French Jews and Muslims Face Intersectionality Issues

 The New York Times recently reviewed a new play about French Jews that one can see as thematically related to a post I recently wrote about a book called "The Last One." 

The play, "Prayer for the French Republic," by Joshua Harmon, is about a Jewish family agonizing over their identity in the face of what they view as rising antisemitism in France. As the NYT reviewer puts it, "they want to be part of country that may never fully accept them" and after an ugly incident, at least one member of the family wants to move to Israel.  "It's the suitcase or the coffin," he says.

In "The Last One," a young Muslim woman living in a Paris Suburb agonizes over whether she can be fully a French citizen without giving up other parts of what she views as elements of her identity.

Other Muslims living in France are apparently increasingly coming to the conclusion one can't if a Feb. 13, 2022 New York Times Story entitled "The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France" is correct. 

In both the play and the book, the individuals in question are dealing with what is increasingly being called intersectionality. People see themselves as having various strands of identity that insect in certain ways -- sometimes positively, sometimes negatively -- that often fail to comport with a national identity of shared sociopolitical and cultural values. 

There is arguably nothing new about this -- I'm thinking of Leopold Bloom's encounter with "the citizen" -- in James Joyce's "Ulysses" -- but for some reasons these issues seem to be increasingly coming to the fore.

Viewing "A Challenge You Have Overcome" Through Ghosts

 I suppose we are all to one degree or another creatures of our past, which in my case, in this particular instance, has to do with my having spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Virginia Woolf.

In that context, Allegra Goodman gets high marks for her short story "A Challenge You Have Overcome" in the Jan. 25, 2021 New Yorker in that it treats with ordinary people going about their ordinary days. But Goodman loses points when viewed through another Woolf filter for depicting her characters first and foremost through materialistic concerns -- whether someone will get into college, whether someone will lose a job, and so forth.

 Fundamentally, it is a gloomy story that Goodman makes a metaphorical attempt to redeem at the end in a fashion that also brings Woolf to mind. In "Mrs. Dalloway," Richard famously brings roses home to reassure Clarissa he hasn't abandoned her by accepting a lunch date without her. In "A Challenge," Steve first thinks to bring home flowers to his wife, Andrea, to reassure her as his job ends, but then ops for a rather impractical ficus plant, impractical because he has to carry it from Manhattan home to New Jersey on a crowded Jersey Transit commuter train. The ficus is metaphorical because it hearkens back to a song Steve and Andrea used to sing to their young children about the nature of life -- and Steve wants to start over again.

It's easy to see why because Ms Goodman's story fits nearly into a New Yorker short story trope: life is a downer. (Please click on that phrase to see what I have had to say on that topic.)

What was Steve and Andrea's house like? "Unhappiness filled every room." That extract gives the flavor of this story about professional disappointments and, first and foremost, a family in which communication between husband and wife, and especially between parents and child, has pretty much disappeared.

Well, perhaps Ms Goodman thinks that characterizes all too many American families and that is her point. But the title of her story suggests there is a way out, and readers can decide for themselves. There is also a hint of a sequel since this is apparently to be part of a cycle of short stories about Jewish family life (there is nothing in this story that jumps out at one as singularly Jewish) and, in one of the usual New Yorker author interviews, Ms Goodman declines to say whether what happened to one of the sons in the story was a favorable or unfavorable development for him. Presumably she intends to pick up on that in a follow-on effort.

In another respect, Ms Goodman's story brings to mind "The Dead" in which James Joyce depicts a dotted line between those who are living and those who are not. Joyce may well have borrowed this idea from one of his own favorite authors, Henrik Ibsen and his play "Ghosts" with which Joyce was very familiar.

The ghost in question in "A Challenge" is Andrea's deceased mother-in-law, Jeanne, who Andrea keeps hearing and whose "breathtaking honesty" she has come to appreciate -- after the fact. This is a bit like the relief many Americans apparently felt when Donald Trump dismissed the need for political correctness.

In this case, the ghost helps Andrea see life from more than just her own perspective, but does it matter? There, Ms Goodman is disappointing.