotherhood, there are no arguments, no rivalries, nothing but respect, attachment, and love. You might think of this novel as utopian, but for the fact that the two religions represented—Judaism and Christianity—are not the only ones with a stake in Israel’s future. There are no individual Muslims in this book, only a generalized Arab enemy across the border in Gaza.
Still, there is nothing in this novel that excludes the hope that the amity envisioned among Jews and Christians, as well as among Americans, Israelis, and black and white Jews cannot sometime in the future be extended to Muslims, Baha’i, Circassians (Adyghe), Druze, Bedouin, Palestinians, and the other peoples of Israel.
The basis of the novel is a friendship formed in Indiana between Bobby, a Christian youth who after a tobogganing accident is pulled to safety by Danny, a Jewish teen. Whereas some of Danny’s relatives had perished in the Holocaust, Bobby’s father had been one of the American GI’s who had liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp and never was able to forget the horrors that Nazi hate had wrought. The commonalities of the deepest experiences of the two teen’s families help to forge a lifelong bond between them.
We read with fascination as the young men’s friendship grows deeper over time; how they find their future wives in college, and how their attachment to Israel grows through the separate influences of a Christian Zionist church, and Danny’s Israeli wife.
Eventually, the children of our protagonists find their way to Israel; Yoni as a lone soldier destined to fall in love with an Ethiopian Jewish immigrant; Susanne as a professing Christian engaged in good works in Israel’s poorer neighborhoods.
Author Newman, an activist with a variety of U.S. Jewish organizations, has the familiarity with both the American Jewish community and with Israel that makes reading his book like having a conversation with an old friend. Additionally, he brings to his book knowledge of both the Ethiopian Jewish aliyah and the emotional underpinning of Christian Zionism. The novel may be a reverie—especially viewed in the harsh light of the growing estrangement between Israel and Diaspora communities—but if so, it’s a dream well worth experiencing.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
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