Klein’s Exodus mirrors the biblical Exodus in the accounts of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Egyptians and their leaving Egypt with a long over due letter from Uncle Melech, describing his own experiences held by Nazi’s in Kamenets, and a horrific pogrom which he escaped. Exodus 13:16 says “by strength of hand the Lord brought of forth out of Egypt”; Uncle Melech mirrors this scripture saying “I bless the heavenly one for my rescue” (24). Exodus is also the first book of the Pentateuch to mention the High Holy days of the Jewish calendar, and they are contextually represented in Melech’s experience in Kamenets. Describing his feelings over having survived the pogrom, “I end up exculpating myself into a kind of guilt”. (25) This is the very emotion of the prayers of Rosh Hashanah. Melech calls himself “the spared one”, referencing the custom of kapparot, the day before Yom Kippur. All the prayers of Yom Kippur are those of forgiveness, and Melech repeatedly asks for forgiveness in his letter. The chapter moves through the circle of Jewish holidays, but it is interesting to point out that because the narrator is reading a letter of the account, the cycle is back wards. This alludes to one of Klein’s major themes in the novel, a return to the homeland, by moving backwards through the calendar.
Leviticus is considered the book of priestly things, a chapter that contains the tokahhah (words of chastisement), stern warnings from God to obey his laws or suffer the consequences. While investigating in Rome and talking to a camp manager and a priest Melech spoke with, the narrator is concerned his uncle may have converted. The camp manager tells the parable “of the four men who would gaze into paradise” (34) from the Talmud, a tale of men who would gaze on God and were consumed in flame. Melech does not convert, but his nephew condemns him as a “cutter of plants, an uprooter, a convert!”(35) Through the narrator’s suspicions, he seems to judge his uncle guilty, as though he were the vengeful god himself.
Numbers is the tale of Jews losing faith in God because they are frightened of the people living in Canaan, and because of this the lord punishes them to roam the desert for forty years. Klein’s Numbers is entirely spent in Casablanca, where Uncle Melech has gone to the Mellah to help those Jews who will not help themselves. Melech does this because of his own reservations on seeing the land of Israel. Seeing the poor of the slums, and rebuffed in his efforts to help them, Melech is renewed in his faith and journeys to Israel.
In Klein’s Deuteronomy, the narrator converses on a plane with another Jew on his way to Israel, discussing his own theory of Jewish history. The narrator has issues with what he is saying, and getting the last word he says “You have forgotten, in you thesis, to place God.”(67) This is reminiscent of the biblical Deuteronomy, which begins with Moses cautioning Jews not to follow false gods. The chapter ends with the narrator never finding his Uncle Melech, for he is burned alive in a skirmish outside the city. It’s Melech’s name and allusiveness to his pursuer that lend to his “God-like” status. In the end the narrator buries his uncle, and as the first line of the book the narrator remembers the death of his father, “may he dwell in bright Eden!” (11), the book has completed another circle. ‘Bright Eden’ also matches the very last line of the novel, “the beacons announcing new moons, festivals and set times.”(87) This marks the end of the Jewish calendar, and the promise of many more years to come.
Moving from the globe-trotting, learned, messianic Melech, the heroine of Crackpot, Hoda, seems anything but. She is the whore of her community, but maintains a divinely pure soul. Even in her marginalized position, she creates a universe of people around herself. The novel starts with a Kabbalistic quote:
He stored the Divine Light in a Vessel, but the Vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered through the Universe. Ari: Kabbalistic legends of creation.
This quote serves as the center of the novels main theme, broken vessels. The novels title seems to derive both from this quote, and in another sense, the opinion of Hoda’s Winnepeg community about her. There are numerous allusions to pots, pieces and flaws. Hoda’s grandfather is a pot-mender in the Russian Army, Danile weaves baskets, and even Hoda’s own bottomless stomach serves. The story begins in a biblical re-telling of Hoda’s ancestry, giving the idea that she is descended from biblical kings. In actuality, as Danile tells the story of their origins, the real beginning was in a graveyard, as Danile and Rahel are forced to marry to save the community from a pogrom due to the plague. Danile puts a romantic spin on it, but the reality is the community picked the two most flawed people they could find, as dictated by tradition. “…they take the two poorest, most unfortunate, witless creatures, man and woman, who exist under the tables of the community…and they bring them together to the field of death.” (24). Danile is blind, and Rahel is ever-so-slightly humpbacked, two flawed vessels. The idea of a marriage taking place in a graveyard is yet another dichotomy. As Hoda tells this story to her class in school, the teacher stops her mid-story because she sees it as a “whole obscene picture, the wretched couple of cripples copulating in the graveyard while a bearded, black robed, fierce-eyed rabbi stood over them, uttering god knows what blasphemies” (138) Danile’s creation story is almost the complete opposite of what he intended as interpreted by the outside world.
Hoda herself is overweight her whole life, which lends to the allusion if her being a vessel. She is full of the “Divine light”, and thought her experiences in her life try to break her; her incredible love seems to flow out endlessly. “Sometimes Hoda had so many feelings all going in her at the same time that she felt as though she would burst, and all those feelings that were churning around that way inside of her would come splattering out in all directions” (113) She falls into prostitution almost without knowing it. Prostitution could be seen as a breaking of the spirit, but she does it to stay alive and to keep her family together; a family unit ‘broken’ by the death of her mother. Hoda is the divine dichotomy. A princess and a whore, she is everything and nothing.
Because of Hoda’s incomplete education, her idea of how babies are made is a little off, but only lends itself to the ‘broken vessel’ theme. She rationalizes that men have to squirt in enough of their own ‘pieces’ to create a whole baby, and by not sleeping with the same ones all the time she will not have a baby. Her fat hides her condition from even herself, and one night her vessel is ‘broken’ almost entirely. The baby is described as a lump, as she believes it is the pieces of all the men she has slept with. She leaves it at the orphanage with a cryptic note. “TAKE GOOD CARE. A PRINCE IN DISGUISE CAN MAKE A PIECE OF A PRINCE, TO SAVE THE JEWS. HE’S PAID FOR” (219) ‘piece of a prince’ could be construed as ‘prince of peace’, who would indeed be a savior of the Jews. The child’s name given at the orphanage is David Ben Zion, King David. His unknown origins could be a form of Immaculate Conception. He too, like his mother and grandparents is a bit flawed, Hoda tied the umbilical cord in a funny way which gives him such a strange belly button he is nicknamed Pipick. Hoda does not see Pipick again until one day, many years later; he comes to her as a customer. Once she realizes who he is, she makes another decision which threatens to break her vessel. She must sleep with her son to save him. If she does not, she could reveal his origins and disgrace him. Hoda commits the greatest taboo in order to save her son.
Hoda is finally saves in the end when she marries Lazar, alluding to the Lazarus of the bible who rises from the dead. By this time in her life, Hoda has an incredible need for love, and it is matched by this man who has crawled from the grave of his village to live again. The novel ends with man and woman untied, both flawed vessels themselves like Danile and Rahel.
Crackpot is a novel of opposites, life and death, broken vessels being both full and spilling empty. In the final words of the novel, the prostitute Hoda finally sleeps with someone who isn’t a john. She has a dream that is incredibly disjointed and obscure in its direct meaning, but that is the nature of the “muddy waters in the brimming pot” (427). The novel ends with a vessel reference, not broken, but brimming with life.
