Fiction – paperback; Vintage Books Australia; 280 pages; 2022.
Ashley Goldberg’s debut novel Abomination is a wonderful examination of orthodox religion in a modern setting and how its rules, conventions and traditions can be used to protect people who do wrong.
Set in Melbourne’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, it tells the tale of two friends who go to school together in the late 1990s but drift apart as adults.
Childhood friends
Ezra is the working class Jewish boy who gets a scholarship to the Jewish Yahel Academy, while Yonatan comes from a devout Jewish family and is expected to follow in the footsteps of his rabbi father.
When the book opens we meet the men as adults who have gone their separate ways. Ezra is a bored public servant with a lacklustre love life who is no longer a practising Jew, while Yonatan is still deeply embedded in the ultra-Orthodox community, is happily married with a child on the way and has become a respected rabbi who teaches at the school at which he and Ezra were both educated.
The story contrasts their two strikingly different worlds — secular versus religious — but brings them both together again when they attend a rally demanding that an Israeli-based teacher from their past be extradited to Australia to stand trial. That teacher had been accused of sexually abusing students at the Jewish Yahel Academy in 1999.
But while neither Ezra or Yonatan were direct victims, they recall the scandal that erupted at the time and hold strong beliefs that the accused must be brought to justice.
Closing ranks
Like the Catholic Church which has protected its priests from accusations of committing child sexual abuse, Goldberg’s novel shows how the Jewish faith has followed suit.
The author claims the story is a work of fiction but that he drew inspiration from the 2013 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Reading the novel, I could clearly see parallels with the Malka Leifer case in which the headmistress of Melbourne’s Adass Israel School between 2001 and 2008 fled to Israel when she was accused of child sexual abuse.
That said, Abomination is not really a book about sexual abuse — there are no lurid descriptions, for instance, and it doesn’t feature any victims. Instead, it looks at abuse of power and the ways in which the Jewish community closed ranks and protected the teacher in order to protect themselves. It’s a fascinating account of how faith and religion are not immune to moral failings or errors of judgement.
It’s also a brilliant portrayal of male friendship, loyalty and faith, of two men coming to terms with their own frailities, memories and values while trying to figure out what makes a meaningful life.
The novel’s glimpse into a rarely seen world — that of the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Melbourne — is riveting, while the careful pacing and intertwined storylines that switch between past and present gives the book a compelling, page-turning quality.
I ate it up in the space of a weekend and highly recommend it.
Abomination was shortlisted for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award 2020. The striking cover design is by Alex Ross at Penguin Random House Australia.
Reading Matters 
I haven’t read your review yet because I’ve just reserved this at the library!
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Excellent! I read this back in May but have only just found the time to write my thoughts about it now and I was amazed that the story did stick because I raced through the novel so quickly I didn’t take a single note!
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Wow, now that is the work of a Proper Journalist’s brain!
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LOL. My poor brain is fizzing with info overload. At work I swing between writing about property development to renewable energy to health tech investments to beef supply chains and back again, sometimes in the space of an afternoon! Not complaining though. It is very INTERESTING.
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Goodness, I can’t wait till you get over here and you can spill the beans over a long leisurely lunch!
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I was offered an ARC of this one and turned it down (as I have with most ARCs this year – too much of a backlog to accept more!) and now, after reading your review, I’m cross with myself!
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LOL. I’ve stopped accepting ARCs too and am making use of my local library, which I LOVE, but I did purchase this one as a bit of a treat because I spent a lot of time in Balaclava in the mid-1990s and remember being totally fascinated by the ultra-Orthodox Jews who lived there. You probably know about the “eruv”, an area around St Kilda/North Caulfield, in which they are allowed to go on the sabbath. There’s a great article about it here: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/cable-loop-lets-melbournes-orthodox-jews-feel-at-home-20111120-1npdn.html#:~:text=Melbourne's%20eruv%2C%20one%20of%20the,include%20Bentleigh%2C%20Carnegie%20and%20Moorabbin.
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That area is *exactly* where I grew up. In fact, the street where we lived was called the ‘golden mile’ because it was within walking distance of the most orthodox synagogue for elderly Holocaust survivors and it was much sought after. At the time I left home they were starting to build two-storey houses including next door to us, downstairs for them, and upstairs for their adult children and their families.
We had lovely neighbours, but my favourite was Mrs Kuperholz who made the world’s best cheesecake, and her wonderful husband who offered to lend my parents the money, interest-free, for a new hot-water-service when ours blew up the week we moved in.
The nicest thing about living there was that, in an era when teenage boys felt free to comment on the bodies of the girls they passed in the street and make suggestive remarks, the Jewish boys never did.
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How fascinating, Lisa! Mrs Kuperholz sounds like my kind of neighbour — I love cheesecake!
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This looks intriguing. I’ll definitely look it out.
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Hope it gets published in the UK!
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Mr Books thoroughly enjoyed this story too & felt like he learnt a lot.
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What I liked about it is that it presented the ultra-Orthodox world as just something that was there… no explanations… you just have to figure it out for yourself. I knew a lot already from having spent a lot of time in that area of Melbourne in the mid-1990s, so I knew about their traditional rules that apply on the sabbath about not using electricity, going on trams, using phones etc but really good to read about it in a novel.
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I probably won’t read it. Orthodox religious of all faiths seem to get away with a fair bit we wouldn’t tolerate in ‘open’ society. So I’m pleased Goldberg felt strongly enough to put the Jewish, in this instance, under scrutiny.
I notice the Pope apologised recently, in Canada, for the cultural genocide (separation from people and language) of Indigenous children in Residential Schools but not as far as I could see for the systemic abuse they suffered under Catholic clergy.
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I found it fascinating to read this book about Australian Jews and then to read a novel about Australian Muslims (Son of Sin). Their conventions / traditions are more similar than followers of those religions might realise!
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Several reviewers have made a comment like the one on the book’s cover: ‘I couldn’t stop turning the pages,’ and this was true for me as well. But when I reached the end I felt a sense of great disappointment. The novel is badly written and the frequent jumps in time seem to be used with the intent of confusing the reader. Technical religious terms in (I presume) Hebrew are used without any translation or explanation. Although the chapters are headed alternately ‘Ezra’ and ‘Yonatan’ (the two main characters), they are written in the third person with hardly any exploration of the characters’ inner lives; and the female partners of these two men are hardly developed at all. Finally, and most annoying of all, the plot lines which keep us turning the pages just fizzle out without any resolution. Perhaps I completely missed the point of the book, but there it is. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
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I understand those frustrations, Paul, and I don’t disagree. But I enjoyed the book seeing as it’s the first I’ve ever seen about Orthodox Jews in Melbourne – a closed community that fascinated me when I lived in Melbourne and later when I was a regular weekend visitor (in the early 1990s). Perhaps on that basis I was more forgiving of its flaws, but you are right, the storylines do fizzle out. I saw it more of a story about the impact of religion on the way people choose to live their lives and of the bonds of male friendship.
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