The title of Jonathan Safron Foer’s 2016 novel, his first in
a decade, is taken from the Book of Genesis. “Here I am,” is what Abraham tells
God after God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The imputations of
Abraham’s cryptic response are explored by Foer in the context of his novel’s
gifted, if ultimately flawed, protagonist Jacob Bloch.
Jacob Bloch belongs to the third generation of Jewish
diaspora, after his grandfather Isaac left the horrors of Europe behind and
built a life for him and his family in America, starting as a shop-keeper.
Jacob, a secular Jew, is a successful, if creatively frustrated, television
screen writer. He has written a prize winning novel years ago, but, for several
years he has been hacking out the screenplay of a popular sitcom, which, while it
ensures the steady flow of income that supports the comfortable life-style in
Washington DC, leaves him feeling creatively unfulfilled. Jacob lives with his
wife Julia, and three (smart, precocious and, for these reasons, irritating)
sons—Sam, Max and Benjy. Julia is an architect, successful like Jacob, and (like Jacob) is creatively unsatisfied, not having built anything yet. Jacob’s
father Irv has turned into a provocative media blogger who has a special talent
for detecting anti-Semitism (Europe has become a Jew-hating continent (when was
it not?); French are ‘spineless vaginas’ who would shade no tears over the
disappearance of the Jewish people; and Germans were the only true European
friends of the Jews, but they were bound
to run out of their ‘guilt and lampshade’ one day) and whose preferred solution
to deal with any anti-Israel sentiment is to take out the offender to an open
field and napalm. As the novel opens we learn that Isaac, nearly hundred, is
about to be shipped off to a care home as he is finding it increasingly
hazardous to live on his own. Isaac wants to die but is postponing his death
(as if it is in his gift) until the Bar Mitzva of his eldest great-grandson,
Sam. Sam, who is growing into a surly and opinionated teenager, is in trouble at
school having written offensive and racist words in his book (including the N
word, which is totally unacceptable), a charge he persistently and tenaciously
rejects. Julia does not believe him, but Jacob does. Here the reader gets the
first inkling that all might not be well with the Blochs. And the readr is right: the
mid-life snafu arrives. The crisis in
the Blochs’ marriage arrives over the most trite, yet the most devastating, of
matters. Julia discovers texts Jacob has sent to a work colleague which makes
you wonder whether the talented television script writer wasn’t moonlighting as
a script writer for porn industry. Julia believes Jacob’s submission that
although he and the woman exchanged salacious texts, nothing happened between
them (she knows he would lack the guts), but that is not enough for her to stay
in the marriage which has been losing its shine. Julia may have many good
qualities, but forgiving marital infidelity, even though only in texts, is not one
of them. As Jacob's marriage implodes and descends into the predictable
pettiness, resentment, and self-pity (expressed, however, in scrupulously
polite manner and language, the estranged partners being in agreement that they
must keep up the front of reasonableness and moderateness for the sake of
children), another crisis arrives in their lives which poses serious questions
to Jacob about his Jewish identity in the pluralistic American society and its
freedom: the destruction of Israel (Foer rather dramatically opens his novel
with the sentence that informs the reader of this calamitous occurrence). The
dramatic worsening of Arab-Israeli relations (if that were possible) following
an earthquake, the ensuing mother of all wars between Israel and practically
the whole of the Muslim world, and the threat to the very existence of Israel
form the second strand of the novel. Jacob has a cousin (once removed) in
Israel; he is the grandson of Isaac’s brother who decades earlier decided to
migrate to Israel. Jacob’s Israeli cousin (as the cousin, Timir, is frequently
referred to in the novel), is a confident, brazen-faced, assertive man who has
achieved financial success doing business and deals that do not get covered in
the pages of Financial Times. Timir (like Jacob) has got his leg over on
occasions over the years, but (unlike Jacob) he is smart enough not to have got
caught. Jacob has a complicated—loving but tense—relationship with Timir. Timir
arrives in the USA with his middle son just before the Arab-Israeli war breaks
out. Goaded by Timir (who informs Jacob that he does not have enough real
problems), and perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to send a message to
Julia, Jacob decides to go to Israel in response to an emotional appeal made by
the Israeli prime-minister to the Jewish diaspora to return to the motherland
in her fight for survival (a rare instance of hysteria in the novel, worthy to
be in a Philip Roth novel). Julia does not stop Jacob (Julia’s depiction in the
novel is a tad unsympathetic: she is a somewhat cold and distant figure who
is bored with Jacob and takes the opportunity offered by Jacob’s inappropriate
texts to end the marriage and start relationship with the father of Sam’s
friend) and (predictably) this moment of heroism (or insanity) does not last. As
this sprawling novel ends, the reader is left (or is meant to be left)
grappling the questions of identity, relationships, and human existence.
Here I Am is (relatively) more straightforward in its structure
compared with Everything is Illuminated, Foer’s debut novel (my most
favourite). The novel has many sub-plots which appear to play hide and seek
with the reader; they disappear for a while, only to appear briefly again when
you are not expecting them. These digressions and subplots can be a bit
confusing at times, and give a fragmented feel to the novel (I don’t know
whether that was deliberate). Foer’s tendency to switch between formats
(combined with chronological dislocation of the narrative) can be exhausting
for the reader. Long passages of texts (bristling, I have to say, with incisive
observations and mordant humour) alternate with long passages of
stichomythia—so long in fact that the reader must go over the dialogues more
than once to understand which statement is said by which character. As one can
expect from a Foer novel, there are passages of great wit and verbal acrobatics
notwithstanding occasional cross-over from irreverence to puerility. There are
bravura set-pieces in the novel, and comic one-liners abound; but, for all that
there are also passages which are long-winded where Foer seems to try too hard
to be quaint.
Here I Am is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man
in the modern world, Jewish or not. I read that there are many autobiographical
elements in Foer’s novel (he was married to Nicole Krauss for ten years before
the couple separated in 2014). Even if you did not know that, in Jacob Bloch
Foer has created a protagonist in whose foibles—his neediness and
self-absorption, his solipsism—as well as qualities (sensibilities, inherent
decency) many men would see a reflection of themselves. Perhaps there is also a
message somewhere in it: it is the heroics and not the sensibilities that will
get you through life. That is a great strength of this not-perfect novel.
