What would happen if the Witch of Endor — the ancient biblical seer who was able to summon the departed prophet, Samuel, for King Saul before going into battle against the Philistines — was reborn in modern times as the daughter of a famed British writer? And what if this new witch’s eccentricities, depression, and substance abuse provided great literary fodder for her mother?
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” the Polish Jewish poet Czeslaw Milosz was quoted as saying. Toby Lloyd’s debut novel, Fervor, attempts to test this assertion.
The family in question are the Rosenthals. The mother, Hannah, is a popular/reviled conservative Jewish columnist who’s made her reputation writing the story of her Holocaust survivor father-in-law. Shortly after her father-in-law’s death and the book’s publication, something snaps in the psyche of her daughter, Elsie, who was unusually close to her grandfather. Elsie begins ditching school, sneaking booze, and writing grotesque stories. Perhaps she’s dabbling in kabbalah. And, who knows, maybe she’s a real-life witch. (Whether her supernatural qualities are real is left somewhat ambiguous.) But Hannah knows a good story when she sees it. She turns Elsie’s circumstance into a book called Daughters of Endor, which becomes another runaway bestseller. Understandably, the rest of the family is not exactly thrilled with the book, and Fervor charts the family’s dissolution.
The novel is (mostly) told through the eyes of Tovyah, the schoolmate of Elsie’s younger brother. (An elder brother, Gideon, is in the brood, too, but he’s largely an afterthought.) Tovyah arrives at Oxford University shortly before the second book is to be published. He is cold, arrogant, full of confidence, and disdainful of his fellow students. He’s extremely eager to delve into great literature and finds that his peers are largely unthinking, highly politicized, eager to drink themselves silly, and full of scorn for him, too, as the son of the “fascist” Hannah Rosenthal.
Even though this novel takes place in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it anticipates some things that feel eerily relevant now: the Oxford campus is seething with contempt for an Orthodox Jewish boy because of who his mother is. The cant that we’ve seen in the media is projected onto Tovyah. And, naturally, he feels great alienation.
This seems to be the story of 2023/4 for a lot of Jews — how divorced from and misunderstood by the rest of the contemporary world we feel. Not just on university campuses, but on the part of friends we thought we knew.
Fervor asks serious questions about what it means to be Jewish, religious, British, and a member of a strange and estranged family.
Max Gross is a novelist and journalist who lives in Forest Hills. His 2020 novel, The Lost Shtetl, won a National Jewish Book Award
