Rabbi Isaac has led a worldly life of rabbinical service, studying for years in England and sojourning into Cold War-era Russia and Ukraine. For all that, his greatest challenges are the conservative Jews of his congregation outside New York, some of them Holocaust survivors who still see the world through a lens of tribalism and fear. Meanwhile, his daughter Bracha struggles to live her progressive ideals during her own studies in Israel.
A timely addition to a difficult conversation, Jeffrey Gale’s THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION takes a broad view of both the modern shape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the history of racism and anti-Semitism in the United States. The text has a strong historical approach to this content, bringing medieval Jewish history and the conquest of the Americas into its arguments about 20th-century eugenics, race, and imperialism. There are moments in which the text elides or over-simplifies those connections (early modern views on race treated Black Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Jews quite distinctly, and took different paths to coalesce around scientific racism several centuries later; also, there’s questionable support for the broad claim that the ideas motivating the colonization of the Americas also motivated the Spanish Inquisition). But overall, this is a political work, not an academic one, and most readers will be persuasively overwhelmed by the wealth of historical information that THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION brings to bear—especially about under-discussed national sins, like the American eugenics movement’s global influence in the early 20th century. These reflections on the past are interspersed with moments of beauty and grief: when the Rabbi leads a recitation of a Kaddish with the names of concentration camps interspersed between the lines, the effect is stunning.
Nonetheless, Jeffrey Gale’s THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION stumbles on storytelling; it is far more “historical” than “fiction.” All of that interesting historical detail often comes through lengthy monologues dropped whole-cloth into the text. These sections are both the best and worst parts of the book. In one stretch, the narrative goes back and forth between Rabbi Isaac at an interfaith colloquium discussing the religious history of racism in America, and his daughter Bracha in Israel taking classes on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a profitable ideological structure, but the effect is bland; the text is essentially cutting between scenes of experts talking without interruption for long periods at a stretch. The information is still interesting, but, for fiction, it falls flat—breaking the commonplace “show, don’t tell” rule. Given its scope, this would be a very different book if it tried a dramatically different approach to this ideological structure (parallel stories, for instance, of a Spanish conquistador and a modern Israeli settler), but the current approach simply doesn’t hold up to the gravity (and real interest) of the content. There is a more active plot here in which Rabbi Isaac tries to get his congregation to accept their Gentile neighbors—especially Black and Latinx children, including some undocumented immigrants pursued by ICE—and that similarly could have been the approach to a more conventional narrative. As it stands, however, this feels more like an ideological cutout than a real story. Again, this is fine within the themes of the text; but for “fiction,” it’s a loss.
Ultimately, it might have been best for THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION to commit to a nonfiction approach. However, it is still highly successful in communicating its key points: that the long, intertwined limbs of anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism still surround us in America today; that community, especially a community of faith, must provide a structure for grief and healing; and that we all bear a moral obligation to recognize the shared humanity in others, regardless of color or creed.
Jeffrey Gale’s THE SECRET OF REDEMPTION explores moving and crucial truths about the human condition. Although its storytelling is often lackluster, the material is no less valuable.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
