A Narrow Bridge

September 4, 2017
This unfortunate pseudonymous first novel by Joyce Gittlin and Janet B. Fattal is about Jacob Fisher, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn whose life is shattered in a murderous explosion, and Rosie Yarber, a single mom living in Birmingham, Ala., struggling to raise her son while dealing with her jerk of an ex-husband. Through the magic of a paint-by-numbers plot, a traumatized and homeless Jacob ends up on the steps of an Alabama church, “greasy, uncombed, maybe not in his right mind.” Needless to say, the church is Rosie’s, and it is not long before Jacob is being coaxed out of his depression by the musicality of the church, the presence of a child in need of a father figure, and the love of a preternaturally good woman. Aside from the predictability of the plot, the novel suffers from Gersher’s obvious lack of close familiarity with the Orthodox Jewish community, which is painted as monolithic, leading to a profusion of small, off-putting inaccuracies that are not at all remedied by infelicitous prose.