Faith for beginners : a novel /

With humor and insight, Hamburger explores the cultural tension between the nation of Israel and American Jews through the story of the Michaelsons. Helen, the daughter of Russian immigrants, is married to a psychologist suffering from a slow-burning cancer. They have two gay sons. The youngest, Jeremy, is an NYU student and recent suicide-attempt survivor. Helen decides a trip to Jerusalem is what her family needs. With high hopes, she signs them up for the Michigan Miracle 2000. However, they soon feel as if they are in a tourist trap. Helen and Jeremy are driven by a connection to faith to escape the prepackaged experience, albeit in bizarre ways. Helen has an affair with the hirsute rabbi leading the tour group, and Jeremy falls in love with a deaf Palestinian named George. Hamburger engages the reader with wonderfully flawed characters and through the history, legend, and propaganda of modern Jewish life. This novel is highly recommended for anyone who is drawn to stories of family affected by the global political context of everyday life. --Andrea Japzon Copyright 2005 Booklist

A woman hopes a family trip to Israel will help her reclaim her confused, rebellious son in Hamburger's entertaining, irreverent first novel (after the collection The View from Stalin's Head). Jeremy's been at NYU for five years, but he's still just a junior, and Helen Michaelson, 58, thinks he might have a much-needed spiritual awakening on the "Michigan Miracle 2000" tour. But while Jeremy's more interested in cruising Jerusalem's gay parks, Helen herself is primed for revelation, as she finds that her connection to Judaism and her family is more complicated than she'd thought. Hamburger has an exacting eye for mundane detail and suburban conventions, and in Jeremy he's created the classic green-haired, pierced college student ranting about social injustice. But beneath Jeremy's sarcastic, moralizing banter, there's a convincing critique of Americans' way of being in the world. In Israel in 2000, the Michaelsons are like Pixar creations trapped in a movie filmed in Super 8-the Middle East may be fraught with political tension, but their biggest problem is the heat outside their air-conditioned bus. Hamburger goes further than witty satire, though, and when the plot takes a dark turn he demonstrates that he's capable of taking on global issues, even if his characters aren't. Agent, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In Hamburger's debut novel (following the short story collection The View from Stalin's Head), Helen Michaelson takes her deeply troubled drug addict son, Jeffrey, and her terminally ill husband on a mission to Israel in the hopes of redemption. This sorry group of misfits complains bitterly about the heat, the people they meet, and the excesses of the slick, packaged tour they've taken. Israel is portrayed poorly as a foil for the Michaelsons' miseries, which are juxtaposed with the country's own, more serious problems in the summer of 2000. In short order, Jeffrey gets himself to a gay cruising park, where he meets a Palestinian kindergarten teacher, while Helen becomes enamored of the young rabbi leading the mission. Hamburger's hyperbole is excessive, and the characters are grotesque, ugly Americans. Not recommended.-Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An American Jewish family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem is the subject of this debut novel from Hamburger (The View from Stalin's Head, stories, 2004). When 22-year-old underachiever Jeremy Michaelson almost dies of a drug overdose, pragmatic matron Helen shepherds him and her terminally ill husband David (a retired psychoanalyst) onto a tour ("Michigan Miracle 2000") that arrives in Haifa during a punishing heat wave. While Jeremy, happily gay and ever on the prowl, checks out a "cute Hasid" and gets harassed by "handsome, snickering Arab bullies," Helen searches the World of her Fathers for inspiration, guidance and an understanding of why she and David have produced two gay sons (her elder, unlike reckless Jeremy, is a respected professional secure in a long-term relationship). The novel thus splits into two halves. We follow Jeremy as he attends a rowdy Shabbat dinner hosted by an Orthodox acquaintance, courts a shy, closeted yeshiva student, flashes his Western liberal's credentials in social situations that cry out for reticence, then undertakes a whirlwind affair with a deaf Palestinian kindergarten teacher (which puts the latter in very real danger). Meanwhile, Helen attracts the initially unwelcome attentions of sexy Rabbi Sherman, stumbles through a meeting with Shimon Peres at a public reception and experiences a moment of mingled enlightenment and further confusion in an underground cave (Jerusalem tourist attraction Hezekiah's Tunnel)--in a lame echo of the Marabar Caves incident in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Hamburger strives mightily for variety, introducing chapters with excerpts from Jewish history or doctrine ("Faith for Beginners," as it were), and focusing briefly on the moribund David, as he resigns himself to his fate and returns home early. As Helen, Jeremy and their varied instructors all learn, "No one ever said it was easy to be a Jew. . . ." Thoughtful, but too long and attenuated. At this stage of Hamburger's career, his short stories are better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.