From sunny Tel Aviv to cloudy Michigan: review of Danit Brown’s collection of short stories Ask for a Convertible
The Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2008
Danit Brown’s debut, Ask for a Convertible, is a collection of beautifully woven short stories, most of which revolve around Osnat Greenberg, who is both American and Israeli and comfortable with neither. Upon leaving sunny Tel Aviv for the cloudy suburbs of Michigan at the beginning of her teen years, Osnat embarks on a long and, under Brown’s artistry, exquisitely rendered struggle to find a place she feels she belongs in and can call home. Bookended by the appropriately titled “Descent” and “Ascent,” we follow Osnat as she freefalls through identity issues and as she searches for somewhere she can feel her feet firmly planted on the ground.
The journey we are on as readers is through stories full of vivid, quirky characters many of whom, like Osnat, are forced to continually define themselves and their place in the world. The characters are at turns compelling, darkly humorous and downright funny.
There is Harriet, a Jewish girl who, despite the fact that she is growing up in Indiana, is obsessed with the Holocaust and “trains” to survive another one. There is Noam, an Israeli who comes to New York City expecting to find Israelis making money hand over fist, finding instead “the first thing I saw when I got off the highway was a man on the sidewalk beating a woman with a dead fish that was as long as his arm.” At some point, each character realizes that things aren’t exactly as he thought or expected, and he must come to terms with that.
And they must come to terms with each other, as individuals and as people hailing from different cultures. Brown perfectly captures both the fragmented nature of Israel-Diaspora relations as well as the sometimes uneasy kinship we feel for each other. Further, she doesn’t neglect the complicated relationship that American Jews have with their country of birth. At once inside and outside the bounds of Christian culture, American Jews occasionally find themselves – like Israelis – foreigners in the United States.
Despite the gravity of the topics, Ask for a Convertible has a whimsical, zany feel. The voice is light and fresh, the writing is crisp and taut. Each scene moves at a brisk pace and the result is a collection of imaginative and utterly engrossing and enjoyable short stories.
While the form of Ask for a Convertible is a strength – the short stories allow for multiple points of view and are, in part, what makes this such a brisk read – it is also the book’s biggest liability. Because the stories are interconnected and the reader spends a majority of his or her time with Osnat and her family, it is easy to forget that the book is not a novel. So when the reader bumps into inconsistencies – such as Osnat’s “lousy Hebrew” as mentioned in the hilariously titled “Land of Ass and Honey” versus the narrator’s assertion in “Ascent” that “Osnat could say just about anything in Hebrew” – the effect is jarring. Readers are forced to stop and remind themselves that they are, after all, reading short stories. However, if the stories are revolving around the same cast of characters it seems like consistency would be important.
Another troublesome aspect is that the stories seem to be sounding the same note over and over again. By the time the reader reaches the last story, there is a hint of redundancy. Perhaps if this collection had been fashioned into a novel instead, the scope of the themes could have been broadened rather than reexamined and reexamined again.
Of course, it could be argued that this continual reexamination is one of the greatest strengths of the book – the reader comes to understand that all the characters, no matter where they are from, are struggling to define themselves in the world. It could be argued that Osnat being a lousy Hebrew speaker in one chapter and a good Hebrew speaker in another, uncomfortable with her quasi-Israeli status in both, adds complexity – it shows that national identity is not necessarily related to how well one speaks a country’s language.
Ultimately, the reader comes to understand the struggle to situate oneself in the world as neither Jewish nor Israeli as a human one. In the midst of Osnat’s identity crisis, a Christian character offers her comfort, “There is no right place, except inside your body. You’re not the only one who feels this way.” This is wisdom that resonates with both the characters and the readers.
And when writing can reveal to us truth about our own lives, when stories are so essentially human that they can transcend the boundaries of gender, class, time, and place – such as those of Ask for a Convertible – the work ascends into the sphere of great literature.