Abomination

 

Abomination was recommended to me by a school librarian while I was doing a school visit, and given my recent dip into Orthodox Judaism, Chaim Potok, Israeli drama series etc, I thought I'd give it a go. It was interesting to read a novel set in the same culture, but in my own city -- I know most of the streets the characters inhabit, the city landmarks, the cafes, a parallel world to my own.

Probably inspired by the case of child abuser Malka Leifer, the book opens with a protest against a sex offender who was smuggled out of Melbourne and protected by Israeli authorities (in this instance, a male teacher), which reunites old school friends Ezra and Yonatan after twenty years. Yonatan has remained Orthodox, married, expecting a child, now himself a rabbi and teacher at the same school; Ezra, whose parents pulled him from the school after the scandal, is living a secular life, but lost and unhappy. Both young men find themselves questioning their choices and their current situations, and their reunion acts as a catalyst for some difficult decisions for each of them.

I really enjoyed the way Ezra and Yonatan's parallel lives intersected and bounced off each other, and Ashley Goldberg has done a terrific job in posing tough questions about faith, friendship, community, loyalty, tradition and doubt. In a book which centres on questions of masculinity, I was pleased that Ezra and Yoni's partners got some time on the page -- I would have been interested to read more from their points of view.