Book Review: The Worlds We Think We Know: Stories by Dalia Rosenfeld

Review by Sarah Appleton

The Worlds We Think We Know: Stories
Stories by Dalia Rosenfeld
Milkweed Editions, April 2017
$16.00; 264 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1571311269

The Worlds We Think We Know, Dalia Rosenfeld’s debut collection of short stories, depicts the worlds of cultural and ethnic Jews, worlds she reveals are sometimes at odds, sometimes overlapping, and always tinged with the darkness of a people long persecuted yet cut with the humor it takes to survive. She depicts these worlds through details—a widow who continues to mourn her long dead husband; the ubiquitous cucumber and tomato salad; the dust storms that sweep into the city leaving grit in your teeth; Israelis who have served, or will at any moment, in the army. Setting does this work, too; Rosenfeld’s stories oscillate between Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and America, usually the Midwest, with Europe, and the atrocities Jews suffered there, always lurking in the past. A sense of loneliness and isolation pervades the collection, and its sources are myriad—depression, being seemingly the only Jew in a Midwestern city, an immigrant living in a foreign land or being left by an immigrant. Repeating threads—names, characters, motifs—draw the stories together, blurring the lines between the worlds to create a sweeping, yet precise narrative of Jewishness.

In some stories, Rosenfeld’s characters work to slough off their Jewish identity in favor of their new country. When Misha, in the opening story, “Swan Street,” immigrates to America, likely from Russia, he leaves behind his wife, the story’s narrator. “It was my presence, of course, that Misha was trying to ignore,” she says, “my profile that obstructed his view of Eileen,” a pretty American and fellow guest of the Swan Street Bed and Breakfast who has been helping Misha look for a permanent apartment. Eventually, Misha succeeds in ignoring his wife’s presence when Eileen offers herself as the final place she has to show him: “It was the body of another woman, the ultimate dwelling place, that Misha was led that night. Eileen left him little choice: she was beautiful, she was radiant; she was America.” Eileen stands in for America while the wife stands in for the country Misha has forsaken, setting the tone for metaphorical readings as well as an imbalance in one culture’s or country’s value over another.

But America isn’t always the desirable country, and several of Rosenfeld’s stories are populated with American students studying abroad or otherwise living in Israel reaching for a Jewish identity that hovers just out of reach. Their roots in Israel are semi-permanent. As the narrator in the titular story explains, “my parents . . . raised me to be the kind of Jew who could plant a tree in Israel without having to stay and watch it grow.” Two other stories, “Amnon” and “Naftali,” are named for the men the female protagonists, Nava and Dina, respectively, are drawn to. “I cannot recite the street names of Tel Aviv by heart,” Nava admits, “because I have not really lived there.” She is there to ask Amnon, a man she spent a summer on a kibbutz with long ago, to come live with her in America, but by the end, Amnon tells her, “‘I know you want to stay…I knew it then, and I know it now. It’s all right, Nava, you don’t have to be afraid.’” Similarly, Dina clings to a city through the man she loves. “It was easy for me to love [Naftali] without knowing him,” she says, “He lived in Jerusalem, a city that belonged to my heart like no other.” But, as with Nava, Dina’s place in the country is tenuous, her identity as an American inerasable. “I had wanted to have one last conversation with Naftali . . . one final exchange to make him see that where he came from, I came from too.” The reader can’t help but doubt the veracity of Dina’s claim, which she entrenches in the following sentence, also the last in the collection: “But there was too great a distance between us, and it was all I could do not to turn around and wait for him on the other side of the street.” At the conclusion of the collection, this great distance feels metaphorical, a claim to a country, religion, and ethnicity that feels both rightful but unattainable to one not born and raised in Israel or the shtetl.

This identity struggle plays out in America, too. In “Flight,” the narrator opts for the kosher co-op in lieu of the college dining hall, and there she falls in love with Danny, a fellow college student who regularly pontificates on points of Jewish religion and culture. She wants desperately to join Danny’s conversation because of his allure—or the allure of someone so knowledgeable about a faith and ethnicity she has claim to but knows little about. Although Kyo, the narrator’s best friend, appears to place her at the center of his world, the narrator has eyes only for Danny, perhaps because he is certain about his identity whereas Kyo struggles between his Japanese half and his Jewish one. At a Shabbat service, which Kyo attends at the narrator’s request, the co-op’s rabbi asks students to reclaim their identity as Jews. “I am a Jew,” the students take turns saying, and Kyo says it, too. Afterward, the narrator demands, “‘Now you have to unsay it.’ . . . ‘I’m not a Jew,’” Kyo responds, adding, “‘It’s weird, I always thought that was a bad word.’” Kyo gives voice to what readers may be feeling, dispelling a misconception, as in all the stories, that illuminates and reclaims the many facets of Jewish identity.

Although it is never the central focus of a story, the Holocaust is inescapable, an undercurrent that cuts through nearly every story at some point. In the titular story, the narrator visits Lotzi, a Holocaust survivor, who “always waited for [her] to arrive before retrieving his knife from the cupboard, a gesture that was never lost on [her] since [she] feared he would one day use it to take his life.” There’s a fleeting moment in “Naftali” where Dina is looking through a photo album with an elderly friend when she notices that “[m]any of the faces were young, and did not get older as the pages piled up.” While they are looking at the photo album’s pages another time, the friend asks Dina about a man she went on a date with, and Dina finds it “hard for [her] to make the leap from Lili’s pigtails to Assaf, from violent death to snowflakes sailing over the sea.” Naftali himself lives in an apartment intended for his grandfather, who never lived in it since he died in Europe, graveless, which prompts one to assume he died in a concentration camp. Small and subtle though they might be, these moments are ties that bind those they touch to their Jewish identity regardless of how Jewish they may feel.

Despite these dark allusions, characters’ depression, or disintegrating relationships, the tone of Rosenfeld’s stories is not elegiac; although the stories are sometimes somber, they are leavened with humor. The endings of Rosenfeld’s stories, as with “Naftali,” often ring as metaphorical, particularly the more shocking they are. In the end, through her poignant prose and spare, effective dialogue, Rosenfeld conveys a multi-dimensional portrait of the worlds of Jewishness, worlds many readers may not have really known at all.

Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School, where she lives with her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her @sarahkapples on Twitter.