Mazel Tov

Mazel Tov by J. S. Margot, published by Pushkin Press in 2020, is a warm, funny and thoughtful memoir about what happens when two very different worlds meet and discover that neither is quite as simple as the other had imagined.

As a young woman in Antwerp, Margot found herself tutoring children from an Orthodox Jewish family, entering a household governed by traditions, religious observance and social expectations very different from those she had grown up with.

What begins as a job gradually becomes something much more complicated and much more interesting.

There are lessons to teach, customs to understand, assumptions to unlearn and the inevitable moments when everybody involved realises that what seems perfectly normal in one household can appear wonderfully strange in another.

Margot writes about the experience with affection, curiosity and humour rather than treating it as some grand anthropological expedition into mysterious territory.

Which is fortunate, because nothing ruins a friendship quite like discovering that somebody has been taking field notes.

The book explores the rhythms of Orthodox Jewish family life, religious practice, education, marriage expectations and community traditions, but does so through the ordinary business of knowing actual people rather than examining them from a safe academic distance.

That distinction matters.

People are always more complicated than categories.

Families are especially so.

And teenagers, regardless of religion, remain teenagers.

Over time Margot’s relationship with the family deepens, and the book becomes as much about friendship, growing up and learning to navigate difference as it is about religion or culture.

There are moments of misunderstanding, surprise and disagreement, but also the much more important discovery that affection has an inconvenient tendency to cross boundaries people assumed were fixed.

The setting in Antwerp gives the story another layer of interest.

The city is home to a substantial Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish community, existing alongside the wider secular world while maintaining traditions that can seem centuries removed from contemporary European life.

The two worlds occupy the same streets.

They simply do not always inhabit the same social universe.

Margot found herself moving between them.

That makes Mazel Tov particularly engaging because it avoids the easy temptation to present one side as enlightened and the other as peculiar.

Instead, everybody gets to be human.

Which means everybody occasionally gets to be unreasonable.

The title itself, meaning congratulations or good fortune, is wonderfully appropriate for a book about relationships that develop in unexpected ways.

It is also one of those expressions that has travelled so successfully beyond its original linguistic and religious setting that people may use it without giving much thought to where it came from.

The book therefore works on several levels at once: memoir, cultural observation, friendship story and a gentle examination of what happens when people stop viewing one another as representatives of groups and start dealing with the far more troublesome reality of individuals.

Published in 2020, this English-language edition from Pushkin Press brought Margot’s story to a wider readership and fits neatly into the publisher’s excellent habit of finding interesting European writing that might otherwise remain inconveniently unavailable to those of us who only speak one language properly.

For readers interested in memoir, Jewish life, religion, cultural difference, Belgium, education or simply relationships between people who were not obviously destined to understand one another, this is an engaging and unusual book.

It is thoughtful without being solemn, affectionate without becoming sentimental, and informative without ever feeling like someone has accidentally slipped a sociology textbook into the cover.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. Published in 2020, it is positively youthful by Crappy Old Books standards and has barely had time to become old-fashioned.

ISBN: 9781782275282.

A warm, intelligent and occasionally surprising memoir about friendship across cultural and religious boundaries, and the useful discovery that understanding other people generally works better when you actually talk to them.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where cultural understanding, unlike most things, still comes without a subscription fee.

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