On Division

Goldie Goldbloom has written a positive and comforting novel about the Chasidic community. 
On Division gives the reader a view into this closed Williamsburg community, showing both positive and unpleasant sides.  The reader can take away their own view in the end,  but this is a book that wants to give the reader a change to appreciate how people who live in these kinds of communities and stay there are feeling.

In most of the books that come out about the very religious Jewish sects, the stories are about how these authors do not fit in and have left their families behind to find a new life in the secular world.
In this novel, that is written by a Chasidic woman who stays and works from within the Jewish religious world, we see a different perspective .

Suri is a mother, grandmother and is about to become a great-grandmother.  She has gone through menopause and even is a breast cancer survivor.  Her family has been a pillar in the community until the tragic death of her oldest son.  Now when her latest daughter got married Suri feels the match was not as prestigious, that their standing the community has been lessened.  If people were to find she was pregnant what would happen to their standing int he community then?  She is also worried about what her family will think so she starts to keep it a secret from everyone including her husband. 

She goes to the midwife and is convinced to start regular weekly visits to the hospital for checkups for health reasons. These she does in secret.  She gets more and more involved in working with midwife to help other pregnant women coming to the hospital clinic. As the secret is kept and more secrets are kept,  Suri starts to feel the power of having these parts of her that other people do not know about her.  She also begins to understand how her son felt, that as a young gay man in a community that was not accepting of homosexuality, he was keeping a secret that hurt. 
Suri realizes that she did not help her son enough.  She finds a way int he end to come to peace with what happened and know that if she could have it to do over she would do things differently.

Suri comes to the realization that she is apart of the Chasidic life and she can see both the pros and cons of that life, but that it is the place she is comfortable.   She invites the midwife to come to her home for a Purim celebration.  Val the midwife is uncomfortable with all the noise and chaos.  She is upset by the fact that everything in this Jewish home revolves around marriage and children.  She wants to know why Suri doesn't want more of life for herself or for her daughters and granddaughters.  Suri explains to her,  "What else is there? The whole life of a Jew is devoted to family.  There is no end to that cycle.  Think of Dead Onyo, in another community she would be in a nursing home, alone.  No one would know that she makes excellent poppy-seed jam.  Instead, here, she is loved.  Her great-grandchildren sit in her lap every day.  She will never be moved to a nursing home because there will always be someone to rake care of her."

In the end isn't that what all of us want?  To  be loved and cared for and never alone?  There is something to be said in favor of some of the rules that govern the Chasidic and other Orthodox sects of Judaism.  This book helps point out that it is not all black and white.  There are so many shades of gray, that there are good parts and restrictive parts to every experience in life.  We all have to choose where on the spectrum we are most comfortable living.