The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman Page A

Plus, it was the financially prudent decision: a fourth year at her private high school, Gustav Girls’ Academy, though not cheap, would be cheaper than a fourth year at whatever private college she ended up attending. Of course, her parents told her that financial considerations shouldn’t matter to her. But really, none of the logic mattered to Judith at all. She made her decision because she agreed with her father: She didn’t want to lose a year with her favorite people, either. She didn’t want to miss any family meetings.
    It was not as if Judith was in any hurry to be done with the work of high school, either. True, she was often stressed, nearly always sleep-deprived. But these were not conditions she minded. In fact, she took a certain pride in her fatigue—as though it were a state to be aspired to. From this perspective, she could appreciate better the notions of athletics: When she and her teammates were sweating and staggering up the hill on Triangle Street, she felt a particular form of communion with them—the same she felt walking into the library at Gustav Girls’ Academy on a Saturday to see it crowded with her classmates, her mammoth backpack heavy on her shoulders with books and binders.
    Later in her life—when she would occupy long hours at galleries and auctions, staring at works of art she might buy to decorate the walls of the Colonel’s casinos—she wondered quite what had impelled young Judith to work quite so hard. She had been, if anyone was, a child of the leisure class. Why, then, had there been so little leisure?
    Some of it, she understood, was just the twists of her DNA—“who she was.” She had classmates at Gustav’s who smoked pot between classes, went to Ani DiFranco shows on the weekends. But the majority—even the vast majority—had been little terrors of self-discipline, like her. The differences between most of her classmates and her were the differences in degrees between fervor and fanaticism.
    The work, Judith came to believe, was somehow intrinsic to the proposition of being a daughter of the upper middle class. On the most basic level, Judith and most of those she went to school with were raised to believe that the key to success in life was hard work: to have the life and career you wanted, you had to go to a good college; to get into a good college, you had to do well in high school and in everything else; and to do well in everything required hard work. It was the fundamental proposition—the promise—of American achievement. Yet the intensity of the effort, she understood later, was out of proportion to this logic. The 5:00 A.M. wake-ups, the summers at SAT-prep camps, the time spent studying in class, outside class, in the car on the way to National Honor Society meetings: It was as if they felt they owed it to themselves, to their parents, to the big bedrooms in which they slept and to the new cars in which they were driven and to the backyard pools in which they swam. It was as if the work, finally, made them not rich, but deserving.
    There was also for Judith—as for many of them—another element to her diligence, though it was one she tended not to dwell on in her adult life: She was Jewish. Her family was not observant in the Orthodox sense of the word—they didn’t keep kosher, didn’t refrain from watching television or handling money on Friday night. But Judaism was important to them. They belonged to a Reform synagogue, went once a month for Shabbat and on many of the (major) holidays. They participated in any food drives the synagogue held and made regular donations to MAZON and to the ADL, understanding such giving to be as much a practice of their religion as eating matzo on Passover. There was Judaic artwork throughout the house, a mezuzah on the front door. Hannah, whose own mother was a survivor of Buchenwald, always set her novels among the highly Jewish milieu in