Inside our Anglo-Jewish bubble, we sometimes live in a world of assumptions.
We know – or think we know – who is Member of the Tribe (MOT) and who just enjoys hanging out with us. Now the writer-comedian Max Olesker has ripped back the curtain on who is who in his hugely entertaining and thoughtful memoir, Making the Cut.
Some will understand quickly from the title that this is the story of Olesker’s journey from laid-back liberal and uncircumcised Jew to full-on Orthodox convert, complete with a date with a scalpel.
It could almost be a Billy Crystal/Meg Ryan meet-cute when Olesker, performing at the Edinburgh Festival, meets Eliana Ostro, and falls desperately in love. He’s Jewish, she’s Jewish – perfect, right?
Jewish, shmu-ish. For not only did Olesker’s mother convert to Judaism via the Reform movement (unacceptable to the Orthodox) his own sense of Jewish identity turns out to have no validity in the modern Orthodox world to which Ostro belongs.
Eventually, after much agonising and many break-ups, Olesker makes an irrevocable decision to take the “gold standard” of conversion and put himself in the hands of the London Beth Din. And it must be said that even with the fictional names of the dayanim and the fictional address of the Beth Din, the organisation does not emerge well.
While Olesker and Ostro steep themselves in Jewish learning, appointments with individuals at the Beth Din are made at scarcely believable six-month intervals, and sometimes are cancelled at the last minute, while all the psyching-up the couple has done to prepare themselves goes out of the window. Mind games is the expression that comes to mind. Meanwhile, Olesker excels at conveying the great love he has for his parents and their support throughout this agonising process.
From the rabbis, there are straightforward and reasonable questions about intent and sincerity, and less acceptable ones about the nature of Olesker’s work. Is comedy, one member of the Beth Din asks, an appropriate job for a Jew? This could almost be the blackest of black Jewish jokes, but it seems to have been a genuine question.
Elsewhere there is endless discussion of where Olesker and Ostro will eventually live if he makes it through conversion and out the other side. A well-known condition of London Beth Din conversion is that the applicant lives, for an unspecified length of time, with a religiously observant family in an acceptable neighbourhood.
But questions remain about this couple. Why were Olesker and Ostro not asked to live with families in Stamford Hill, the heartland of strictly Orthodox Judaism? And why was Ostro, living in observant comfort in her family home in Primrose Hill, also obliged to go to live with a strange family?
Further, why does Olesker say that Hendon and Golders Green are known as “The Area”? I have lived in both neighbourhoods for many years and I have never heard them referred to as “The Area”.
This all said, this memoir does an excellent job of steering the non-Jewish, or less-informed Jewish, reader through the maze of Orthodox Judaism.
Am I allowed a spoiler? I think so. It’s a rather lame one. Olesker had the operation, and he married her. Mazel tov!
Making the Cut, by Max Olesker
Ebury Press
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