Mayer Belkin thought he knew it all. But when he discovers his mother wasn’t in fact Jewish, his world turns upside down. The orthodox yeshiva scholar and protagonist of Reuven Fenton’s debut novel Goyhood, departs New York for his hometown of Atlanta after his mother’s suicide. It is there that he learns he isn’t, according to Jewish law, a Jew. The fix is easy: convert. An appointment is set and in a few days everything will be as it was. He’ll be back at the yeshiva and at home in a satisfactory marriage to his wife, Sarah. Until then, David, Mayer’s secular brother, encourages Mayer to join him on a road trip. As the brothers begin their adventure and spend more time together than they have in years, “Mayer’s whole world,” Fenton told me, “opens up, literally and figuratively.”
As is expected in road trip dramedies, the road leads to misadventures and confronts its journeymen with questions of their past, present, and future. Mayer rides into a goyhood that won’t last for long, but that will change him and his relationship to Judaism.
Fenton has been covering breaking news for the New York Post for 17 years and counting. In our interview, we leave the news desk behind and hit the gas on everything Goyhood.
Why did you want to write Goyhood and explore what it means to feel, as you state, like a counterfeit Jew?
You ever have these ideas that pop into your head, sometimes these creative what ifs? I get these all the time and most of them have to do with having a superpower. This particular one popped into my head on its own. It came at a time when I had tried selling a novel, which was something completely different, but it didn’t end up working out. I didn’t know Goyhood was going to be a road trip in the beginning but I did sort of intuitively know there’d be a fish-out-of-water concept that would go along with the what if of realizing you are a counterfeit Jew.
The suicide note the mother leaves behind is the impetuous for everything that happens throughout. It took me by surprise when she revealed she wasn’t Jewish, but I was also surprised at how funny the letter is. It’s not what I expected, especially the references to events happening in pop culture. Was it difficult to write and find the tone for the letter?
The mother went through different personalities before I figured out who she was. At one point she was this successful lawyer with ivy-league pedigree. I was working on intuition. I did want to make the letter entertaining too, because I want to make the whole book entertaining. But there’s so many unknowns when you’re writing this stuff and in the end you just keep trying until you find something that feels right to you. I didn’t want to dwell on the cause of the crisis too much, the whole lie of the thing. I wanted the book to focus on the aftermath rather than the crisis.
The book has all the elements of a buddy road trip comedy complete with funny one liners, like when David and Mayer return to Atlanta and everything in the town is essentially different, save for CVS, which you write would “stay CVS till Armageddon.” And there’s also moments where you use Torah or the Psalms for comedic relief as well. For instance, when the brothers are arguing and Rabbi Kugel quotes the Psalms and says, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also dwell together.” Did you want to bring out the humour in the Torah?
Not on purpose, although I’m happy anybody found anything funny. And by the way, the things you’re pointing out, I myself didn’t find that amusing. It comes back to the subjectivity of the reader. The Torah is the pulse that’s pulsing through the nerve centre of the story. And I think it’s inevitable that somebody’s going to find something humorous because it’s brought up in humorous situations.
Did you find it difficult to integrate religion into the mix?
It wasn’t. Inevitably, Mayer goes back home and makes the discovery and he and his brother have time to kill so a road trip seemed like the natural course. The road trip is always a symbolic journey to self-discovery. As the characters move along on the road they change. I realized, early on, that I wasn’t going to make this a book in which I keep Mayer, my protagonist, in his community. I wasn’t going to turn this into a situation where he’s hiding some secret from his community but they’d inevitably find out and then there’d be drama involving him being kicked out or ostracized. I didn’t want to do that because I think the community would be very understanding and supportive. And not only that, but he would resolve the issue pretty quickly. I didn’t want to create fake drama where there wouldn’t be any.
There are many moments when we see that the right way to be Jewish is different for various communities and denominations. We see this when we’re told that when Mayer moved from Atlanta to Brooklyn to go to the yeshiva, he changed the way he spoke. Perhaps then the question shouldn’t be are we Jewish enough but who are we Jewish enough to? What did you hope to find or maybe not find in these types of questions when you were writing the novel?
After the novel was done, somebody asked me what is a Jew. The technical aspect of what a Jew is, according to my protagonist, is that your mother has to be a Jew. The reform rabbi at the end is meant to throw the whole construct up in the air. She kind of makes their jaw drop. In Mayer’s mind, he never for a second doubts that for him it simply means that his mother needs to be a Jew for him to be a Jew, but then who is he being a Jew for, that changes. He’s not the same kind of Jew at the end of the book than he is at the beginning. In the beginning, he lives this cloistered life in this yeshiva. His days don’t vary from one another. When he leaves the tiny neighbourhood of Kensington, he realizes he hasn’t stepped outside of the neighbourhood for years. Someone asked me yesterday, “So by the end what is he, modern Orthodox? How would you describe him at the end of the book?” And I don’t really know. I only know what the confines of the story are. My thoughts don’t necessarily wander beyond what I’ve already written down. He is still deeply Jewish, and a Jew according to Jewish law, but who is he mentally? He seems to have feelings for Charlayne who’s not Jewish, so there’s potential conflict there.
The book ends with Mayer teaching David the Book of Genesis. It ends at the beginning and feels like a new start for both of them, even though they’re back in Atlanta.
Exactly. The entire epilogue was not in the book I submitted. The book actually ended more ambiguously with the car driving off into the night in the previous chapter. His whole concept of who he is Jewish[ly] is blurred now, regardless of whether he was living his life the right way before. In the yeshiva, he had a very solid sense of what he was doing.
You’ve spoken about how things end ambiguously, but do you think as these characters go on, they believe they’re still being guided by God? Where do you see them now and what is their relationship to God?
The revelation for me at the end of the book was that things do happen. There is a cosmic force at work driving these events, and it’s okay to explore why this force is at work. The lesson that drives Mayer to decide to not go back [to Sarah and his life in New York] comes from the advice the reform rabbi gives at the end, which is to put yourself in a state of mind where you’re thinking what can I do to make all these events that happen to me, all this hardship, worthwhile, to make it good. Mayer is all about the letter of the law but by the end he and his brother become more spiritual.
To that end, was there anything that surprised you while writing Goyhood?
I write draft after draft and very gradually the story comes together and I get to know the characters after each draft. And finally, through some magic, it starts to take form into an actual three-act that’s structurally sound. The fact that this works out at all is a surprise to me. The fact that the characters come together as real people, or real-seeming people who are hopefully believable, there’s truly magical work there.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mayer Belkin thought he knew it all. But when he discovers his mother wasn’t in fact Jewish, his world turns upside down. The orthodox yeshiva scholar and protagonist of Reuven Fenton’s debut novel Goyhood, departs New York for his hometown of Atlanta after his mother’s suicide. It is there that he learns he isn’t, according to Jewish law, a Jew. The fix is easy: convert. An appointment is set and in a few days everything will be as it was. He’ll be back at the yeshiva and at home in a satisfactory marriage to his wife, Sarah. Until then, David, Mayer’s secular brother, encourages Mayer to join him on a road trip. As the brothers begin their adventure and spend more time together than they have in years, “Mayer’s whole world,” Fenton told me, “opens up, literally and figuratively.”
As is expected in road trip dramedies, the road leads to misadventures and confronts its journeymen with questions of their past, present, and future. Mayer rides into a goyhood that won’t last for long, but that will change him and his relationship to Judaism.
Fenton has been covering breaking news for the New York Post for 17 years and counting. In our interview, we leave the news desk behind and hit the gas on everything Goyhood.
Why did you want to write Goyhood and explore what it means to feel, as you state, like a counterfeit Jew?
You ever have these ideas that pop into your head, sometimes these creative what ifs? I get these all the time and most of them have to do with having a superpower. This particular one popped into my head on its own. It came at a time when I had tried selling a novel, which was something completely different, but it didn’t end up working out. I didn’t know Goyhood was going to be a road trip in the beginning but I did sort of intuitively know there’d be a fish-out-of-water concept that would go along with the what if of realizing you are a counterfeit Jew.
The suicide note the mother leaves behind is the impetuous for everything that happens throughout. It took me by surprise when she revealed she wasn’t Jewish, but I was also surprised at how funny the letter is. It’s not what I expected, especially the references to events happening in pop culture. Was it difficult to write and find the tone for the letter?
The mother went through different personalities before I figured out who she was. At one point she was this successful lawyer with ivy-league pedigree. I was working on intuition. I did want to make the letter entertaining too, because I want to make the whole book entertaining. But there’s so many unknowns when you’re writing this stuff and in the end you just keep trying until you find something that feels right to you. I didn’t want to dwell on the cause of the crisis too much, the whole lie of the thing. I wanted the book to focus on the aftermath rather than the crisis.
The book has all the elements of a buddy road trip comedy complete with funny one liners, like when David and Mayer return to Atlanta and everything in the town is essentially different, save for CVS, which you write would “stay CVS till Armageddon.” And there’s also moments where you use Torah or the Psalms for comedic relief as well. For instance, when the brothers are arguing and Rabbi Kugel quotes the Psalms and says, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also dwell together.” Did you want to bring out the humour in the Torah?
Not on purpose, although I’m happy anybody found anything funny. And by the way, the things you’re pointing out, I myself didn’t find that amusing. It comes back to the subjectivity of the reader. The Torah is the pulse that’s pulsing through the nerve centre of the story. And I think it’s inevitable that somebody’s going to find something humorous because it’s brought up in humorous situations.
Did you find it difficult to integrate religion into the mix?
It wasn’t. Inevitably, Mayer goes back home and makes the discovery and he and his brother have time to kill so a road trip seemed like the natural course. The road trip is always a symbolic journey to self-discovery. As the characters move along on the road they change. I realized, early on, that I wasn’t going to make this a book in which I keep Mayer, my protagonist, in his community. I wasn’t going to turn this into a situation where he’s hiding some secret from his community but they’d inevitably find out and then there’d be drama involving him being kicked out or ostracized. I didn’t want to do that because I think the community would be very understanding and supportive. And not only that, but he would resolve the issue pretty quickly. I didn’t want to create fake drama where there wouldn’t be any.
There are many moments when we see that the right way to be Jewish is different for various communities and denominations. We see this when we’re told that when Mayer moved from Atlanta to Brooklyn to go to the yeshiva, he changed the way he spoke. Perhaps then the question shouldn’t be are we Jewish enough but who are we Jewish enough to? What did you hope to find or maybe not find in these types of questions when you were writing the novel?
After the novel was done, somebody asked me what is a Jew. The technical aspect of what a Jew is, according to my protagonist, is that your mother has to be a Jew. The reform rabbi at the end is meant to throw the whole construct up in the air. She kind of makes their jaw drop. In Mayer’s mind, he never for a second doubts that for him it simply means that his mother needs to be a Jew for him to be a Jew, but then who is he being a Jew for, that changes. He’s not the same kind of Jew at the end of the book than he is at the beginning. In the beginning, he lives this cloistered life in this yeshiva. His days don’t vary from one another. When he leaves the tiny neighbourhood of Kensington, he realizes he hasn’t stepped outside of the neighbourhood for years. Someone asked me yesterday, “So by the end what is he, modern Orthodox? How would you describe him at the end of the book?” And I don’t really know. I only know what the confines of the story are. My thoughts don’t necessarily wander beyond what I’ve already written down. He is still deeply Jewish, and a Jew according to Jewish law, but who is he mentally? He seems to have feelings for Charlayne who’s not Jewish, so there’s potential conflict there.
The book ends with Mayer teaching David the Book of Genesis. It ends at the beginning and feels like a new start for both of them, even though they’re back in Atlanta.
Exactly. The entire epilogue was not in the book I submitted. The book actually ended more ambiguously with the car driving off into the night in the previous chapter. His whole concept of who he is Jewish[ly] is blurred now, regardless of whether he was living his life the right way before. In the yeshiva, he had a very solid sense of what he was doing.
You’ve spoken about how things end ambiguously, but do you think as these characters go on, they believe they’re still being guided by God? Where do you see them now and what is their relationship to God?
The revelation for me at the end of the book was that things do happen. There is a cosmic force at work driving these events, and it’s okay to explore why this force is at work. The lesson that drives Mayer to decide to not go back [to Sarah and his life in New York] comes from the advice the reform rabbi gives at the end, which is to put yourself in a state of mind where you’re thinking what can I do to make all these events that happen to me, all this hardship, worthwhile, to make it good. Mayer is all about the letter of the law but by the end he and his brother become more spiritual.
To that end, was there anything that surprised you while writing Goyhood?
I write draft after draft and very gradually the story comes together and I get to know the characters after each draft. And finally, through some magic, it starts to take form into an actual three-act that’s structurally sound. The fact that this works out at all is a surprise to me. The fact that the characters come together as real people, or real-seeming people who are hopefully believable, there’s truly magical work there.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.