Nicknamed “Torpedo Speedo”, instructor Bram Goodman rocks in a bathing suit. “Ritually sliced,” Bram is nevertheless a “very very very bad Jew”. Bram never attends synagogue, never had a bar mitzvah. “A devout heretic,” Bram unabashedly gorges on pork sandwiches and ‘Chinese’ on Passover. Curiously, Bram wears a Kabbala string on his wrist, a Magen David pendant hangs from his neck. Bram also has the Hebrew name, Yonatan tattooed on his arm. Bram never fails to do his “yizkor swim” to deflect his primal grief and excise hate from his heart.
Born in Paris to, “not-much-good-at-anything”, daddy Maury Goodman and Moroccan, Sophia Sultan, a nightclub singer with The Sultry Sultanas, Bram’s life was generally unwieldy and confusing. Raised in Israel, during his teens, Bram is inseparable from cousin Yoni. After the family relocates to Brooklyn, Bram desperately misses Yoni. He feels lost, lonely without his best friend, and idol. When he flunks out of Dartmouth, Bram returns to Israel and joyfully reunites with Yoni. Both enlist in the IDF to serve in the 1982 Lebanon war. Patrolling the villages and borders, the two soldiers witness the horrific aftermath of the Sabra and Shalita massacre. Yoni is never the same. Nor is Bram after Yoni’s suicide.
Yoni’s death creates an unbearable vacuum for Bram. Numb with pain and hatred for the war that severely mangled his life, Bram feels rudderless without Yoni. Devoid of faith in any higher power Bram seeks temporary comfort in a Dionysian lifestyle. Aimlessly drifting, without purpose Bram ends up on the French Riviera instructing “rich tanned” kids to swim. He busks on Paris streets singing Yiddish songs with French lyrics and joins Krav Maga, martial arts classes, to release the persistent ache inside. And then along comes Liz, a serious, smart “purebred gentile,” a legal aid lawyer, who happens “to look like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.”
Bram and Liz never find time to get married but devote a great deal of time raising three boisterous kids becoming a family enveloped in love and community service. Bram tries hard to keep his emotions in check, his grief less piercing over time. He even allows himself to dream swimming the English channel, slowly, letting go of the past. But when his son Theo, aged 12, begins to read about his Jewish heritage he asks Bram how to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah.
The past intrudes on the present reawakening Bram to his profound loss with recurring nightmares of the Lebanon war Bram hopes his son’s request “is just a passing phase.”
An immersive, generational novel Swimming to Jerusalem by author Seth Bornstein is cannonball dive into a pool of love, family, and renewal. An unexpectedly compelling debut.
