We are ready to wrap up our 113th Lite Reads selection, Whom My Soul Loves by Rivqa Rafael. There were questions as food for thought on social media as people had the chance to read it and think about it. I will be sharing my own thoughts here. Apologies for the delays! Spoilers ahead for those who have not read the story yet. Content Warning: the story discussed features disregard for personal autonomy, death/dying, sexism/gender discrimination, shaming, slurs.
Whom My Soul Loves by Rivqa Rafael is a 2019 fantasy short story. We follow the main character Osnat, a queer Jewish woman who can communicate with spirits and is trying to exorcise a dybbuk from a local mother. Osnat lives in a very Jewish community in New York City where she is in school to be a doctor but also takes on local cases of possession. Other members of the community view her as an outsider and mock the potential that she might be a convert, and much of the condescension and othering seems to stem from her being an outsider, a Sephardi in a largely Ashkenazi community, and able to communicate with spirits, although some of it blatantly stems from her being a woman. Osnat is trying to exorcise a dybbuk (“a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person,” – wiki) from the local widowed mother Mrs. Stein. When the dybbuk proves uncommunicative, Osnat goes for a visit with a member of the Chevra Kadisha (the group of people in a Jewish community that ensures that Jewish bodies are prepared for funeral rites in accordance with Jewish law and are not desecrated) with one of Mrs. Stein’s children, the seven year old Shmueli. With a mixture of help from Dina, a member of the Chevra Kadisha and a friend of Osnat, and her own spiritual powers, Osnat learns that the dybbuk was once a woman named Batya who was alone in the community with no one to sit shiva for her. When Osnat is finally able to communicate with Batya, it is revealed that during her life the dybbuk had felt an unrequited love for Mrs. Stein. Osnat is able to coax Batya into moving on by showing her kindness and empathy, especially as Osnat as queer as well. Batya becomes a benevolent spirit and leaves of her own volition to allow Mrs. Stein to be happy with her family.
It’s genuinely excellent to see how heavily influenced by Jewish culture every aspect of Whom My Soul Loves truly was. The story is filled with Jewish characters, set within a Jewish community, and the plot is based firmly within Jewish mythology. I’ve written before about how I’m actually converting to Judaism, and while I am still studying for conversion (it’s a long process), it felt so good to read something that was just so Jewish while I’m going through this process. I definitely wish that the Hebrew terms used throughout the story had come with a glossary at the end; I personally understood maybe half of the terms used either because I knew them well or because I was familiar enough with them to pick it up from the context, but there was still a lot of terms I was completely unfamiliar with. Additionally, since transliteration can result in wildly varying spellings, it made me have to spend more time on words I knew (like Kabbalah being spelled Qaboloh) and it made it harder to search words I didn’t. I think it’s wonderful when stories (whether they are originally primarily in English, or they were translated into English from a different language) are able to include relevant words that feel truer to the culture than any translation attempt might or where there isn’t really an English version for the word, but it would have been helpful to have a handy glossary at the bottom for folks who aren’t Jewish or for Jewish folks who have limited Jewish learning or limited experience with Hebrew. Regardless, this was a fairly minor concern, as I did love that it managed to be so steeped in Jewishness, even if that meant it wasn’t exactly an effortless read. It was great to read something that was so at home in its Jewishness and featured elements of Jewish culture that don’t often make it into fiction, while also telling the story of a dybbuk, something that has been endlessly popular in Jewish fiction.
Aside from being unabashedly Jewish, Whom My Soul Loves is also unabashedly queer. Osnat herself is queer, and this influences the ways she interacts with the world throughout the story. Her friend Dina accepts her and cracks jokes that Osnat is in on. When it is revealed that the dybbuk Batya was queer and in love with Mrs. Stein, Osnat is able to express genuine empathy and understanding having experience queer love and loss before herself. It is this empathy that allows her to coax Batya into moving on. I really liked that the story was able to make queerness a centrepiece of the story without having it be a love story or a coming out story. I don’t have a problem with either (and I love romance, so I won’t pretend I don’t hope to see it everywhere), but it’s truly nice to see queer people getting to exist in their queerness without it being about coming out or falling in love. Queer people are still queer when we’re out, and we’re still queer whether or not a relationship is on the table. The fact that Osnat gets to exist in a story where she is blatantly queer but doesn’t need to have a romantic interest to show for it is honestly lovely. While dealing with a broken heart, as Batya is, is a type of love story, it was nice to see Batya and Osnat connect in that way, and it was nice to see that this was a world where queerness simply is.
Between Jewishness and queerness, between being an outsider and being among friends, Whom My Soul Loves is a story that is heavily about community and the ways we exist in and around our communities. Osnat is both apart of a community and apart from community. The larger community that she lives within sees her as an outsider, a Sephardi, a woman, queer, and suspiciously mystical. At the same time, she has clearly formed her own community within that community, between the people she has helped and their families and her friends like Dina. In a larger community that probably wouldn’t have included her, she has made her own community of people she cares about and who care about her. This type of found family is so intrinsic to queer stories because it is so often the way that many of us feel the most at home at the end of the day. In Batya we see a true outsider, someone who isn’t part of the local community at all. Batya was alone in life, rejected by the woman she loved, and alone in death, left haunting the woman who loved her. It is the sense of community she finds when speaking to Osnat that allows Batya to move on at all. That sense of community and kinship is ultimately Batya’s salvation, as well as Mrs. Stein’s.
Overall, Whom My Soul Loves by Rivqa Rafael was a lovely story that I enjoyed. It was really great to read something that was so Jewish and so queer. It was a bit shorter than I may have preferred, and I did feel a bit like it was a short excerpt from a larger piece, but it was still a lovely read. I look forward to reading more from the author.
I hope everyone who participated by reading the story and following along on social media has enjoyed themselves. If you have more thoughts to add, you can leave a comment here, or join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram. You can also join in on the discussion at Litsy by following @elizabethlk and the #litereads hashtag. The next selection will be available shortly, Monday, April 12.
The Feminist Bibliothecary 