THE SEED APPLE
by Sheldon Greene
In Greene’s (After the Parch, 2014, etc.) novel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor meets a family of Jewish Native Americans in California and gets drawn into an age-old dispute.
In the 1980s, Mendel Traig leaves Bolton, Pennsylvania, for a monthslong vacation in Canyon Springs, California, in the hope that the arid desert air will alleviate his chronic bronchitis. He quickly meets Sarah Cavanaugh and is drawn to the “shyness, warmth and intelligence in her eyes.” At the same time, he’s reminded of a female friend who died during the Holocaust. He discovers that Sarah is a metallurgical engineer who’s working on a communication tower in the area—a U.S. Navy venture that will be used to facilitate contact with nuclear submarines. The project is controversial, however, as it’s on a site that local Native Americans consider sacred; they tie up construction in litigation, threatening its future. Mendel soon becomes close friends with the project’s developer, Arin Binyan. Arin is an uncommon man, and Mendel is fascinated by what he describes as his “almost irreconcilable emulsion of materialism and spirituality”; he’s devoted to the tower project but also appreciates the holy significance of the site and its connections to his own Jewish Native American family. However, Arin clashes with his son, Zev, who openly opposes the tower. Over the course of the story, Greene conjures a profound connection between Mendel and Arin, circuitously showing how they share the lonesome experience of mourning. Along the way, the author’s prose is, by turns, comically punchy and delicately elegiac, which is a rare and impressive literary combination. Rare, too, are the novel’s wit and moving wisdom. At one point, for example, Arin poetically observes, “We’re programmed to grieve, you know. It’s healthy; it lets us put the matter of death behind us. Every animal grieves: elephants, I suppose, even mice, although I’ve never seen it. It’s that seminal commitment to the life process.”
An affecting tale of love, loss, and loneliness written with style and deep emotion.