The year begins in early summer with the arrival of Batsheva Jacobs and her young daughter Ayala. It ends just after Shavuot the following year.
Through that year, the community goes through tumultuous times that lead to two teenagers in the community leaving, separately and under dramatically different conditions.
Batsheva is different from the other ladies in the community: She is a young widow who has moved from New York City to Memphis, where her late husband grew up, to start over again. She is a convert. She wears flowing skirts and dresses. She has a tattoo. She has a degree in art. She studied with her rabbi in New York and wants to continue those studies in Memphis.
The ladies of the Auxiliary are middle-aged with children either in or on their way to college. They wear modest long-sleeved shirts and long skirts in stiff denims and twills. They have deep roots in both Memphis and Orthodox Judaism. They follow the rules. When in doubt, they seek an authority -- social convention, consensus opinion of the Auxiliary, the pronouncements of the reigning balabosta or a question sent to the rabbi via their husbands.
Life would have continued as it always did had not a group of teenage girls rebelled against the status quo and expectations of their families and community. Suddenly there's trouble in River City, to paraphrase "The Music Man." The girls are drawn to Batsheva because she's younger than their mothers, more willing to talk about forbidden topics and has experienced things forbidden by Judaism. The ladies of the community decide to hire Batsheva as an art teacher in the girls' school, hoping to quell some of the girls' dissatisfaction.
I found this book an uncomfortable read. Through most of the book, the women of the Auxiliary speak with one voice: "our community was the safest place on earth, close, small, held together like a carefully crocheted sweater." It's as if these women don't have independent thoughts or personalities.
For all their lip service to tradition and Jewish values, they are mean-spirited yentas, judgmental and arrogant. Tziporah Newburger, who manages the mikveh, holds a class to encourage the ladies to work harder at observing the commandments. She asks each woman present to select one mitzvah to focus on with more intensity. When it comes to selecting her own, Tziporah realizes that "as far as she knew, she might have mastered all 613 of God's commandments." As she swells with pride, she realizes that she may need to work more on humility.
As the months pass, individual voices of ladies in the Auxiliary are heard: Rena Reinhard has a straying husband and is terrified that if she gets a divorce, she will no longer be accepted. Helen Shayowitz is so invested in her expectations for her daughter that she nearly buys her a wedding dress before she has a fiancé. Another woman has a forbidden bowl of shrimp salad hidden in her freezer.
The Ladies Auxiliary became a best-seller and was described by reviewers as "compelling," "compassionate" and "insightful." But it also generated controversy in Orthodox circles.
In 2005, author Wendy Shalit published an essay, "The Observant Reader," in the New York Times Book Review and suggested that Mirvis (and other writers) were writing so-called "insider' fiction (that) actually reveals the authors' estrangement from the traditional Orthodox community." Shalit herself had written several books about women and girls returning to modest dress and traditional Jewish values.
Mirvis fired back in an essay in the Forward that Shalit was questioning "who owns the imaginative rights to a way of life." Mirvis argues that there's a wide variety of experience and response to living a traditional Orthodox Jewish life. Shalit, Mirvis writes, is "de-legitimizing . . . any individual experience other than her own."
Ironically, by 2011, Mirvis' dissatisfaction with her marriage and her traditional Orthodox world led her to a divorce. The divorce also led her to leaving Orthodox Judaism. She wrote a memoir, The Book of Separation, about that experience published in 2017.
I was not as troubled by Mirvis' portrayal of an Orthodox life as less than perfect as I was by the broad, coarse brush she used to paint her characters. Most of us are not as good as we would like to be. We all have flaws. Flaws don't cancel us out as human beings or Jews. Just because some members of a group are hypocritical, doesn't mean the entire group should be discredited.
Ultimately, I was unclear what Mirvis' message was. The Ladies Auxiliary ends with a scene that suggests the community featured in the book was connected to its roots and to its children and their future, offering a continuum of peace, identity and belonging.
That portrayal doesn't resonate with how Mirvis has portrayed these characters and this community. Clearly some characters, although a minority, didn't feel connected and supported. In Mirvis's own words, you have to wonder why anyone would.
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About the Author: Tova Mirvis (1972 - )
That was Mirvis' first book, published in 1999. It was followed by The Outside World (2004), Visible City (2014), and The Book of Separation (2017), a memoir of leaving her faith and her marriage as she approached her 40th birthday.
She received a masters of fine arts in creative writing from the Columbia University School of the Arts. She currently lives in Newton, MA, with her family.
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