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Mar. 26th, 2019 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDisobedience by Naomi Alderman
Now I am so much more disappointed about the movie. I wrote about how surface-level the movie is when it comes to Jewish stuff. Alderman's book is definitely not surface-level. Each chapter is preceded by thoughtful Chasidic meditations on kabbalah and midrash and the Jewish conception of the universe, which are very, very carefully aligned to the narrative. And that all works quite well, but it's the little things that she gets right that are the book's daggers of insight. Alderman gives Ronit so many sharp, bitter one-liners that only someone of the community could articulate.
I loved a scene where Dovid, Ronit, and Esti are invited to Shabbos dinner at the home of a big shul macher. The macher and his wife are revealed in Ronit's careful observation to be two-faced and phony, but their guests, an esteemed community Rabbi and his wife, are genuinely kind people who are also deeply enmeshed in the fabric of Orthodox life that so damaged Ronit. Ronit eventually decides to respond to the macher's wife's verbal jabs with a series of sarcastic barbs that blow up the conversation, but the subtlety of her weighing how much she wants to show respect to the guest Rabbi is what makes this scene so powerful and effective.
And then Alderman follows up this scene with a scene at shul on Shabbos morning. She mentions at the beginning of the scene that it's the day before Rosh Chodesh and I instantly understood where she was going, even though it took her two pages to get there. The special haftarah for Machar Chodesh is the story of David and Jonathan, about which I once wrote "With regard to David and Jonathan, the point is that one can never really know what was going on within the bedroom, and it's not really all that important either way. The Torah is trying to teach us something here about friendship and loyalty, and it's trying to sort out inter-dynastic politics, and there's a half dozen other things going on in that story, so whether David and Jonathan were physically intimate is almost immaterial- unless you're gay and Orthodox and that passage is one of your touchstones of your existence." Alderman here clearly staged her writing in a way so that if you are an insider and you know the ins and outs of Jewish life, you'll understand what's happening well ahead of the non-insider reader. It's such a lovely gift to read a book this thoughtful by someone who appreciates these nuances.
I am puzzled by the movie's choice to turn Ronit from a financial analyst to a photographer. Not that a photographer can't be an analytic person, but one of Alderman's clear ideas is that Ronit is someone who if she'd been male, would have been a worthy successor to her father. Alderman shows her throwing her whole life into the analysis of an ersatz Talmud composed of numbers and figures, struggling to find a channel for the particular sort of divine inspiration that lives inside of her. I... could not have gotten that from the film.
Delving deeper, unlike the film, the book Disobedience is not a story about Ronit's inability to mourn her father. It's a story about the fact that since she never properly mourned her mother, she cannot grieve for her father. Ronit's mother is so much more central to her identity in the book and it is a major part of why the story is so much more emotionally resonant to me as a story about grief, the way it tackles different layers of emotional baggage and the messy way they intersect and interact with each other.
I am less certain how I feel about a story arc about Dovid's headaches, which are possibly some sort of prophetic visions and possible are just fucking migraines that Rov Krupka in his short-sightedness prevented Dovid from having treated. It felt very similar to how I felt about the frame story in Alderman's The Power... it's a story arc that's too complicated for the limited treatment it gets, so it ends up just obfuscating and undermining the themes the rest of the story is exploring.
Now I am so much more disappointed about the movie. I wrote about how surface-level the movie is when it comes to Jewish stuff. Alderman's book is definitely not surface-level. Each chapter is preceded by thoughtful Chasidic meditations on kabbalah and midrash and the Jewish conception of the universe, which are very, very carefully aligned to the narrative. And that all works quite well, but it's the little things that she gets right that are the book's daggers of insight. Alderman gives Ronit so many sharp, bitter one-liners that only someone of the community could articulate.
I loved a scene where Dovid, Ronit, and Esti are invited to Shabbos dinner at the home of a big shul macher. The macher and his wife are revealed in Ronit's careful observation to be two-faced and phony, but their guests, an esteemed community Rabbi and his wife, are genuinely kind people who are also deeply enmeshed in the fabric of Orthodox life that so damaged Ronit. Ronit eventually decides to respond to the macher's wife's verbal jabs with a series of sarcastic barbs that blow up the conversation, but the subtlety of her weighing how much she wants to show respect to the guest Rabbi is what makes this scene so powerful and effective.
And then Alderman follows up this scene with a scene at shul on Shabbos morning. She mentions at the beginning of the scene that it's the day before Rosh Chodesh and I instantly understood where she was going, even though it took her two pages to get there. The special haftarah for Machar Chodesh is the story of David and Jonathan, about which I once wrote "With regard to David and Jonathan, the point is that one can never really know what was going on within the bedroom, and it's not really all that important either way. The Torah is trying to teach us something here about friendship and loyalty, and it's trying to sort out inter-dynastic politics, and there's a half dozen other things going on in that story, so whether David and Jonathan were physically intimate is almost immaterial- unless you're gay and Orthodox and that passage is one of your touchstones of your existence." Alderman here clearly staged her writing in a way so that if you are an insider and you know the ins and outs of Jewish life, you'll understand what's happening well ahead of the non-insider reader. It's such a lovely gift to read a book this thoughtful by someone who appreciates these nuances.
I am puzzled by the movie's choice to turn Ronit from a financial analyst to a photographer. Not that a photographer can't be an analytic person, but one of Alderman's clear ideas is that Ronit is someone who if she'd been male, would have been a worthy successor to her father. Alderman shows her throwing her whole life into the analysis of an ersatz Talmud composed of numbers and figures, struggling to find a channel for the particular sort of divine inspiration that lives inside of her. I... could not have gotten that from the film.
Delving deeper, unlike the film, the book Disobedience is not a story about Ronit's inability to mourn her father. It's a story about the fact that since she never properly mourned her mother, she cannot grieve for her father. Ronit's mother is so much more central to her identity in the book and it is a major part of why the story is so much more emotionally resonant to me as a story about grief, the way it tackles different layers of emotional baggage and the messy way they intersect and interact with each other.
I am less certain how I feel about a story arc about Dovid's headaches, which are possibly some sort of prophetic visions and possible are just fucking migraines that Rov Krupka in his short-sightedness prevented Dovid from having treated. It felt very similar to how I felt about the frame story in Alderman's The Power... it's a story arc that's too complicated for the limited treatment it gets, so it ends up just obfuscating and undermining the themes the rest of the story is exploring.
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Date: 2019-03-26 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-26 06:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-29 05:16 pm (UTC)