Fiction This article is more than 10 years oldReviewThe Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris – review
This article is more than 10 years oldCatherine Taylor on a Booker-longlisted debut about Orthodox JudaismIn the last few years two novels about very different Jewish communities have been published to acclaim: Francesca Segal's elegant, Costa-winning The Innocents, an update of Edith Wharton transplanted to the surface liberalism of affluent north London, and Anouk Markovits' I Am Forbidden, a powerful, harrowing account of an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect. Eve Harris's first book, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, lies somewhere in between. The serious subject at its core – the semi-arranged marriage of two young Haredi Jews – is belied by the warmth of the writing. There are demons here, but they do not terrify.
Twenty-year-old Baruch Levy sets his heart on 19-year-old Chani Kaufman, whom he glimpses across their gender-separated sections at a wedding. The pair are from starkly contrasting backgrounds, even within their narrow Hasidic world: Chani is one of eight daughters growing up in a shabby Hendon home; Baruch is the elder son of a dubiously wealthy Golders Green landlord, their luxurious house presided over by his social climber of a mother. What Baruch and Chani share, though, is spiritedness and stubbornness. Each has rejected the various suitors offered up to this point, and Chani – bright, pretty, but lacking the religious seminary education deemed the best credential in a good wife – has had the humiliation of being turned down even by those she had no interest in. As denoted by the title, Harris's premise is that this union is not just a binding agreement between two people – it affects families, friends, the wider society.
As the novel opens the bride is waiting in the sequestered bedeken room, where the groom will verify that she is the right woman, sweating in a wedding dress worn by so many generations it is rotting at the armpits. Harris captures Chani's combination of anxiety, sexual curiosity, teenage boredom and deep pride in tradition. She also sets up a figure of comic but serious opposition in Baruch's mother. A rank snob, Mrs Levy deplores Chani's poor origins and unsophisticated parents, though their heavyweight rabbinical ancestry is deemed a plus. Her crude attempts to bully Chani provide enjoyably icy stand-offs, with a memorable nod to Pride and Prejudice's famous showdown between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet.
Humour abounds, but so do pathos and anger. Chani despairs that she will become an exhausted shell like her endlessly childbearing mother, and frets that her parents will bankrupt themselves with the task of marrying off eight girls. Baruch, destined to train as a rabbi, secretly yearns to study at university. The most interesting parallel story is that of Rivka Zilberman, known publicly only as the Rebbetzin – the wife of Chaim, an ambitious rabbi. The couple's backstory is related in depth – Rivka, an outgoing secular Jew on a gap year, meets a handsome young South African in early 1980s Jerusalem. The freedom of their affair is soon curtailed by his growing orthodoxy and her acceptance of it. Nearly 30 years on, that willed acquiescence has frayed to the point of snapping. Harris's eye for suburban social mores is wickedly acute, as is her evident relish in describing both the sensual life and its absence. While perhaps too breezily written to take it further in the Booker stakes, her book has the potential to be that rare thing – a crowd-pleaser about Orthodox Judaism.
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