Bookworm: 'Not Our Kind,' by Kitty Zeldis, in Search of Lost Time
In 1913 the French publishing house Grasset released Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, the first installment of what has since become one of the most important novels in literary history. This arresting work of fiction is a glimpse into the world of 20th-century French aristocracy, stitched together with, among other things, tales of love affairs as intense as they are covert, of life in a wealthy countryside village, of illness, of the struggle of Jews in high society. In 2018 an author by the pen name Kitty Zeldis published a similar book: Not Our Kind. And by similar I mean the complete opposite.
Set in postwar America, Not Our Kind is a coming-of-age story about a recent Jewish Vassar graduate who takes a job as a private tutor for a wealthy family whose daughter had polio, all the while navigating a world that is unfriendly to Jews. Everything is turned upside down when she falls in love with her pupil’s uncle. At a time when we find ourselves reckoning once more with subtler forms of American anti-Semitism, this book should have found itself perfectly positioned to resonate with readers. However, it fails for the most part to explore this part of the protagonist’s story in a meaningful way, and merely glosses it—Judaism feels like little more than a character. Even though the protagonist must change her name to hide the fact that she’s Jewish, we never really feel the gravity of this change. Judaism is mentioned almost casually and at the end of conversations. For the most part, it treats the matter of being an outsider as an afterthought, even though the idea is in the title itself. And there’s the question of why this author and publisher chose to use a pseudonym in a book where her character must also change her name to fit in.
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