Joan Leegant’s Wherever You Go is making the blog rounds now. It’s the story about Israel, Zionism, extremism, faith and family, and the things people are saying about it are very impressive. Here’s her version of the When We Fell In Love essay:
When We Fell In Love by Joan Leegant
What would draw a 12-year-old Jewish girl on Long Island to a novel about a suffering Irish priest who establishes a Catholic mission in China amid poverty, civil war, plague, and the hostility of his superiors? From a distance of 48 years, I can only guess.
In the early 1960s, my parents had what I suppose was a typical-for-the-time collection on the shelves in our post-war suburban living room. A row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, for which they had a subscription. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. Leon Uris’s Exodus, of course. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (partially hidden). From Here to Eternity by James Jones. The much loved How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewelyn.
There, tucked in among the future classics and blockbusters and potboilers and World War II sagas, was a different kind of novel that caught my attention: The Keys of the Kingdom, published in 1941 by the Scottish doctor-turned-novelist, A.J. Cronin.
Why did I gravitate to that book? Some speculations. I know I had no patience for the girly offerings circulating among my friends and female cousins, old stand-bys like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Anything upbeat or cheerful was suspect. The youngest of three children, at five-foot-six at age 12 often mistaken for older, and sensitive to tragedy and injustice – two orphaned cousins would move in with us that year; a progressive uncle had marched with Martin Luther King – I needed someone to talk to me about the state of the world. My parents, though readers, were neither intellectual nor political; my father, an accountant, was a quiet man, my mother a gregarious housewife who liked to go shopping and talk on the phone.
In fact, the most cerebral person in my life was our rabbi, a proper man who spoke in complete sentences, quoted philosophers in his sermons, and treated me as an equal. I was an odd youngster. I liked Hebrew School, an after-school program that for most kids was an eye-rolling torment, and went to sabbath services alone, my parents dropping me off in the parking lot. Religion interested me beyond the pediatric and gastronomic Judaism widely available. On the outside a normal, outgoing kid with lots of friends and an active school and social life, inside I craved dialogue about what constituted a moral life. This seemed to exist only in the province of men. The concerns of women and girls, as presented in the literature available to me at the time, seemed silly or boring. Their stories were about snagging husbands, spewing nasty gossip, and engaging in cat fights (my limited view of Jane Austen, whom I wrote off prematurely and permanently); or else they were irritating paeans to female heroism, like uplifting stories of Amanda Earhart and Florence Nightingale, all gloriously trumped up and saccharine. I wanted no part of it.
A.J. Cronin offered me a soulmate. At last, someone who spoke to me. Someone whose stories whispered dark truths that gave me a lump in my throat and hours of blissful absorption. I don’t know what I was reading until then; I recall nothing before Cronin’s novels, all of which I quickly scooped up after discovering my first.
What do I remember of The Keys of the Kingdom? Almost nothing. Now, reading about the book online, I learn from the publisher’s updated description that it is “a thoughtful tale of a man called to do good in an imperfect world.” I’m not sure that’s what gripped me in 1962 as I read under the covers long past the time I was supposed to turn out the lights. Back then I read for story and only story. Wikipedia assures me that Cronin’s book was indeed a page-turner.
But here’s something remarkable. Forty-eight years after stumbling across The Keys of the Kingdom, I published my first novel—my second book of fiction—and what was it about? The impulse to a religious life. Characters whose certainty about God’s plans for them clashes with society when their beliefs become extreme. People striving, however wrong-headedly, to find a morally righteous path.
Not an exact replica of my first bookish love but in the same neighborhood, you might say. Though my life has taken many detours on the road from my first pivotal experience as a reader to becoming a novelist – a law career, the birth of two children, twenty years honing my craft – the same themes now run through my writing that ran through my earliest reading.
And until I wrote this post and thought about that first crucial book, I didn’t even know it.
Joan Leegant is the author of a novel, Wherever You Go, and a story collection, An Hour in Paradise, which won the Winship/PEN New England Book Award. She divides her time between Boston and Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University. For more about Joan Leegant, visit www.joanleegant.com.
