Family plots
Many Israelis are convinced that Jews living in the Diaspora invite another Holocaust. But some recent American Jewish fiction imagines a dire fate for the Jewish state itself. The “Frozen Chosen” in Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” adopt Alaska as their homeland after Israel is annihilated. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here I Am,” an apocalyptic conflict devastates the Middle East.
David Samuel Levinson sets his second novel, “Tell Me How This Ends Well,” in 2022, after a Three Day War that allows Iran, Syria and Lebanon to carve up what used to be Israel. Gripped by “America First” isolationism, the United States refused to intervene. But, stung by remorse, the country admitted 4 million Israeli refugees, which in turn precipitated an epidemic of violent anti-Semitism. It is, we are told, “a terrible time for the Jews in general.” It is not a swell time for one dysfunctional Jewish clan in particular.
Using the rampant bigotry as ambience for a dark and deadly comedy of bad manners, Levinson focuses on the Jacobsons, a Jewish family that is unhappy in its own miserable way. The patriarch, 70-year-old Julian Jacobson, is an abusive, self-centered bully to his long-suffering wife, Roz, and their three children. Mo, 42, a frustrated movie actor, cuckolded husband of a woman named Pandora, and doting father of a set of twins and a set of triplets, is the eldest. His sister, Edith, is a professor of ethics whose own behavior, particularly toward men, would rankle Spinoza. Jacob, the youngest of the three Jacobsons, is a struggling playwright who lives in Berlin with his lover, Dietrich, the son of Nazis. “You all have been nothing but constant disappointments,” Julian tells Mo, Edith and Jacob.
The occasion is Passover, and members of the scattered family converge on Mo and Pandora’s house in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas for four days of blood combat. Roz is suffering from a rare, fatal lung disease that requires her to be hooked up to an oxygen tank. But Julian, a retired research pulmonologist, drives them out to California from their home in Dallas. Edith flies in from Atlanta, where, until suspended for an indiscretion with a student, she was teaching at Emory University. And, traveling from Germany, Jacob brings along Dietrich to introduce to his kin. The climax of the reunion will be a seder, which, to revive his moribund Hollywood career, Mo has arranged to be broadcast live as reality TV.
Mo’s swimming pool is empty because, parched from a prolonged drought, California imposes thousands of dollars in penalties to discourage frivolous use of water. The story takes place in an environment of dry hate, appropriate for an outbreak of anti-Semitic bombings and shootings. And amid “the hatred that swirled like dust in the air,” the Jacobson siblings plot the murder of their patriarch. Thrown together in the days before the seder, Mo, Edith and Jacob dredge up old resentments — painful memories of slights, insults and assaults. They are especially troubled by Julian’s mistreatment of Roz, a beloved Jewish mother who defies the cultural stereotype. Suspecting their father of plotting to kill her, they argue over how to kill him first.
Successive chapters offer the perspectives of Jacob, Edith, Mo and Roz, but not the despised father and husband Julian. An irredeemably nasty domestic despot, he remains “a black hole into which he sucked all light and luck and love.” No one can escape his gravitational field, but Julian’s angry energy powers the narrative. “Tell Me How This Ends Well” is the story of Oedipus inspired by Aristophanes rather than Sophocles.
“Someone, please, tell me how this is going to end well,” one of the jousting Jacobsons thinks to himself. However, no responsible reviewer would reveal how Levinson’s novel ends, only that it is fortified with surprises and, for all its slapstick props, including a dead peacock floating in a swimming pool and a Heimlich maneuver performed during a nationally televised seder, is unexpectedly affecting. For all the narrative pranks and pratfalls, the book is a moving account of the rich complexities of maternal love and the bewildering ecstasies of sibling rivalry.