I would never have picked up Goyhood to read. I would never have come across it, had it not been for the author contacting me directly with a request to review the pre-release of the book. The one paragraph synopsis he provided sounded entertaining, so I committed to giving it a try.
Mayer and David Belkin are fraternal twins who grow up in a very small town in rural Georgia raised by a single mom, or perhaps not raised by her. She is definitely in over her head and the boys are pretty much raising each other. What could go wrong?
One day they come home to find a rabbi at their front door talking to their mother. The conversation and introduction to the boys ends up changing the life of Mayer fundamentally. Eventually he leaves the small town to go the Brooklyn, New York, study in a Jewish college and become a Talmud scholar. Through a sequence of sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time, he is invited to marry into a prominent Jewish family. Eventually he is a super-orthodox Jew and completely estranged from his twin brother and his mother.
When their mother dies unexpectedly, Mayer travels back to Georgia and meets up with his brother David. Together they find out family secrets that totally upend both of their lives. To recover, the brothers decide to go on a road trip through the south, from Georgia to New Orleans and back, performing a series of antics and adventures. For both of them, the trip reveals who they really are and what they really want to do with their lives.
This is a road trip story, a little bit like Thelma and Louise, a little bit like On the Road, and a lot like The Lincoln Highway. A group of strange characters get thrown together in a car to work out the mysteries of their lives.
The story is entertaining, but I think you need to be a Jew, or at least interested in Judaism, to really appreciate it. The complications that arose in Mayer’s life that he and his brother had to work through are all based on Jewish doctrine, which has no meaning to a non-religious person like me. I actually felt glad that I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have what I consider contrived complications in my life.
Most religions seem to try to convert non-believers into their fold. Some have it as their central mission to proselytize and get others drawn in. I have always admired the Jewish for seemingly being the opposite. You don’t get in, and it seems like you’re never really accepted unless you’re born into it, and – as I learned in this book – unless your mother was a Jew. I respect the Jewish religion not for its teachings or its tradition, but simply because it appears to value education as one of its highest goals.
I learned a lot about the lives of orthodox Jews by reading this book, more than I ever thought I would, but I must admit that I skimmed over many sections that went too much into scripture and God just to get the story moving forward.
