Emily Maguire interviews Eli Glasman
Eli Glasman admits he felt ‘a little scared’ about how Melbourne’s Orthodox Jewish community would respond to his first novel, The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew, given it is narrated by a 17-year-old Orthodox rabbi’s son trying to reconcile his sexuality with his faith.
Yossi is, as his friend Menachem says, ‘proper religious’. He begins his day with a ritual hand-washing, always wears a tzitzit (a traditional woollen undergarment) and feels ‘chuffed’ when he’s the first to arrive for before-school prayers. Unlike many teenagers, Yossi knows exactly who he is and where he belongs: ‘I couldn’t imagine a life where each day bled into the next with nothing more to punctuate existence but payday and a piss-up on the weekend. A life with no God, no holy days, no prayers, no significance to food or clothing.’
It’s a feeling with which Glasman, who parted from Orthodox Judaism ten years ago, is intimately familiar: ‘One thing I really missed when I stopped being religious was that sense of place and purpose, the sense of direction in knowing what your life entails … I felt a real lacking in my day.’ In writing the novel, Glasman enjoyed re-experiencing, through Yossi, the ‘comforts of the rituals I felt I’d lost’. So important is religion to Yossi that it doesn’t occur to him to ditch it in order to explore his attraction to other guys. Apart from giving up the daily ritual of visiting the Mikvah (bathhouse) because ‘being in a room with naked men is too tempting’, Yossi continues to live a devout life while, secretly, he prays for God to ‘make these feelings stop’. He reaches out to an anti-gay cyber rabbi who advises him to flick a rubber band against his wrist every time he has an ‘inappropriate’ thought.
Then along comes Josh, a blue-eyed, shaggy-haired, nominally-Jewish boy from Perth. Josh is not only irreligious – he believes it’s ‘all primitive’ and that having to follow the rituals Yossi so values is ‘like playing out someone else’s obsessive-compulsive disorder’ – but brazenly sexual, casually announcing he’s had loads of sex with both guys and girls. Before long, poor Yossi’s wrist is red raw from all that rubber-band flicking.
Josh is more than just a pain in Yossi’s wrist, however. He also becomes a friend, and the discussions he and Yossi have about sex, religion and how to live right help both boys begin to move towards a space where faith and same-sex love can not only co-exist but actually feed off each other and thrive.
Indeed, it’s only when Yossi finally gives in to sexual temptation that he begins to come into his own as a brother, son and community member. This sex-sparked maturing wasn’t initially Glasman’s plan for Yossi. In fact, he had not planned for his leading man to become sexually active at all in the novel. As he wrote, though, he realised that ‘it had to happen for Yossi’s emotional development. I wanted to show the way in which sex relaxed him and he could better connect with his father and his sister and his friends because he was satisfied in this way.’
The sex itself is portrayed with great tenderness and refreshing frankness, thanks to the care with which Glasman approached the task of writing it. ‘A lot of the euphemisms can take you into a dodgy arena and I desperately didn’t want that,’ Glasman says. At the same time, he was aware that being too explicit or graphic might ‘have an almost pornographic effect’. Glasman wrote The Boy’s Own Manual in around seven months after graduating from the University of Melbourne with honours in Creative Writing. ‘I can’t take too long to write a novel,’ he says. ‘I need to run with the rush of excitement when it’s new.’
That rush of excitement is evident – the novel pulses with energy – but it’s also evident that many of the novel’s ideas have been incubating for far longer. Since he himself bowed out of Orthodox life at the age of 17, Glasman has been considering, and writing about, the big questions of faith, sex, community and belonging.
In his case, sexuality wasn’t the cause of his leaving religious life (he’s straight, but considers it ‘an honour’ that some people assume otherwise) but the struggle many same-sex attracted religious people go through troubles him. Which brings us back to why he was, at first, ‘a little scared’ about the Orthodox community’s response to his novel: he’d seen for himself the hostility with which some people treated openly gay Jewish teenagers.
But long before he’d finished the novel, he realised through discussions on his blog, where he raises many of the same issues, that there’d been no uniformity of response, good or bad. ‘There’s a great difference within [Orthodox Judaism]. While people may follow certain laws, everyone brings different thoughts to them, everyone has different levels of religious adherence … Whenever I talk about the book I get completely different responses from any number of people.’
Photograph by Julian Dolman.
It’s the acknowledgement of this diversity that makes Glasman’s portrayal of Yossi’s community so rich. All of the characters are portrayed with nuance and warmth – even those who sometimes express cruel or judgemental attitudes. The point is clearly that the intersection of faith, identity and values can be a confusing place and some people need more time and help than others when it comes to navigating it.
And of course it’s not only the Orthodox Jewish community that must grapple with such issues. Anyone who’s experienced a clash between the beliefs of their family or culture and their lived experience will find much to relate to here – something that makes Glasman extremely happy. ‘I’ve found that to be the most rewarding part of what I’m writing … To hear people say they can relate, especially when it’s someone you wouldn’t expect, it’s wonderful.’
