(RNS) — I have written a great deal about antisemitism lately — for good reason. But opposite that, philosemitism refers to when gentiles love, admire and feel a sense of solidarity with the Jewish people. It is the instinct to regard the Jewish story as one of humanity’s essential stories.
Author John Irving might just be philosemitism’s contemporary master.
You know him as the writer of “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules,” among other novels. His new novel, “Queen Esther,” is a literary riffing on the biblical story of Esther — a modern midrash, if you will. It also might be the most sympathetic treatment of Jewish themes by a non-Jewish novelist in decades.
Irving has written about religion before — for example, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” — but “Queen Esther” is his first novel to center Jewish identity, antisemitism and what it means to belong to a people.
It seems as if he has been preparing for this literary moment all along. Look at the characters who occupy Irving’s books: wrestlers, sexual outliers, orphans and wanderers, along with eccentric and sweet characters. From T.S. Garp and Roberta Muldoon (“The World According to Garp”) to Homer Wells (“The Cider House Rules”) to Owen Meany to Ruth Cole (“A Widow for One Year”), many are outsiders and marginalized people. Metaphorically, he’s always been writing about Jews.
At the center of this new novel is Esther Nacht, the only Jewish orphan at the St. Cloud orphanage in Maine, a familiar locale to those who have read “The Cider House Rules,” in the early 1900s. Her father died en route from Vienna. When Esther was 3, antisemites in Portland murdered her mother. The orphanage staff encourages her Jewish identity, but also nurtures her longing for motherhood — for continuity, for rootedness.
In classic Irving fashion, there are two mothers, non-romantically joined, whose partnership forms one of the novel’s many meditations on unconventional family. There are also wrestlers (Esther conceives her child with a Jewish wrestler), various bodily preoccupations, desired pregnancies and a young person who dreams of being a writer, another Irving stock character.
“Queen Esther” also brings us many of John Irving’s typical themes. For example, it deals with identity and belonging — Esther is an orphan twice over, first by violence, then by abandonment. She needs to reconcile the various places in her narrative, Vienna, New England and, later, Jerusalem. Esther’s son, James, inherits that longing for belonging.
Under the unconventional families theme, Esther is raised in a Protestant New England household, loved but never entirely rooted. Later, the arrangement that produces her son — and the arrangements that her son, in turn, pursues — becomes another layered family structure.
Another theme is trauma and survival. Esther’s suffering is not merely personal; it is part of a collective Jewish narrative. Her offer to maim her son to keep him from serving in Vietnam mirrors the sacrifice of earlier generations of Jewish mothers — those who maimed their sons to keep them out of the Czarist armies in Russia.
Exile and the search for home is another common Irving theme. Esther is culturally, religiously and emotionally displaced. She must negotiate between her past and her present — a thoroughly Jewish tension — and she bequeaths that negotiation to subsequent generations.
Esther is a Jewish Forrest Gump. Her journey recapitulates the modern Jewish story: from wartime Europe, to America, to the yishuv (pre-state of Israel), to the early years of the Jewish state, to a sojourn in antisemitic Vienna to the turbulence of Vietnam-era America.
Reading this book, Irving gets it. He understands the Jews.
He gets the inner meaning of Zionism (the author has visited Israel on several occasions). He writes about how Esther’s adopted family, the Winslows, could not understand why she would want to immigrate to Palestine:
Esther believed the Jews would never be free from discrimination or persecution in exile — not in Europe, not in the United States. ‘Look at what happened to Esther’s mother in Maine! Did Esther’s mother find tolerance and assimilation in Portland?’ … Esther doesn’t want to be persecuted or assimilated.
That’s a pretty good definition of Zionism: for Jews who don’t want to be persecuted or assimilated. For that reason, Esther chooses a tattoo for herself with a quote from Charlotte Bronte: “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Irving also gets Jewish moral struggle, especially around Zionism. He brings Esther and the reader to pre-state Israel. He explains the history of Jewish military responses to Arab threats — to the Haganah and its elite strike force, the Palmach, which emphasized havlagah, or restraint, even in the face of brutal provocation. He contrasts them with the more militant Irgun and Stern Gang. He wonders: How do Jews defend themselves without losing themselves? It is a question that jumps off the page.
And, he understands the Jewish calendar. He unpacks an overlooked theme of the Jewish holidays in the journey from Purim to Shavuot. They are all about hiddenness — from Purim, with the hidden identity of Queen Esther herself and Jews celebrating by hiding behind masks; to Passover, where a piece of matzah is hidden; to Shavuot, when that which was once hidden, Torah, is revealed.
Irving has written a profoundly Jewish novel — one we need now because of the pandemic of antisemitism in America. He treats Jewish resilience with reverence, Jewish wounds with gravity and Jewish perseverance with admiration. “Queen Esther” feels like an unexpected blessing and an act of cultural friendship.
We Jews need allies, and this book is filled with them. Irving has said: “I’m not Jewish, but I’ve always been pro-Israel, and I’ve always been pro-Jewish.” “Queen Esther” illustrates and illuminates that.
Thank you, John Irving, for reminding the world that the Jewish story is not only worth telling, but it is worth loving. Thank you for being our friend.