Courage in the Lion's Den

A WRITER'S WIT
I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.
Adam Rapp
Born June 15, 1968

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Jonathan Foer's story is the fourth in a series of four. —RJ

Mirka Laura Severa

June 6 and 13, 2016, Jonathan Safran Foer, “Maybe It Was the Distance”: Three generations of the Bloch family—Irv, Jacob, and Max—head to Washington’s Reagan airport to meet their Israeli cousins. ¶ The middle cohorts—Jacob and Tamir—are the focus of this story seen through Jacob’s eyes: his struggle as a novelist juxtaposed against Tamir’s arrogance over having accumulated a massive fortune. Jacob recalls for the reader two significant events the cousins share: one in which, as teenagers, in Tamir’s bedroom in Israel, the boys masturbate side-by-side repeatedly (viewing the same pair of breasts via the computer) as if it is a sport; second, an incident which takes place in DC on the eve of Jacob’s bar mitzvah, where, in the middle of the night, Tamir jumps into the lion’s den at the National Zoo and expects Jacob to do the same. The dare to be courageous, the challenge, is indicative of the implicit contract in their lives, the American Jew leading a rather easy life compared to the Israeli facing death every day. Following their grandfather’s funeral years later the two have a short exchange, the tenor of which seems to encapsulate their lives:

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“‘It was a hard day,’ Tamir said.
‘Yes, but the day has been decades.’
‘But it’s felt like only a few seconds, right?’
‘Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I find myself saying, “I’m going through a passage.” Everything is a transition, a stop on the way to the destination, turbulence. But I’ve been saying it for so long I should probably accept that the rest of my life is going to be one long passage: an hourglass with no bulbs.’
Tamir leaned over and in a low voice, almost whispering, said, ‘You are innocent.’
‘What?’ Jacob said.
‘You are innocent.’
‘Thank you.’
He pulled back and said, ‘No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.’” (77).

But the fact that Jacob lives in a country where, in certain respects, he can remain a child, trusting, is not insignificant. This entire story is adapted from Foer’s forthcoming novel, Here I Am, due out in September.
Photograph by Mirka Laura Severa

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