In Abonimation, best friends Ezra and Yonatan are students at an ultra-Orthodox Melbourne Jewish school when a teacher is accused of sexual molestation and is quickly squirreled away to Israel, beyond the law’s reach. Ezra’s parents pull him from Yahel Academy and place him in a public high-school and the two friends do not see each other again for 20 years, when the abuser is finally extradited to Australia.
Ashley Goldberg (Photo by Dan Soderstrom).
Their lives have taken vastly different paths: Ezra is an atheist with a non-Jewish girlfriend while Yonatan, now a married, ultra-observant rabbi, is a teacher at their alma mater.
Their reunion evokes memories of their school days and both men’s lives slowly begin to derail as they grapple with questions of faith, community trust and self-realisation. While Yonatan begins to question the strictures of his Orthodoxy, Ezra re-examines his long-ignored childhood religious practice.
Clearly inspired by the high-profile cases of Manny Waks and the Sapper sisters, who were sexually abused by staff at two Melbourne Jewish schools, Abomination brilliantly examines sexual abuse, the conflict between secular and religious worlds, and the private battles of faith plaguing so many raised in the latter. The wider issues of bullying, isolation and life-long effects of childhood trauma are also thoughtfully probed.
Admirers of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and Lisa Emanuel’s more recent The Covered Wife will welcome this deftly plotted and thoughtfully realised novel of friendship, trauma, faith and identity. Abomination will certainly secure debut novelist Goldberg’s place on the Australian literary scene.
—Abomination by Ashley Goldberg (Penguin Books Australia) is out now. Limited signed copies are available while stocks last!
Abomination
Limited Signed Copies Available!
Melbourne 1999: Ezra and Yonatan are best friends whose lives are forever changed when their school, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yahel Academy, is rocked by a scandal and they are thrown onto two divergent paths.
Twenty years later, the lives of the two men are very different: Ezra identifies as secular and atheist, while Yonatan has been ordained as a rabbi and even teaches at the academy...
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