Orthodox Wife-Swapping, and So Much More
At the heart of Olive Days (Counterpoint, $27.00), a debut novel from Jessica Elisheva Emerson questions of knowing—if anyone can really know us, if we can know ourselves—and what the cost of being known can be.
Ensconced in the Orthodox Jewish community of Pico-Robertson, Los Angeles, Rina Kirsch lives a life structured by the ceaseless tasks of an religiously observant wife and mother. It’s this exhausting routine, informed by “muscle memory,” that grounds Rina when, in the early pages of the novel, her husband, David, persuades her to participate in an evening of wife-swapping.
Is it the betrayal of “being traded” by her husband that dislodges Rina, emotionally and physically, from the life she’s been living? Maybe. Rina breaks the boundaries of her marriage (and of Jewish law)—in vivid detail—in a series of actions that both have an immediate cause and have been a long time coming.
Rina, who knows “what it was like to be nostalgic for something you’d never had,” commences a search for new experiences. She crashes and glides into relationships with a series of men who push her into interrogating herself, her authentic beliefs, and her unfulfilled desire to be known beyond the persona she presents to her frum Modern Orthodox community.
In a story about a woman’s desire for freedom from a religious life, are relationships with men the only means of achieving it? Emerson’s male characters, even those who fail hugely with their wives, trip, crumble and sometimes rise to the occasion, surprising the reader as well as Rina with their vulnerability. After all, it’s David, the same husband who swaps Rina for a friend’s wife in the early pages of the novel, who arguably opens the door to her to reconnect her sexuality after years in a stale yet surprisingly young marriage—and he also urges her return to painting.
Rina struggles with her connection to Judaism in the face of her eroding belief. In her final encounter with Anshel, a rabbi with whom she had a brief affair, she’s destabilized by his revelation that not only does he see her more vividly than she thought possible, but that his own Jewish practice is rooted more in fear than in faith: “Being at large in the world, being untethered, that is what I cannot face.” It’s a sobering moment.
Rina does feel like she’s truly known by Will, her art teacher, who himself searches for spiritual affirmation. A flow chart connecting the characters in Olive Days might show that the most important revelation we’d learn isn’t about sexuality, but, that everyone wants to feel fully seen. Sex, religion and art can all be seen as means to that end.
Olive Days is a study of what comes after moments of intoxication and freedom. That question sweeps beyond the very specific Jewish milieu Emerson describes: Once someone sees us for who we are, or for who we really could be, do we have to live up to that vision? Or is it enough to have been glimpsed?
Chanel Dubofsky is a writer in Brooklyn, NY.
