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Foreword
The
idea for The Ladies Auxiliary first came to
me over coffee with a friend in New York. My friend
had recently converted to Judaism. She struck me as
someone who was different, who followed her own mind
without worrying about what other people thought of
her. I was telling her about the close-knit world
of the Memphis Orthodox Jewish community where I grew
up, and at one point she jokingly asked me, "What
if I moved to Memphis?" I looked at her and thought,
"My God, what if you did?"
My friend's comment inspired me to think about the
way an outsider can challenge a world like the one
I had grown up in. In this community everyone knows
everyone else, and most people are related in some
way. People feel rooted in the city; it is a community
that goes back several generations. I am a fifth generation
Memphian on one side, and most of my family still
lives there. My great grandfather started the Jewish
newspaper; my grandparents helped found the Jewish
day school there. I grew up feeling thatI had a place,
that I was connected to a community and a tradition.
But I also felt that there was little room to be different.
There was a strong pressure to conform to a narrow
definition of how you were supposed to be, and it
was considered wrong to question anything about the
community. For me, this was often suffocating, and
ultimately I chose to live in a place that was more
open.
Writing this novel was a way to explore my own relationship
to this community. Adopting the point of view of the
women of the Ladies Auxiliary, I began to understand
their impulse to preserve a way of life that sometimes
felt as if it was slipping away. I missed the sense
of kinship that I grew up with. I missed being rooted
in a place and having deep connections to a city and
the people who live there. But I also felt the difficulty
of trying to live in such a close-knit world. I discovered
that writing about the community where I grew up separated
me more from it. It was as if I had broken a pact
not to reveal the inner workings of this world and
could never be inside of it again. But for me, part
of being a writer means looking honestly at my own
world and asking questions about it.
Discussion
Questions
1. The novel opens with an almost pastoral description
of Memphis's Jewish neighborhood, typologically evoking
a "city on a hill" image. How do the themes that imbue
this first scene set the tone for the rest of the
book?
2. Find a passage in which a Jewish ceremony is described.
In what ways does Mirvis show the myriad, even contradictory,
meanings that it contains for each of its participants?
3. The use of the first-person plural pronoun for
the narrative voice emphasizes the collective, uniform
nature of the community. The story is told not by
any one member of the community but by a chorus. How
does Mirvis play with this voice to emphasize moments
of dissension or doubt? At what points is the voice
the least omniscient?
4. What did you make of the seeming role reversal
between mothers and daughters, with the mothers portrayed
as naïve and the daughters as more perceptive and
worldly?
5. What do you think will happen after the end of
the novel? Will Batsheva stay? To what extent will
she be integrated, if at all?
6. How do you imagine Ayala to be five or ten years
after the end of the novel?
7. This book, with its independent, proud heroine,
could be read alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter (even down to the strange apparitions
in the sky). How do they both explore issues of tradition,
tolerance, belief, individuality, and forgiveness?
In what important ways do they diverge?
8. What characters did you identify with most? Was
it always Batsheva?
9. Do you think Yosef's doubt about Judaism predated
Batsheva's arrival? Or did it grow out of their conversations?
10. Was there ever a point where you agreed with those
who thought that Batsheva had "crossed the line"?
11. How and where does Mirvis blur the division between
religious faith and small-town provincialism?
12. Do you think it is possible to carve out a space
for individualism within an orthodoxy? Is what Batsheva
attempts even possible or, in the end, do you have
to choose one over the other? (Perhaps think of other
stories—Voltaire's Candide, Ken Kesey's One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Mark Twain's The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James's
Daisy Miller—in which someone presents a challenge
to an established order.)
13. What do you make of the vision in the sky that
ends the novel? How can it be read along with the
opening scene of the novel?
Praise
for The Ladies Auxiliary
"The Ladies Auxiliary, with its brilliantly
original collective narrative voice, sheds entirely
new light on the nature of community. Insightful and
compassionate, it is rich in detail and full of evocative
power."—Mary Gordon
"Tova Mirvis's debut novel marks the entrance of an
important new voice in fiction. By being so uncompromisingly
true to the particulars of the small Jewsih Orthodoxy
in Memphis, Tennessee, she manages to produce a tale
of the widest universal scope. At once wickedly satiric
and lovingly sympathetic, it is an insider's look
at the pressures brought to bear on insularity by
the appearance of an outsider."—Rebecca Goldstein,
author of The Mind and Body Problem and Mazel
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