Book Review (fiction): The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis (1999)

"Batsheva appeared in our lives on a Friday afternoon as we were getting ready for Shabbos. It was inappropriate that she moved in when she did." Thus begins Tova Mirvis's delightful The Ladies Auxiliary (1999), a novel depicting a neatly controlled and small-town Orthodox Jewish community disrupted by an outsider's arrival and residence.

In a nutshell: this novel is an exaggerated and at times simplistic story, which is also part of its appeal. It is probably best understood in the tradition of modern Jewish folk-tales, worthy of both Chelm and Chaim Potok, both comic and tragic in a unique and particularistic way.

What is most remarkable (and funny, and tragic) about this work is that it is told in the first person plural. The narrator's voice is a collective "we" or "us" of the Sisterhood of the Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis who fears, celebrates, and ultimately tempers its own history and worldview regarding an artsy and disruptive newcomer. It is a modern shtetl voiced and collectively conscious.

This narrative perspective is perhaps the novel's greatest achievement--the characters themselves are types, but their collective tragedy, even if privileged and inconsequential, is heartfelt--which makes reading this work a fulfilling task. I found myself laughing at the narrators' righteous indignation, and I found myself wondering about their collective limits and compromises, too, as the story unfolds.

With its bird's-eye surveillance and single-mindedness, the novel is clearly an exaggeration of the perception a high school girl might feel growing up in the community, or a newcomer might feel arriving to town. Similarly, the near absence of central male figures (and the near powerlessness of the central rabbi of the town) seems unrealistic or exaggerated in such a community.

The novel is clearly authored by an insider (Mirvis grew up in the community), as she details types and tensions, and without resorting to stereotypes or cliches. Mirvis gets so much right, too (first courses at a shabbos dinner! Jewish holiday art projects! the tensions around innovating womens' ritual and traditional learning!), that it's hard not to see a very familiar Orthodox Jewish life-as-lived reflected here.

Finally, as a teacher and principal, I loved that The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis (1999) took place over the course of an academic year--from the end of summer until Shavuot. So much drama unfolds and builds through the life of not only a cycle of Jewish holidays, but of a year of school, and especially when tensions of individual expression and conformity emerge in this central institution of private school in an insular community.

My recommendation: read this book, if you haven't yet. It is not as irreverent as you might think, it is most definitely relevant for any community centered around central religious institutions (synagogues, churches, private schools), and it rewards its reader with a narrative complexity that often eludes its delightful, naive plural narrator.