American writer

By Paul Haist

"The Cantor's Daughter, Stories," by Scott Nadelson, 2006, Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts, $15.95

I am disinclined to call Scott Nadelson a Jewish writer, in the sense that I believe Jewish writer is widely understood in literary circles, because I think it is incidental that the characters in his short stories are, for the most part, Jewish.
The fact that most of his characters are Jewish is about as important as the fact that most of them reside in suburban New Jersey where Nadelson grew up.
And there is more to being a Jewish writer in a literary sense than merely being Jewish, which Nadelson is.
I believe this was true about the stories in his first collection, "Saving Stanley, The Brickman Stories," although I did not address the issue then because my initial astonishment at the lyrical beauty of Nadelson's prose outweighed that and most other issues for me.
However, no matter whether it was true of the first collection, it seems certainly true of the eight artfully crafted stories in his new collection, "The Cantor's Daughter, Stories," out this spring from Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts of Portland.
What Nadelson writes about, like all writers of fiction, are human relationships, mostly between two or more people and sometimes only with oneself.
Every story in "The Cantor's Daughter" turns on the unfolding or evolution of one or more relationships in circumstances that largely have nothing to do with cultural identity more narrow than that of America.
So, while the title story, "The Cantor's Daughter," for example, clearly possesses some Jewish elements (the girl's father is a cantor, they came to America from Israel), the epiphany and transformation experienced by the 16-year-old girl in Nadelson's story could as well have happened to any child anywhere.
It is an episode in a coming-of-age story in which the teenage girl, largely estranged from her widower father, finds her way back to him and finds a place again for him in her heart after a shabby post-prom intimacy with a boy, all complicated by the father and daughter's shared experience of having lost the wife/mother.
The story is not distinguished by its players' Jewishness. The story is distinguished by Nadelson's insightful sensitivity, his emotional depth and his gift for language, which combine to unlock a door into a closed theater wherein everyone, Jews and non-Jews, may see themselves as actors on its stage.
Nadelson consistently relies on ordinary events in ordinary lives to open that door and show us ourselves. It comes in each story, often as a surprise: these ordinary people, how like each of us they are.
Many of his characters in the new collection are far from likeable. In the long last story of the book, "Headhunter," for example, about a pharmaceutical industry recruiter and the chemist whose career he helped launch, it is very difficult to like the recruiter.
Len Siegel appears first as an incipient alcoholic ne'er-do-well wallowing in self-pity and hell bent on total failure and personal dissolution.
After a mistake at work enables Siegel to place the chemist in a post in which the chemist rises to international prominence, Siegel, by then himself successful as a consequence of his relationship with the chemist, emerges as an amoral opportunist willing to destroy the chemist who became his friend of many years.
It's hard to like Siegel, and yet in his dialogue with himself it is also hard not to see something of ourselves—what we might too easily become, what cruelty or self-abasement we might find possible in ourselves if we did not hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Here again, the fact that Siegel is Jewish is irrelevant, or, in the unlikely case that it's not irrelevant, it should
be. Men and women everywhere have the capacity to betray others whom
they should not, and Siegel's betrayal
of his friend is not a function of his
Jewishness.
Likewise, in "Rehearsal," the characters' Jewish identity is insignificant, except, perhaps, for the cultural color it provides at a wedding rehearsal, but which does not contribute to the core story.
It is a prodigal-son story about the relationship between two brothers, one responsible and predictable, the other a recovering itinerant profligate come home to attend his brother's wedding.
The responsible brother comes off as shallow, small and self-centered, while the prodigal brother almost glows in an aura of self-realization and spiritual serenity. But nothing about their Jewish identity or heritage is shown to color who each of them is or to motivate their actions.
The same can be said about the Jewish characters in all eight of the new stories.
Nadelson's stories are not Jewish in the sense that stories by, say, Philip Roth,
Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick are. His characters are not driven significantly by their unique Jewish identity or circumstances. The choices they make do not arise from their Jewishness.
Nadelson's stories do not suffer on this account and they are no less worthy of acclaim because of this. However, some others already have labeled him a Jewish writer, but that may be true only in that he is Jewish. It may be more significant that he is an American writer.
As noted in our comment on his first collection, Nadelson tells his stories in unpretentious prose in which the writer is mostly invisible, a quality he has further refined in this second collection.
It is a voice unmodulated by ego and infused with an intimacy that makes it seem almost as if the stories were being read to us alone in a quiet room.
It also was noted in our comment on Nadelson's first collection that he seemed to possess both respect and affection for his characters.
I think the issue of respect still pertains. That is, there are no apologies in Nadelson's stories for the shortcomings of some of his characters, who may be fuller and richer than in the first collection. They simply are who he has made them and the reader is left to judge them.
The issue of affection may have changed in the second collection.
If it is difficult for the reader to like all the characters in these stories, it is likely that the author didn't like them either. This may point to Nadelson's evolving worldview and perhaps some disenchantment with parts of that world.
Nadelson, who once worked as a Jewish Review staff editor and won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for his first collection of short stories, teaches at Willamette University in Salem.