Keshet is thrilled to have the inside scoop on the recently published The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew. Eli Glasman shared his inspiration for penning the work, and offered us a taste of the novel. Take a look!
My debut novel,
The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew
, is about, Yossi, a young gay teenager living in the Melbourne Orthodox Jewish community, as he comes to terms with his sexuality and learns to reconcile his religious beliefs with his sexual orientation.
I wrote the novel because someone very close to me has been in this situation. It was my love with this person, which made me feel frustrated by the implicit and often explicit homophobia within the Orthodox life. The laws against homosexuality was one of the major things which encouraged my movement away from the religious lifestyle.
When I started the novel, I was going through a period in my early twenties, which I think we all go through, where I was rethinking my upbringing with an adult perspective. This book was in large part a way for me to reconnect with Judaism in a way I’d not allowed myself to in the past.
Through Yossi, I could feel the love of Judaism and a belief in God, which I hadn’t felt since I was teenager. Yossi is far more passionate about religion than I was at his age, and I must say, that a lot of his love of Judaism rubbed off on me.
Check out this excerpt from The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew that author Eli Glasman has shared with us:
READING AN ARTICLE online from one of New York’s Jewish newspapers, I found an advertisement offering a Jewish alternative to homosexuality. I followed the link and read through everything the website had to say. The administrator of the website was a guy named Rabbi Pilcer. It took me three weeks to get up the courage to send him an email asking if I could speak with him.
He replied immediately, despite the time difference, saying that we could talk on Gmail chat. I double-clicked his name, wrote Are you there? and hugged myself as I waited for him to respond.
I’m here, he wrote back. What’s your name?
I drew in a deep breath, took the rubber band off my wrist and rubbed the tender welt that had formed on my skin. Flick the rubber band every time you have a sexual thought about another man, the website had advised. You’ll associate the pain with these thoughts and soon they will stop.
It hadn’t worked at all.
I pocketed the rubber band and squeezed the bridge of my nose. I felt uncomfortable giving a stranger information about me, especially over the internet, but I had to know if there was something he could do.
Yossi, I replied.
Hello, Yossi. What’s on your mind?
I scratched the skin around my thumbnail. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to help, I thought. He was a rabbi, after all. What would he know about this? Although, I figured, just because he was a rabbi, it didn’t mean that he didn’t have another qualification. He could have been a psychologist or something as well.
The rubber band thing isn’t working, I wrote.
The curser blinked in the text box for a few seconds before Rabbi Pilcer entered his next sentence.
So, you believe you’re a homosexual.
I winced at the sight of the word ‘homosexual’. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling him this.
I leant forwards and rested my head on my hands, knotting my fingers into my mesh of curly hair, accidentally causing my Yarmulke to fall off and land on the keyboard. Feeling the air against my naked hair made me uneasy. I put my hand on my head while I picked up the Yarmulke and nestled it back into place.
Yossi? Are you there? the rabbi wrote.
I stared at his question for a few moments and then sighed. Even with the safety of distance and anonymity, I felt uncomfortable talking about it.
I closed the chat box and set my laptop to sleep. I then stood up from my desk and dragged my feet across the carpet to the other end of my room, building up static in my fingertips that was zapped out with a gentle prick as I touched the metal handle of my window and pulled it open.
From outside came the noise of traffic and chatter, and the smell of smog. We were positioned on Carlisle Street, the shopping strip of the Melbourne Jewish community, between a Jewish bookstore and a bakery.
I’d lived in this house my entire life. I belonged here. My place was amongst other Jews, keeping alive traditions that were centuries old. I couldn’t imagine a life where each day bled into the next with nothing more to punctuate existence but payday and a piss up on the weekend. A life with no God, no holy days, no prayers, no significance to food or clothing.
I rubbed my wrist again, feeling the slight lump on my skin. I knew that there was only sin in acting on my impulses, not simply in being the way I was. And yet, just having these terrible feelings made me feel like less of a Jew.
At that moment, a droning buzz broke into my thoughts. I turned to my desk to see my iPhone light up. I looked at the screen, rolled my eyes and walked out of my room and down the hall until I reached the front door. I opened it to find Menachem standing there with his phone at his ear.
‘Why don’t you just knock like a normal person?’ I asked.
‘This is more efficient,’ he replied, ending the call. ‘If I prank call you, I know you’ll be the one to answer the door.’
Menachem stepped inside and peeked down the hall towards the kitchen. I could hear my father in there. I figured Menachem was scared my father would see him here and tell his parents he’d been playing violent video games, which was, after all, the reason he’d come. All the public libraries were closed and his family was too religious to have internet in the house, so he had to come to mine to fulfill his gaming needs.
Menachem tiptoed into my room and I followed close behind.
As soon as the door was closed, he started a game of Grand Theft Auto. I didn’t like to watch those sorts of games, nor listen to them, so I made him play with the sound off.
For ages he sat hunched in front of my laptop, hardly talking, while I lay sprawled on my bed singing Jewish hymns into a handheld electric fan. I liked the way the spinning blades chopped my voice so that I sounded kind of mechanical.
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