Books: Miriam & Yeshua

MARY (436 pp.)—Sholem Asch—Putnam ($3.50).

For 30 years Sholem Asch has enjoyed international popularity for the novels and short stories he has written out of his vast knowledge of Jewish life and history. Mary concludes his most ambitious work, a trilogy on the beginnings of Christianity that already includes bestselling lives of Christ (The Nazarene) and St. Paul (The Apostle). In both earlier books Asch had a dramatic lifeline to follow, and he followed it skillfully, feeding in a fascinating mass of scholarly wrinkles, though often he enlarged on Gospel truth. On Mary’s life the Scripture is scant, and Asch had to enlarge still further. The result is a careful, reverent but sugar-sweet assembly of Aschpocrypha.

Miriam (Hebrew for Mary) is a gentle, devout girl whose life has been spent in the peaceful town of Nazareth, feeding the animals, drawing the water for the family, tending the vegetable garden, pressing oil for the lamps, learning how to pound spices. Wild animals are tame in her presence; the fawn and the doe approach her fearlessly. And, like many a daughter in Israel, she dreams of one day bearing the child who will grow up to be the King-Messiah.

When she makes a visit to the temple in Jerusalem, she gets a premonition of her destiny in the words of an aged visionary who points a bony finger at Miriam and cries: “Mark her well, you women . . . From her womb shall Israel’s Redeemer come.”

An Unearthly Light. One morning, before her marriage to Joseph, an invisible presence impels Miriam to her room. There falls upon her “a clear unearthly light, not of the sun,” and the angel appears speaking the words of the Annunciation. She is to bear a son conceived by the Holy Spirit.

The child, called Yeshua, is proud to be known as “Mother’s boy.” Miriam calls him “tinoki” (baby) and dresses him in spotless white linen. She cannot help, as he grows older, setting him apart from his brothers, the sons she bears to Joseph.* When Yeshua begins to sense his Messiahship (in a miraculous answer to prayer at 13), Miriam’s life becomes a struggle between motherly joy and motherly foreboding. After the miracle of the wine at the wedding in Cana, she loses sight of him until just before the end. Asch brings her into the Garden of Gethsemane to eavesdrop on the arrest, a few pages further has her climb to where the cross stands on Golgotha.

“Tinoki, tinoki, tinoki!” Miriam wails.

“Mother!” Yeshua moans, and dies.

A Long Ride. This, says Asch in effect, is how it might have been. He has borrowed from the Gospels, borrowed from the Apocrypha, borrowed from the traditions of Jewish life. His central purpose has been to make Christians and Jews realize what they have in common: “It has been my intention to demonstrate the interdependence of the two faiths in the hope that mutual understanding might bring about a better world.”

Though such intentions may be exemplary, they do not assure a satisfying historical novel. Asch’s method, with its blending of biblical story and Jewish customs, is most effective in the first chapters of the book, leading up to the birth of Yeshua. Thereafter, as his story moves through the all-but-factless wastes of Christ’s childhood, Asch is more & more hard-pressed to picture him convincingly as child, playmate, schoolboy and finally Son of God. Like both earlier books in the trilogy, Mary should have a long ride on bestseller lists this winter. It may also send thousands of vaguely puzzled readers back to the Gospels for the story as it is told there.

* As many Protestants (translating the New Testament adelphoi—brethren — as brothers) maintain that Mary did. Roman Catholics (and some Protestants) translate the Greek word as kinsmen, hold Mary’s virginity was lifelong.