78 Books & arts The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019
2 traditional Jewish literature. Where do you
fit into this world?’”
The title of “On Division” alludes to both
a major avenue in a big Hasidic neighbour-
hood in Williamsburg, and the more perso-
nal divisions that run through Surie—and
the author. The catalyst for Surie’s existen-
tial drama is her discovery that—as a tired
mother of ten and grandmother of 32—she
is somehow pregnant again, and with
twins. Her fierce ambivalence at the pros-
pect of yet more children, and her anxiety
about the gossip they will inevitably stoke
(her neighbours hissing that she is a sex-
crazed grandma, or speculating that she is
covering for a granddaughter’s illegitimate
pregnancy), lead her to hide her condition
for as long as possible. Her success at keep-
ing her bump under wraps from even her
own “better-than-good husband” of 41
years leads her to wonder just how well he,
or anyone, really knows her.
Surie’s secret also dredges up perni-
cious thoughts about another story she
never discusses: the untimely death of a
beloved son who ran away because he was
gay. She wonders what she could have done
differently, and how she might have resist-
ed the strictures of her insulated tribe.
What, she asks herself, “was so terrible
about loving a man instead of a woman?
Did the Torah forbid loving?”
Queer herself, Ms Goldbloom is well-
placed to observe the ways Hasidic Jews
can ostracise their own. She came out in
her 40s, after divorcing her husband of 21
years, which led some acquaintances to
shun her and her eight children. She does
not go into detail, but her novel lists some
of the tactics used to punish outliers:
A stone would come through their front
window. His beard could be forcibly cut off
in the back of a moving van. Playdates would
be cancelled. The meat from the butcher
would always be too fatty...Marriage sugges-
tions would dry up.Ms Goldbloom is quick to point out that, in
real life, plenty of ultra-Orthodox Jews still
eat in her home, despite her massive li-
brary of secular books (another no-no). But
she also recounts the sage advice a rabbi
gave her before she left Australia: “The reli-
gion itself, God Himself, is perfect and peo-
ple aren’t.” Because she doesn’t feel ostra-
cised by God, she says, she doesn’t mind
what other people think.
Considering these travails, it is surpris-
ing that she chose a Hasidic life, rather than
being born to one. As a child, her family in
Perth didn’t keep a kosher home. But what
she learned about Judaism inspired her to
become more religious. She taught herself
Hebrew and Yiddish (“It was fun. I like
codes”), then attended a seminary in Mel-
bourne, followed by one in Brooklyn. Later,
disappointed by the way Hasids treat queer
people (many of whom resort to suicide),shecreatedablogforanonymousinter-
viewswithclosetedultra-OrthodoxJews.
Shefieldedcountlessmessages,manyof
themfromMuslim,AmishorMormoncor-
respondents,whowouldtellher,“Thisis
mystory,too.”
Ms Goldbloom hopes “On Division”
reaches ultra-Orthodox readers, but she
doesn’tseeitasa bookthatisonlyabout
Jews.Likeherdebut,“ThePaperbarkShoe”,
thisnovelisreallyaboutthestruggleto
bridge differences. Children, she notes,
willalwaysdefyexpectations.Partnersin-
evitablydisappoint.“Buttherehastobea
momentwhenyouseethehumanityofthe
otherperson,”shesays.“Therehastobea
waytoconnectwithoutfear.” 7T
he fiddlewas imported to America by
immigrants from the British Isles. The
banjo was played by slaves brought from
Africa. The fiddle and the banjo met in the
American South. “That’s why the first epi-
sode is called ‘The Rub’,” says Ken Burns of
“Country Music”, his new 16-hour docu-
mentary series. “The rub is that friction
caused by blacks and whites.”
Like his explorations of the civil war,
jazz, the Roosevelts and (most recently) the
Vietnam war, Mr Burns’s series is meticu-
lously researched and sometimes solemn,
featuring grave narration and rare footage.
But even the snobbiest viewers will gain a
new appreciation of country—along with
jazz, among the most American of musical
genres, a simple-seeming but complex
blend of old world and new, rural and in-
dustrial, African-American blues and hill-
billy reels, Sunday mornings at church and
Saturday nights at honky-tonks.
Mr Burns mixes oft-told tales with more
obscure episodes. Johnny Cash’s perfor-
mance at San Quentin prison is better
known than the fact that Merle Haggard,
whose lyrics later immortalised the “Okie
from Muskogee”, was an inmate at the
time. Fans familiar with the lineaments of
the short, turbulent life of Hank Williams,
the hillbilly Shakespeare, may have missed
his insistence that “there ain’t nobody in
this here world that I’d rather have stand-
ing next to me in a beer-joint brawl than my
Ma, with a broken bottle in her hand.” De-
spite the occasional black star, such as
Charley Pride (pictured with Cash), the in-
fluence of African-Americans has been
largely forgotten; even some aficionadosmay be unaware that DeFord Bailey, the
grandson of a former slave, was one of
country’s biggest radio stars in the 1920s.
As Mr Burns shows, that was the decade
in which the genre was commercialised.
An insurance firm in Nashville opened a
station, wsm, thinking it a cheap way to sell
policies to working folk. Its Saturday night
barn-dance slot became the “Grand Ole
Opry”, the longest-running show on Amer-
ican radio. As Marty Stuart, a country pro-
digy, puts it, ever since Nashville has had a
“guitar in this hand. Briefcase in this hand”.
According to Harlan Howard, a song-
writer, the music itself trades in “three
chords and the truth”—a theme much
broader and deeper than the cheatin’ hearts
and pick-up trucks of stereotype. Cash, for
example, once dedicated an album to Na-
tive Americans, but initially country sta-
tions wouldn’t play it. In 1975 some banned
Loretta Lynn, who had crooned about her
hardscrabble life as a coalminer’s daughter,
because of her song “The Pill”. “If they’d
have had the pill out when I was having
kids,” she comments in one of the series’s
funniest moments, “I’d have ate ‘em like
popcorn.” Kris Kristofferson—a Rhodes
scholar who left his job as an instructor at
West Point to be a janitor at a studio—dealt
directly and beautifully with sex in “Help
Me Make It Through The Night”. The sug-
gestive lyrics made record labels queasy.
The series opens with a shot of a mural
at the Country Music Hall of Fame, which
depicts a barn dance, the railway, a church
choir, river boats, fiddles, cowboys, a blues
musician and slaves in the field. “It is the
closest thing visually really to what coun-
try music sounds like,” reckons Kathy Mat-
tea, a singer. That sound is always evolv-
ing—to the ire of traditionalists, who have
worried about the influence of rock ‘n‘ roll,
foreigners, hip-hop and much else. “It’s
been a million different things in a million
different ways,” Vince Gill, another singer,
tells Mr Burns. “I don’t think I would enjoy
country music if it stayed the same.” 7A distinguished documentarian tunes
in to country musicAmerica in songThree chords and
the truth
When Charley met Johnny