In summer 2023, Anderson Cooper devoted a whole hour on his show The Whole Story to The Gilgo Beach Killer, about an accused serial killer, an architect who was a family man employed in New York City and living on Long Island, where he allegedly deposited his victims on a beach. In the process of reporting this story, CNN reporters mentioned that other serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy also were family men. A few weeks later, authorities arrested a violent serial kidnapper and sex assaulter who lived an apparently ordinary life with his wife and two kids.
And yet, this "dangerous loner" trope survives.
In my essay "Walking Alone: Dangerous or Heroic" in Prairie Fire magazine, I point out that it is just as likely to be a well-adjusted, non-homicidal loner as it is to be a happy anybody else.
And yet, as a culture, we cling to our sweeping stereotypes—notions that take the place of discerning thought and the subsequent processing of information that may be different from what we believe, and therefore may elicit an inner struggle and change.
Although I'm an introvert, I have lots of extrovert friends. They are in constant social interaction and thrive in the company of others. Occasionally one will confide that they feel as if they are neglecting "who they really are"—ignoring their inner lives. That's funny because it's obvious "who they really are" is people who love people—according to song lyrics, the luckiest people. Likewise, I think people like me—contemplatives who are excited by the inner journey while examining the outer one; people who thrive by having insights, connecting metaphor to meaning, and creating something that has not existed before—live who we really are with a different emphasis.
Author Amina Cain has brilliantly turned this quiet journey, as well as a woman's need for it—a need as strong as any mammal's for oxygen—into a novella called Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Reading it made my brain pop with identification, associations, appreciation, and flat-out glee. In the novel, a woman who works as a museum cleaner, craving freedom to deeply enter and write about the world of the paintings that surround her, finally achieves this. She makes mistakes along the way, gets involved with a man she doesn't want to marry but marries him anyway, and does some hilarious things—hilarious because they're honest and yet incongruent to people who live primarily in the "outer world"—and eventually she is happy. In fact she sometimes experiences being one with everything when she writes about paintings. In a quick search through the book for the word "open," there are many salient quotes about the power of looking within. One example:
All the windows in the restaurant were open, and as I wrote, the waves were crashing right outside them. It began to help me. I began to feel I was in a trance of writing. All around me were plump insects. They too were very alive, beating their wings, landing.
You can read this 158-page entertainment in one sitting and I did (twice)—in a state of near-ecstasy. Then I knocked out a Goodreads review, posted it, and proceeded to get really sad reading other readers' reviews calling the book "insubstantial," "cold," or, even more distressing, this comment by one who loved it: "I mourn for her [the protagonist] to break out of her self-imposed limitations, but she doesn't want to." All of this exposed a social bias I don't understand: Why do people who love connection assume that this is the only real life, the only proper way to be, and that "self-imposed limitations" in favor of time and freedom to travel one's unique inner journey is something to mourn? What limitation is there in feeling one with all that is? Were the great visionaries and mystics who changed our understanding of life and love tragic figures? Or is it that one must declare oneself by some avocation to justify this excitement of discovery? One reader who identified herself as a writer (an introvert?) commented, "This book scared me, honestly. I didn't want to be her, even if I liked her for the most part." I posit that this woman's fear is not of Cain's protagonist but of a part of herself she wants to avoid. Why?
Anne Berest's multi-award-winning masterpiece The Postcard (in an impeccable English translation by Tina Kover, Europa Editions, 2023), about the insidious Nazi takeover of France and Berest's family history, is an exercise in introspection and recounts the perils of a culture's willful refusal to act on an individuated knowledge of right and wrong. The novel not only covers the German takeover of France but also elucidates how that fall was helped by the French people's profound apathy, lack of introspection, and failure to act until it was too late. It's the right book for this time as we seem to be blindly repeating history:
The uniqueness of this catastrophe lay in the paradox of its insidious slowness and its viciousness. Looking back, everyone wondered why they hadn't reacted sooner, when there had been so much time to do so. How they had been so blithely optimistic? But it was too late now. The law of October 3, 1940, stated that "any person with three grandparents of the Jewish race, or with two grandparents of that race if his/her spouse is Jewish" would be considered a Jew themselves. It also prohibited Jews from holding any sort of public office. Teachers, military personnel, government employees, and those who worked for public authorities—all were obliged to resign from their positions. Jews were also forbidden to publish articles in newspapers or participate in any of the performing arts: theatre, film, radio.
[Anne talking with her mother in present day] "Wasn't there also a list of authors whose books were banned?"
"Quite. The Liste Otto, named after the German ambassador to Paris. Otto Abetz. It listed all the books withdrawn from sale in bookstores. All the Jewish authors were there, of course, but also communist ones and French writers who were considered 'disruptive' by the regime, including Colette, Aristide Bruant, André Malraux, Louis Aragon, and even some dead authors, like Jean de la Fontaine."
Right now, all of my Jewish friends are on "high alert" as the world's response to the butchering of Israeli Jews on October 7th seemingly overnight transformed into what appeared to be a pre-orchestrated wave of antisemitism cloaked in support of Palestinians. Nevermind that so many Israelis and Jews around the world agree that the indiscriminate bombing and starving of Gazans is wrong and must end. Nevermind that so many of us agree that the Netanyahu government must go. In knee-jerk fashion, people from college students to publishers* proudly declare that Jews essentially have no right to a country or, worse, that the Nazis had the right idea, and if you don't agree with that, you are part of the problem and have no right to publish, are undesirables who are not welcome in their groups, or, worst, must be extinguished. This is an ancient story:
Tiffany Schlain's remarkable 18-minute documentary, The Tribe, gives the history of the Jews through the Barbie Doll, whose inventor was Jewish. In doing so, it sheds light on the questions: What does it mean to be an American Jew today? What does it mean to be a member of any tribe in the 21st century?
The Tribe articulates the Jews' world history of being outsiders and, therefore, repeatedly scapegoated. However it also makes a point that this has required us (after reading The Postcard, I now declare myself a secular Ashkenazi Jew even though I was raised without religion or Jewish culture—more about that in a second) to be persistent to survive at all. Struggle, persistence, and a tendency to question are characteristics of the Jewish diaspora. And deep study and argument, debating all sides and interpretations of scripture, laws, and beliefs are at the heart of Jewish culture.
My parents dropped their religion when they met and married. Our sole Jewish education was being told that had we lived in Hitler's Germany, we would have been shoved in an oven. So I was, in a sense, raised with a "clean religious slate." My mother told me that when I grew up, if I wanted a religion, I could choose one. I never have wanted one. But if reading The Postcard didn't sufficiently activate my Jewish DNA, the frying of my bone marrow at the explosion of self-righteous hate following the October 7th Hamas attacks has let me know that no matter what my nonreligious beliefs are, I am a Jew. And I now believe that my preference for contemplation in solitude and nuanced understanding before making rash statements is another aspect of my DNA—a gift from studious ancestors whose names I will never know. And I am grateful.
What about the contemplative life is so threatening—even to people whose natural inclination is in that direction? And why do women judge another woman—in this case, Amina Cain's protagonist in Indelicacy—as "cold" or (per one member of my book club) "selfish" for acting out of who she really is? Cain wrote a taut, perfect story of the inner journey, as well as a woman's requisite negotiation with the outer one to achieve it and act on her inner sense of what was right—a book for our time. While Cain writes from the perspective of an individual seeking introspection and enlightenment, Anne Berest offers a visceral history of what happens when an entire society refuses to act out of introspective integrity because it would require fighting what seems like a mass movement—only made possible when we abdicate our individual responsibility.
So, to anyone who complains that they are neglecting their inner lives, perhaps I should say: Yes, maybe you are if you cannot understand the freedom available to all of us by going within—to discover it is the same as the outside, only better because everything and everyone is included as One—so scapegoating makes no sense. And perhaps our current cultural chaos mandates that everyone go inside to make this discovery.
(NB: I you are a person who finds no problem with introspection, hot off the presses is David James Duncan's long awaited novel Sun House about a community of people who find a way to be with one another and in love with All That Is.)
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* This essay was originally accepted by a publication where a lovely editor urged me to go into the "Jewish weeds" of my personal story. First, I resisted. When I did, I realized he was absolutely right; the piece made more sense to me. However, when he read my references to the antisemitism happening right now in publishing, he claimed it was "unsubstantiated." I withdrew the piece.
In case you are unaware of what is blatant to all Jewish writers submitting work to publications, I will provide some references:
That there was a tsunami of antisemitism unleashed in the publishing world immediately following Oct. 7th is a fact. I've lost count of the "leftie" places I normally assumed would be open to my work who now post warnings on their submission pages that if you are Israeli or a Zionist, your work is not welcome. Writer Erika Dreifus began collecting data on this after Oct. 7th. (I have not reread this document which has been updated many times since I first read it but here's the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15SQ_XdrTFVgUGkdn6WvsFQVTFrqrDAzmMDxQsgokCIY/edit)
And recently you can hear it firsthand in a recording between a media buyer for a book about Israel and the book publication Shelf Awareness, a newsletter I've treasured: The Free Press
If you are unaware of the debacle at Guernica over a piece that expressed compassion for both sides of the Israeli/Gazan war, here are some resources about it:
Editors' resignations and the erasing of an article by an Israeli writer who has done humanitarian work in Gaza for years
Interview with Israeli writer Joanna Chen
Here is a piece about a push to boycott Jewish authors:
https://kathleenschmidt.substack.com/p/book-publishing-and-antisemitism
Here is an overview of what is happening better than any I could ever report:
Journalist Bari Weiss at 92nd St. Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfjLm0-fQEg&t=6s
And here is a wrap-up of the antisemitic wave in publishing by James Kirchick: "A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing"