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By: GREG MARZULLO
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AARON HAMBURGER, the 32-year-old gay author of “Faith for Beginners,” says an epigram from a friend inspired his first novel.
“I had a friend in Israel who said to me, ‘To live—it’s enough,’” he says.
The quote became a central theme for the novel’s characters who struggle to find their place in a culture of suffering.
Through the voice of a young Israeli tour guide, Hamburger writes, “I think no one needs to make excuses because he wants to enjoy his life ... To live—it’s enough.”
Hamburger promotes “Faith,” which was released Oct. 11, during an upcoming stop in Atlanta.
The author lives in Rome after winning the prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, which gives emerging artists, scholars, architects, musicians and writers a place to work in the Italian capital for a year.
The author’s first work was a collection of short stories titled “The View from Stalin’s Head,” and the book received excellent reviews.
Following the stunning debut, “Faith” shows the Michaelson family on their trip to Israel from Michigan after Jeremy, a gay college student, overdoses on pills and liquor. His mother Helen drags him and her terminally ill husband to the Promised Land in an attempt to re-connect familial bonds.
Mother and son experience transformational love affairs and eye opening looks at their Jewish and Palestinian neighbors. By the end of the novel, their own relationship endures some deep changes.
LIKE THE FAMILY in the novel, Hamburger traveled to Israel in 2000 to research a proposed book about the country’s gay culture.
“When I got there, no one was really interested in talking about the community. They said, ‘We have more important things to worry about,’” he says.
All of Israel was consumed with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s trip to Camp David. After receiving sage advice from his friend, Hamburger decided to just be a tourist for the rest of his trip.
“The book came out of that experience,” the author says.
The novel contains a major gay character, but Hamburger identifies more with Helen, Jeremy’s mother, he says.
“She was a character that I felt a close sympathy with. Jeremy I had to get to know,” Hamburger admits.
Helen is very concerned with living the status quo, but she also yearns to experience all life has to offer.
In the novel, Hamburger writes, “...somewhere, muffled by all these sad stones and grains of sand, by the sounds of ice tinkling in cold cappuccinos and the cameras flashing and the watches ticking their lives away, she sensed a real heart full of life, beating impatiently to be recognized. Find me, it said. Know my name and all will be well.”
JEREMY IS BRASSY and unrestrained, but still a child in many ways. Like some of the novel’s characters, he comes to Israel wanting the country to fulfill preconceived notions, but the nation’s stark reality reveals darker underpinnings.
Hamburger writes about Jeremy’s perceptions of the Israeli bourgeois and the Palestinian underclass, “Jeremy felt his heart race as he thought of the shining limestone city up the hill scrubbed pink for spoiled American tourists. ... And down here in this valley, just a few yards from the [Wailing] Wall, these poor innocent villagers scratched for their survival in a festering garbage dump.”
Hamburger cites the country’s endless cultural complications as part of the difficulty in unraveling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“How do you create trust in an atmosphere of war?” he asks.
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