The dangerous descent of a rising star of literature
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The mature style, the credibility of the story and the well-constructed narrative plot would never suggest that David Hopen’s “The Orchard” is a first work.
The story tells of Aryeh Eden, a seventeen year old who lives with his parents in Williamsburg, an orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn, in which he lives quietly and of which he unknowingly experiences all the contradictions. Including his life that flows serenely between perspectives and possibilities that are not already included in the noun “precepts”.
The move to Florida
Study the Torah daily in a world that has become secularized and in a neighborhood, a sort of invisible curtain, in which the “different” are those who do not respect the rigid social rules imposed by religion. Yet, as in the best thrillers – and this novel is nowhere near – the twist is around the corner, taking the form of a job opportunity for Ari’s father, as he is called in his family and friends, which will lead him and his family in Florida, near Miami. The seductive world that confronts him will eventually change the coordinates of his life. The existential contaminations that he will live in Zion Hills, the place where he moves with his family, the contradictions that he will experience between what surrounds him, and from which he will be “kidnapped”, and what he has inside, are the symbols of a revision deep of those certainties that represented the only experience he was allowed to have.
Knows Noah, attends the Jewish Academy. She meets people, a world that is not hers, different from anything she had known up to that moment. And that attracts him terribly. Starting with a form of secular hedonism which in his eyes appears, at times, as a “fault”. He will be overwhelmed, as an extra, then as a protagonist, then as an accomplice.
A dangerous descent
But it’s like a dead-end road heading straight downhill. Dangerous, because the constraints, the rules of the religion that Aryeh had known since he was a child were perhaps a brake, but also synonymous with the concept of “limit” which, by imagining one’s future, becomes a solid pillar. Experience after experience the group of those young “rebel” Jews, as if by nemesis, brandishes their faith like a weapon. There is little space in “The Orchard” for good feelings. Society has changed because the balance of power between the individual and the community has changed. Among the strengths of this novel, there is Hopen’s ability to trace the psychological profiles of the protagonists with Shakespearean precision. The language is never crude, but true, and is rightfully among the best works of contemporary American postmodernism. Impossible not to turn the page to understand what will happen next. And then, to its further merit, there is also that the most visible element, the religious one, seems to be only a narrative expedient to narrate a conflict between generations and testify with bitterness how the individual, with his choices, is always the creator of one’s destiny.
“The Orchard”, David Hopen, Nutrimenti, pag. 576, 24 euros
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