Game of Thrones and (our need for) happy endings

I’ve been reading Game of Thrones and thinking about happy endings.

If you’re not familiar with it, A Game of Thrones is the first book in a humongous, sprawling fantasy series that gained a lot of fans when it was recently made into an HBO series. With five volumes totaling some 5,000 pages, its size makes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings look like a 98-pound weakling on the beach. And five volumes isn’t the end of it. I just finished number five and everything remains cliffhangers; author George R.R. Martin says there is at least one more volume to come, maybe two.

Like Tolkien, Martin has created an entire cosmology with thousands of years of back history, religions and civilizations, largely derived from feudal Europe (knights, kings, castles, the only light is fire). But as my friend Nick Herold pointed out in recommending the series to me, Martin differs from Tolkien in the depth of his characters.

Game of Thrones is made up of chapters with alternating protagonists — dozens of them. Each chapter, you’re inside someone else’s head, seeing their rivalries and desires and feeling their pain as they get imprisoned, seasick, maimed or betrayed. And there is a LOT of maiming and betraying. I like that Martin doesn’t sugarcoat his feudal kingdoms a la Disney. Villages are muddy and starving, wounds fester with yellow pus in a world without antibiotics, rats and dogs are a dinner staple for common people while the royalty eat elaborate, gout-inducing banquets.

That grittiness applies to the plot(s) as well as the details of daily life. No one seems to catch a break in Game of Thrones. Good, honorable characters are killed. Evil characters are killed. People who should be allies become antagonists. Well-intentioned plans go awry. Children are orphaned; innocents are betrayed; heroic gestures lead to disastrous outcomes.

Sometimes I wish I could take all the “good” characters and bring them together, in one place and on the same side, but they are scattered across two continents and don’t even know that their family members or friends are alive. They experience one setback after another. Really, it would feel like The Perils of Pauline — damsel now tied to the railroad track, now dangling from a bridge, now up against a firing squad — if the flow weren’t broken up by moving between the ups and downs of those dozen-plus different characters.

About halfway through the five books, I realized these aren’t really novels. None of the volumes end with closure. There is no visible narrative arc — no rise toward a climax, followed by resolution. The story just goes on and on. Ups, downs, ups, downs, more complications, more characters, more ups and downs. It could go on like this for a dozen volumes. A hundred.

Which makes me wonder how Martin is going to end the series. At any point, he could wrap things up and bring all the dozen plot lines to tidy conclusions. That’s what I yearn for as I read it — the good characters all uniting, the lingering mysteries revealed, the triumph of a Good King (or Queen) who brings permanent peace and justice to the beleaguered lands of Westeros. But to some extent, that would feel like a betrayal of the rest of the series.

The series is like life — nothing ever seems to really end, and one “resolution” just leads to a new set of conflicts. Compare it to world politics. Our involvement in Iraq is “ending.” Obama is bringing our troops home. But the internecine conflict and sectarian tensions there continue, and at any point there could be a new eruption of violence that spills over and affects the Middle East and us in unforeseen ways. In Game of Thrones, none of people’s efforts to establish a just and peaceful kingship have succeeded so far. Why should we believe they will succeed at the end of the series?

So I started thinking about happy endings. We crave them. We want good to triumph over evil, but perhaps even more, we want things to be resolved. Static. In tragedies like Romeo and Juliet, the heroes die but as readers we are still satisfied because things are wrapped up, static, concluded. Everything is known. The story stops.

And this is of course pretense, artifice – no less on the individual than on the political level. Pride and Prejudice ends neatly with the marriages of Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley. But marriages begin, not end, on the wedding day. There are a zillion conflicts that happen afterwards – illnesses, jealousies, power struggles, intergenerational conflicts, who knows what. But we don’t want to see any of that. We want things to be wrapped up, resolved, static.

My favorite Darcy and Elizabeth – Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle – at their static, happy ending

Would anyone buy a novel where everything — everything — was left unresolved at the end? Could you even call that a novel?

And why is narrative resolution so important to us, when the only thing in life that is truly static and permanent is death?

A (gefilte) fishy holiday tradition

These days we associate it only with Passover Seders, but gefilte fish was a traditional Ashkenazi dish at other Jewish holidays too, including Rosh Hashanah. I’m reprinting a recent email from Miriam Harel, who like me grew up in the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement in New York. Unlike me, Miriam moved to Israel, where she lives on Kibbutz Haogen near Netanya, works as a therapist at  the Adler Institute in Herzliyah,  and has three grandchildren. She is author of a book on therapy with children.

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By Miriam Harel

I have memories of carps swimming around in my grandmother’s bathtub in Brooklyn (I vowed never to take a bath in her house again) and the old grinding machine locked to the table with a vise and the long, long ritual of homemade gefilte fish with a carrot slice on the belly of every gefilte. Hours and hours of work cutting, grinding, rinsing, boiling, waiting till cooling, and all the rest.

What the fish symbolised I’ll never know, but I do remember “May you be the head of the fish and not the tail,” with visible fish heads eyeing us on the holiday table.

I would have imagined that this day of long arduous labor was some kind of religious ceremony, and gefilte was symbolic of the devotion of our grandmothers to the tradition of their own mothers and grandmothers to suffer through and then provide this to their eager families on holidays, each with the seasoning of his origins — the Polish more sweet gefilte, and the Hungarians more peppery like all else.

Never in my life did I attempt the feat of soaking, killing the carp with a blow to its innocent head, cutting, boning, grinding, boiling, cooling. I watched my grandmother Malka in amazement and awe but never would I attempt this. There was always someone selling it at some food market or some chaverat kibbutz who did this as a specialty… except for this year.

I went to all the possible places in this immediate area. The local supermarmarkets tried to talk me out of it: Oh, come on. You don’t still want THAT? Some salmon, maybe St. Denis? I was offered bottles of Manischevitz gefilte pickled in something sinister and God knows how long it has been on the shelf.

Gefilte fish jars in a Miami deli

I tried the Russian specialty stores who offered me caviar and herring, and the little shops who shrugged and referred me to some Yemenite woman who makes amazing Chreime harif harif [spicy Middle Eastern fish].

I started thinking of travelling to Bnei Brak [an ultra-Orthodox Tel Aviv suburb]. Seriously. Are you nuts? I thought to myself. The young people in the family don’t eat it. It looks weird to them, especially with that red stuff, and is a nondescript color and doesn’t look like schnitzel or anything nice.

The end of the gefilte era is like the end of a thousand-year-old fixed tradition that originated in Germany or France with the origin of Yiddish (gefilte means “filled” in Yiddish) — fish stuffed with all kind of fillings so that it would go a long way like other bread puddings of the poor in Europe.

I was about to give up when I came across the ready-food take-out store of Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon.

There was a whole counter full of packed plastic boxes with six pretty little gefiltes lying side by side in their own juice or yoich as they
say in Yiddish. I was so happy to see them again and respectful of Mishmar Hasharon for holding onto this tradition.

Probably no one under the age of fifty will touch them, but they will be there. As always. My comfort fish, resonating with images of Brooklyn and my grandmother.

Shana tova to all.

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Note from Ilana: The era of gefilte fish may not be dead, just ready for reinvention. My husband Sam has adapted his family’s gefilte fish recipe to use fresh wild salmon, which our local fish store grinds for us. To complete the Bay Area foodie transformation, he serves it with a wasabi creme fraiche. The result is light pink fish balls with light green wasabi drizzled around it… even our friends who hate (jarred) gefilte fish love it. 

Sea glass and Rosh Hashanah

I spent the weekend at our Stinson Beach house with Leslie Laurien, one of our co-owners, creating mosaics on two bare concrete steps. Leslie has been going to Stinson for more than a decade, collecting sea glass the entire time, and so had amassed a fabulous collection of smooth, rounded pieces in a variety of colors. There were various shades of clear glass, from milky white to slightly blue and even violet. There were beer-bottle-brown pieces, and green, a few tiny cobalt blue ones. In addition, Leslie had gathered broken tea cups, tiles, marbles and shards of mirrors. Before going any further, I need to say that she is an incredible artist (some of whose work you can view here) and I was more the — shall we say — sorcerer’s apprentice. :-)

Here is a picture of the project underway, and one of what we ended up with. It still needs to be grouted.

Photo by Ilana DeBare

Photo by Ilana DeBare

Even sitting in piles on the stoop, the sea glass pieces were beautiful. Washed and rubbed and ground by the waves for decades until smooth enough for a child to hold, they start out as trash but look like exotic gems by the time you find them on the beach. Some of my favorites are the ones that are barely larger than dots — tiny green or blue or cloudy pearls.

Then last night, I woke up in the dark thinking of those pearly glass dots in tandem with some comments that our rabbi has been posting on Facebook. It wasn’t any conscious connection; those two things just slid together in my sleepy mind.

As part of Elul, the month leading up to the high holy days, Rabbi Andrew Straus has been posting a short question or story each day, designed to spark reflection.

Just little questions, in the oh-so-flippant and distracting world of Facebook. I guess they are like bits of precious glass found on a beach. So I thought I’d reprint a few:

If I could live this past year over again: what would I do the same? What would I do differently?
For the things you would do the same – what lesson can you learn?
For the things you would do differently – is there a pattern? What can you learn from that?
What can you do at this point to change the things that you want to change?

Another:

The story is told of Jacob and Eliezer who were on a difficult journey together. They helped each other out of many tough situations. One day as they crossed a raging river Jacob nearly drowned. Eliezer saved his friend’s life. Once they were safely on the other side Jacob chiseled into a nearby rock, “In this place Eliezer risked his life to save the life of his friend  Jacob.”

Several days later Jacob and Eliezer got into a terrible fight regarding who would carry the food. Jacob took a stick and wrote in the dirt: “In this place Eliezer broke the heart of his friend Jacob during a trivial argument.” Eliezer watched and asked; “Why did my heroism get carved into stone, but the fact that I broke your heart only get scratched into the dirt?”

Jacob smiled and responded; “I will forever cherish how you saved my life, risking your own to do so, but as for the insults and hurtful words, these I hope will fade as quickly as the words I have scratched in the dirt.” With that, Jacob rose and wiped the inscription away with his foot.

How many of us are carrying minor hurts with us that can be wiped away? How many of us are holding on to words said in anger and forgetting the words said in love? How many of us are remembering the hurt and forgetting the mitzvot the good deeds done for us? What would it take to wipe the words away?

And another:

“It is a cornerstone for Judaism …, that however great a person’s transgressions may be, they fail to penetrate to the innermost core of one’s soul. Always and under all circumstances, there remains something pure, precious and sacred in a person’s soul.” (Rabbi Soloveitchik)

Who are you at your core? What is precious and sacred in your soul? What makes you, you?
How do you get in touch with your innermost core? What can you do to let your core shine brighter?

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown this coming Sunday. Shanah tovah! 

May your coming year be as sweet as apples and honey, and as shiny as sea glass pieces, smoothed and polished into gems from our unwanted, discarded trash.

Photo by Ilana DeBare