THE WASHINGTON STORY by Adam Langer
“Thus
the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole Earth:
And they stopped building the city.”
Genesis 11:10
“The universe is expanding!”
Alvy Singer, Annie Hall
When I was growing up in the small, Jewish enclave of West Rogers Park on
the north side of Chicago, my universe, like that of most every child, was
exceedingly small. A six-block hike to Ner Tamid Synagogue seemed a nearly
impossible venture; one only crossed California Avenue with the aid of a
police officer or patrol boy. Over time, my universe expanded, growing to
encompass the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, then America, and,
when my fiancée was living in Germany, practically the entire world. Or so
it seemed. But whenever I return to West Rogers Park to visit my parents,
who still live in the same home they’ve owned for forty-three years, I
suddenly feel the universe contracting again until it sometimes feels as if
it’s no bigger than the one I knew as a child.
In writing The Washington Story, I have been consumed with this idea of an
expanding and contracting notion of place, of the worlds that are contained
within larger worlds. In my previous novel, Crossing California, I chose to
study a very circumscribed location, that of West Rogers Park, and the
borders that existed within it. With the new novel, I have decided to
explore the world as it expands beyond this small neighborhood.
The Washington Story is set over a five-year period and the structure of the
novel is inspired by the five books of Moses, which are also, in part, a
story of Diaspora. The novel concerns assimilation, the place of the Jew
within the expanding universe, the relationships between Jews and
African-Americans, and those among conservative, orthodox, reconstructionist,
and non-practicing Jews. It begins on November 10, 1982, when Harold
Washington announces his candidacy to become the first black mayor of
Chicago, and ends on November 24, 1987, the day of Mayor Washington’s
untimely death. Between ’82 and ‘87, many events of historical significance
took place—most notably, the twilight of the Soviet Union: the deaths of
Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, and the rise of
Mikhail Gorbachev. But I most associate this era with Harold Washington,
whom I dutifully researched as a 15-year-old Chicago Magazine intern in
1982. In the heart of the Reagan era, Washington represented a force for
change and unity in times of race and class struggle, and was the flashpoint
for a citywide controversy as Chicago debated between electing its first
black mayor or its first Jewish mayor, Bernard Epton. The Washington Story
is not a book about Harold Washington, Bernie Epton, nor any other
historical figure or incident. It comprises five books about characters
whose worlds are in the process of expanding or contracting, set against the
historical backdrop of the mid-1980’s.
Book I (Eruv, or Jill and Muley’s Book of Boundaries), is set predominantly
in West Rogers Park during Harold Washington’s contentious first campaign,
when high school junior Jill Wasserstrom, a fifteen-year-old Maoist who
donated all of her Bat Mitzvah money to charity, experiences two love
affairs: one in her neighborhood with a young African-American and one
beyond its borders with a lapsed Catholic. In Book II (Be-Midbar, or Mel and
Michelle’s Book of Choices), the world expands to encompass the entire city
of Chicago from October 1983 (when the south side White Sox lost the
American League Championship Series) to October 1984 (when the north side
Cubs lost the National League Championship Series). In this book,
19-year-old white actress Michelle Wasserstrom and 36-year-old black
filmmaker Mel Coleman fall in love during the making of a gangster flick
exploring the tension between Chicago’s north and south side underworlds.
Book III (Shemot, or Jill and Becky’s Book of Exodus), concerns Jill
Wasserstrom’s eventful freshman year of college as Jill leaves West Rogers
Park behind to study in her late mother’s hometown of Poughkeepsie, New
York, where she hopes to reunite with her grandmother whom she hasn’t seen
in a decade, and where her roommate Bibi Eisenstadt becomes involved with a
Gentile grad student. The boundaries in Book IV (Kaddish, or Muley and
Hillel’s Book of Mourning) expand into the celestial realm, beginning in
Chicago with the first appearance of Halley’s Comet in 76 years, journeying
to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and ending with the first anniversary of the
explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger; these events inspire film
projects conceived by Art Institute student Muley Scott Wills who finds
himself at odds with his hypochondriacal roommate Hillel Levy following a
tragedy involving Muley’s father. In Book V (Aliyah, or Jill and Rachel’s
Book of Homecoming), the expanding world begins to contract—from the heavens
above to Europe, then finally back to Chicago, where five-year-old Rachel
Wasserstrom waits in vain for her sister to return home from Germany for the
family’s last Thanksgiving in West Rogers Park, thus completing the cycle.
I distinctly remember the evening of November 24, 1987. I was sitting in the
backseat of my girlfriend’s father’s car; he was driving us to Hartford,
Connecticut, where I would celebrate my first Thanksgiving outside of
Chicago, my first with a non-Jewish family. We were on a dark stretch of
highway and we had been listening to a song by Joe Jackson from the album
Night and Day when the news came on: Harold Washington had died of a heart
attack at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I remembered having heard about
other tragedies—in 1976, when Mayor Daley died, I was in my parents’ den,
watching the movie How to Steal a Million; in 1980, I was in my childhood
bedroom when my mother woke me to tell me John Lennon had been shot. This
time, in 1987, it felt strange that I was no longer in a safe, familiar
place seemingly protected from the events of the outside world, that I was
no longer home, But then again, my definition of home was changing—my
universe had expanded, for better and for worse.
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