Even death can't stop Milton Steinberg

An unlikely resurrection

By Michael Orbach

For those who doubt life after death, there is the case of Rabbi Milton Steinberg.

Steinberg, the rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue, was critically acclaimed as the author of “As a Driven Leaf,” and a renowned public speaker and theologian, who passed away at the age of 46 in 1950. However that minor inconvenience did not stop him. Steinberg’s sophomore novel, “The Prophet’s Wife”, was released for the first time last month to coincide with his 60th yahrtzeit.

At the time of his death from heart failure, Steinberg was working on the 440-page manuscript that would become “The Prophet’s Wife.” The unfinished manuscript was moved to the American Jewish Historical Archive where it sat until a meeting between Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, and David Behrman, the president of Behrman House, the family-owned publishing company that published “As A Driven Leaf.”

“We were talking about another project... and he [Sarna] said there’s another Steinberg novel,” related Behrman, who immediately got in touch with the archive after speaking with Sarna. “I said, ‘Can I have a copy?’ They said, ‘you have to pay for photocopying charges,” Behrman laughed.

After reading the book, Behrman decided to publish it and in 1999 made an arrangement with Steinberg’s two sons. However, the manuscript had problems: Steinberg never had a chance to complete the novel and the completed sections were rough and unpolished.

“The last scene he did while in an oxygen tent on his death bed,” explained Steinberg’s youngest son, David, the president of Long Island University. “’The angel of death is approaching.’ It’s the last words he wrote. The handwritten manuscript trails off.”

Behrman recruited journalist and Columbia University professor Ari Goldman to lead the project.

“It’s a wonder that there was another book there,” explained Goldman, “It’s “As a Driven Leaf” with sex.”

Whereas Steinberg’s earlier work told the story of Elisha Ben Abuyah, the Talmudic sage who become a heretic, “The Prophet’s Wife” tells a story no less strange, that of the prophet Hosea. According to the book of Hosea and its Talmudic interpretations, Hosea asked G-d to curse the Jews because of their infidelity; in a tit-for-tat, G-d has Hosea marry Gomer, a prostitute, and is then told to abandon his children with her. Hosea refuses. In Steinberg’s version, Gomer is not a prostitute but an unloved niece of a scoundrel. Hosea falls in love with her and Gomer agrees to marry him, though not without reservation.

“The genius of Steinberg is he tries to imagine how a prophet in Israel could be in love with a prostitute, or a woman who’s not faithful and he tries to imagine what that person and romance would be like and builds a world around these characters,” explained Goldman. “He’s saying that the metaphor of G-d’s love for Israel is a complicated one and we take it at face value. He [Steinberg] shows its complexity by making it real and concrete and not just a metaphor.”

Behrman concurred.

“I think [in] ‘As a Driven Leaf’ he was working out some of his theological issues with religion and in this book he’s working out issues of marriage and fidelity and love,” said Behrman.

The younger Steinberg also sees a sadder side to his father’s last novel which he completed after the Holocaust.

“There was a darkening in father’s view of life,” David Steinberg explained. “This is a book of unrequited love, this is a book of pain and that I think is not unconnected to the way father developed from 1945 to when he died. He was growing in his capacity to see the human suffering side of living.”

The book is notable for its absence, not only an ending, but also of G-d.

“You don’t hear G-d speak to Hosea as you do in the biblical text,” explained author Norma Rosen, who contributed an afterword to the book. “You hear G-d’s voice in justice, in seeing justly.”

Rosen for one, views the novel as proto-feminist ordeal.

“Hosea is a very brutal text and in it Gomer is a harlot, but in Steinberg’s text she is not; She is simply a very beautiful and passionate woman who fell in love with Hosea’s brother... who is a very impious fellow.”

Perhaps as a result of the manuscript’s unfinished state, Gomer is, at best, a bit character. A woman from a disreputable household, she marries Hosea but promises she cannot love him. In a scene ripped out of a soap opera, Hosea returns home to find his wife being unfaithful with his brother.

“It might appear so at first, since the reader is very rarely treated to Gomer’s interior thoughts. But I fully believe that Steinberg intended the novel to allow us into Gomer’s point of view, eventually. Steinberg revised the manuscript of ‘As a Driven Leaf’ a number of times before he arrived at the final version,” said Beth Lieberman of the company Editor’s Circle, that edited the manuscript and also set up a reader’s website.

According to Behrman, they debated about finishing the novel. Other notable Jewish writers had taken a crack at the manuscript including Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok. Goldman completed one.

“It was the only way to do it,” said Behrman of the decision, finally, to leave the ending undone. “Anything else would be more unsatisfying since it wouldn’t be true.”

Though the lack of endings has engendered its own meaning about Steinberg himself.

“He was a man who was cut off in the prime of his life with a young family and a congregation.” Said Goldman. “He achieved many wonderful things in the 46 years he had, but one can only imagine what kind of giant he would have been had he a longer life.”