When my dear friend Karen gave me Tova Mirvis’ memoir, The Book of Separation, I was quite pleased. I had read Mirvis’ novels, The Ladies Auxiliary and Visible City and thought she wrote with insight and passion. This memoir’s honesty is harrowing as she wrestles with leaving her marriage and her religion to veer from the path that generations of her family had followed. Finding one’s own way is a terrifying proposition for a person who has always lived within the strict religious and social strictures of Modern Jewish Orthodoxy.
Tova Mirvis grew up in an Orthodox home with her parents and two siblings in Memphis, Tennessee. Her youthful memories are warm and wistful when her days filled were filled with love and certainty. She grew up knowing who she was (or thought she was) and what her parents, the community and God expected of her. Every aspect of her life was influenced by the family’s local synagogue and she believed that God was watching her every move. As she grew older and more reflective and thought she might want to be a writer, she begins to question her belief in God and the multiple Talmudic rules regarding food, clothing, friends, transportation and relationships.
Nonetheless, she becomes engaged to her Orthodox husband just twelve weeks after meeting him at Columbia. The mandated rituals related to her marriage illuminate the second-class status of women and anger her. Yet she proceeds, while her husband-to-be never seems to consider deviating from the edicts that govern his life. They have three kids and except for a few small concessions, she obeys the rules. She wears the required wig and prescribed modest clothes, she keeps a Kosher home and observes the relevant rituals for each Holiday. Yet, it was becoming more difficult to adhere to the letter of the law. She and her husband constantly argue. Though Mirvis probably wanted to protect his privacy, the book would have been stronger if she had offered examples of their arguments.
Mirvis’ anger is most apparent when discussing the dictates governing sexual relationships even between married couples. After being told for years that desire is bad, once a woman is married she is considered impure. Sex is regulated by religious rules and women are required to visit the mikvah each month to be cleansed and inspected.
Being a writer made Mirvis’ path harder. She states, “You can’t create freely if you’re always aware of where the borders of permissibility lie.” She understood that her questioning would provoke anger and judgment, “I knew that in a highly codified world, the inner life posed a threat. I knew that these rabbis’ mission was to keep people in side the bounds of the laws. They didn’t believe there were other good or true ways to live, didn’t want their children of their students or their congregants to think that there was a legitimate choice to be made.”
Mirvis tells her readers early in her memoir that Tova means good. She is haunted by the possibility of not being good and therefore not being loved. “This, more than anything was the iron bar across the exit door – love was what tied you and kept you inside. Love, was what you risked losing if you wanted to choose for yourself.”
Mirvis’ ability to write in painstaking detail about the requirements of life on the “inside” is impressive. As angry as she becomes, her descriptions are not cruel and she does not condemn those who remain in the community and adhere to the regulations that chaffed against her consciousness. At the end of the memoir, Mirvis doesn’t leave Judaism, but she leaves the orthodox community. Her parents, her brother and her sister still love her. They have not shunned her. They have allowed her to find her way outside the community as they continue within. As her children age, her memoir will be a gift to them. They will read of her struggle and may even come to understand it. As she says to her son, “ You’re allowed to change, even when it’s painful. You’re allowed to decide who you want to be.”
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