The Far Euphrates
Aryeh Lev Stollman
Delivered with the simultaneously urgent and evanescent rhythms of chanted Hebrew, Aryeh Lev Stollman's tale of a Rabbi's son in the small city of Windsor, Ontario in the 1960s elusively charts not so much a traditional literary coming-of-age, but its central character's deliberate efforts to come-of-soul.
The book's emblematic penultimate section finds the narrator, Aryeh Alexander, withdrawing into his bedroom at age sixteen, where he draws the blinds and enters into a year of almost total meditative solitude, based on the biblical notion of tzimtzum: "Self-contraction, retreat. God's withdrawal into himself to make a space in which he might place the physical universe."
As Aryeh's father explains to him over maps of the Holy Land, the ancient Euphrates river ran out of Eden and into the wider world. It is this agonized, far from Edenic world that Aryeh takes introspective stock of throughout the novel's unfurling of a freak auto accident, a series of miscarriages, the death of an uncle in a mental institution, a fatally ill little girl, the revelation of Holocaust torture and the passing of several major characters.
This would all be impossibly bleak were Stollman's style not so idosyncratically oblique. With the air of a mystic, young Aryeh—and, consequently the reader—takes on the book's events not as emotional hammerblows but as spurs to intellectual and spiritual contemplation of life's meaning. While some of his self-discoveries ring with insight—"...our souls were no more lasting or real than the watery matrix of our bodies. All that mattered to me was the clear statement, the unobstructed, even if tormenting, truth."—Aryeh often seems unrealistically abstract, dispassionately isolated from the melodramatic emotional tumult one expects to find in a bright, sensitive adolescent. Then again, it is this very quality that lends Aryeh a certain Semitic resemblance to the Zen-chilled teenagers of J.D. Salinger's Glass Family stories. Like the now-revered but always difficult-to-pin-down "Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters", The Far Euphrates not only begs rereading, but becomes both more rewarding and more challenging with each pass. It is also easy to resent for its abstruseness, if you are so inclined.
Like so much of his life, Aryeh's homosexuality, which he has inklings of from early childhood, remains almost entirely an intellectual concept to him throughout the book. Waking from wet dreams of an older boy named Mickey, he comments, matter-of-factly, that "Shame seemed beside the point." But dreams are all that Aryeh has of a sexuality; he discusses his feelings with no one, he has no friends his own age, he exhibits neither passion or frustration.
While it is generally a pleasure to find a novel in which a gay character's sexuality is not essential to his story, the downplaying of Aryeh's gayness here has a strange resonance that speaks to his character as a whole. Sexuality is one of many aspects of life that must be played out beyond the realms of intellect or rarified spiritualism; it calls for one's physical presence and for engagement beyond one's self. It is one of so many things—camraderie, generosity and romance among the others—that teenage Aryeh denies himself in his keenly perceptive but sadly disengaged existence. He is clearly brilliant, but not fully human.
