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SPOTLIGHT: A rabbi weaves ‘A Fabulous Tale’ of North Africa

By Michele Alperin Special Writer
    Midway through rabbinical school, Burton Visotzky fell in love with midrash — rabbinic narrative and interpretation of the Bible. Maybe it is not a surprise that an English major from the University of Illinois would be drawn to rabbinic literature, but the resonance was more than just academic.
    “It was like one of those Jungian moments,” says Rabbi Visotzky, professor of midrash and interreligious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. “It sang to my soul. These were stories that not only were very quirky and Kafkaesque, they were my memories and spoke to my collective unconscious.”
    When he decided to write fiction, these same stories came to play a central role.
    Set in the 11th century in Tunisia and Egypt, Burton Visotzky’s novel, “A Delightful Compendium of Consolation: A Fabulous Tale of Romance, Adventure & Faith in the Medieval Mediterranean” (Ben Yehuda Press), interweaves midrash, tales of “The 1001 Arabian Nights” and extant religious and business texts found in the geniza, or storeroom, of a Cairo synagogue.
    On Tuesday, Sept. 23, Rabbi Visotzky will be in town to talk about the book. The event, which will begin at 7:30 p.m., is being hosted by the Jewish Center of Princeton, located at 435 Nassau St. For information, call 609-921-0100.
    As a professor, Rabbi Visotzky has written scholarly academic texts, of course. But it is his popular Judaica publications that prefigure his foray into fiction, reflecting the very quirkiness he admires in the midrash of the rabbis — “the joy in the text, the simultaneous incredible regard for scripture and at the same time the chutzpah the rabbis had playing with the literature.”
    With eight books under his belt, he was ready to stretch himself a little. Having done the ninth century with his “Midrash on Proverbs,” he wanted to study the 10th or 11th.
    Both the period and his own interests came together for him in the person of Rabbenu Nissim, a great Jewish legal authority in North Africa who also composed what Rabbi Visotzky calls “a marvelously quirky collection of ‘aggadot (tales),” from which his novel takes its title.
    Between 1999 and 2001, Rabbi Visotzky immersed himself in the daily lives of 11th-century rabbinic and Karaite Jewish communities, with the help of S.D. Goitein’s six- volume opus on the Cairo Geniza documents, “A Mediterranean Society,” and work on the period by Princeton University professor of Near Eastern Studies Mark Cohen.
    Feeling that scholarly work was out due to his lack of facility in Arabic, Rabbi Visotzky turned instead to fiction as a way to both tease out why Rabbenu Nissim had produced a collection of midrash and to convey (read “teach”) what he had learned about the period to a broader public.
    Within an epistolary format, “A Delightful Compendium of Consolation” tells the tale of a proto-feminist character, her family, actual rabbis from the period, and the multicultural society of North Africa where she lives.
    Starting the actual writing in May 2001, Rabbi Visotzky had completed about two-thirds when classes started up again in September. Then came Sept. 11.
    “One of the challenges of writing the book was my own very complicated reaction to the terrorist attacks and my own finding a way to let go of the anger and move toward further engagement and dialogue with the Islamic community,” he remembers.
    In the wake of Sept. 11, Rabbi Visotzky went to the pier every week to counsel survivors’ families. “I think it took a toll on me,” he says. That emotional wrenching affected the last third of the novel, making it, he thinks, darker than it might have been.
    The anger he felt at his city being attacked also fueled his increasing in interfaith dialogue, in particular Jewish-Muslim dialogue, locally, nationally, and internationally.
    When he set out to write the novel, Rabbi Visotzky had already written many books and known many fiction writers, but was still surprised when their advice turned out to be true.
    “The fiction writers all told me that once you start thinking, the voices of the characters come to you and the characters take over,” he observes. And that’s what happened.
    The novel’s protagonist is a 19-year-old woman, Karimah, who runs off with the Muslim son of her father’s business partner. Rabbi Visotzky himself had a 19-year-old daughter at home when he started the book, so he had some sense of the late-teenage female voice.
    While writing, he would often find himself typing as fast as he could to see what the characters would do next.
    “Sometimes they went in a different direction than I had anticipated and seemed like they were on their own,” he recalls. “The more I wrote, the more the characters became who they are.”
    Although Rabbi Visotzky allowed himself some latitude with his fictionalized characters, as a scholar he also tries to be true to the medieval realities.
    The Karimah character, for example, is something of a super heroine, but Rabbi Visotzky maintains he did not give her any qualities that women did not have in that society— they were warriors and business people; they traveled in caravans, and they could read and write. What was not realistic was to have all these qualities in one woman.
    He uses actual period materials as his models but massages them for fictional purposes where necessary. All poems are translations of period verse; items being sent in a caravan are all real but may not be from a single list, and Karimah’s marriage contract is modeled on geniza texts.
    In the format of the letters his characters send to one another, Rabbi Visotzky also tries to be true to medieval forms. The letters in the geniza, for example, rarely betray emotional content, and except for a very few cases — for example, when Karimah’s brother al-Iskander lashes out at her for the secrets she had burdened him with — Rabbi Visotzky has tried to keep the letters “elliptical, alluding to emotions by referring to other things.”
    Among the characters in the book, most are based on actual historical personages. Only Karimah, her brother al-Iskander and the brigand Abu Sin are fictional.
    Because of Rabbi Visotzky’s literary and rabbinic training, he was very conscious of requiring a lot from his readers. The way he links the story’s plot to the midrashic material, or ‘aggadah, and the Arabian nights tales is through intertextuality. The reader is left to figure out how different texts refer to and influence one another.
    “The rabbinic stories are often reflected in the plot development, and the plot development is reflected in the Arabian nights stories,” he explains. “It is the interweave of the texts that moves things forward.”
    For Rabbi Visotzky, the subject matter of this novel meshes well with changes he has made since Sept. 11. He is studying Arabic with a tutor and is continuing his work on Jewish-Muslim dialogue, which echoes his discovery of ties between Jewish and Arab texts in 11th-century North Africa.
    “I felt strongly that the resonances between rabbinic narrative from the Talmud and the Arabian nights narratives were pointing at Jewish and Muslim worlds not being that far apart,” he says.
    As much as he has turned in new directions since Sept. 11, Rabbi Visotzky remains the teacher par excellence. He admits that his novel serves him well as a teaching tool — not only about the history and social life of the period, but about the texts that people read and listened to.
    “I know a real novelist is not supposed to think that way, but I’ve been a teacher all my life,” he says.