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Bad Mothers and Monstrous Children

Jordy Rosenberg’s “Night Night Fawn” offers a multigenerational tale of Marxists, Zionists, and estrangement.

Barbara Horowitz’s dream was to be a Hollywood star. Failing that, her backup dream was to marry a surgeon. The main thing was to get out of Flatbush, Brooklyn. So when she started going steady with Stephen Rosenberg, who “carried the lawns of Nyack in his heart,” she thought she had it made—until her medical-student beau had an epiphany that he was terrified of blood, and a concurrent epiphany about his true calling as a public-health official.

Instead of dumping him, though, Barbara invited Stephen to a screening of Exodus, the 1960 film starring Paul Newman as the Haganah militant Ari Ben Canaan and Eva Marie Saint as his blond, goyishe love interest. The film depicts the intensifying violence that by 1948 would culminate in the Nakba. “As a literary work, it isn’t much,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once said of the best-selling novel on which the film was based. “But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”

Barbara always understood perfectly well that taking Stephen to the movies was a potentially self-destructive act. Once they’d tucked themselves into the makeout row in the back, her hand levitated into Stephen’s lap and proceeded to extract his penis from his pants, a penis that she could not allow “to follow Stephen down the path of meek liberalism.” It wasn’t love and acceptance that led Barbara (and her hand) astray, but rather the conviction that she could change him. “Destiny was driving me toward disappointment,” she recalled. Stephen asked her to marry him right then and there.

At first, she froze. But as Exodus itself climaxed, Barbara was overwhelmed by a newfound sense of purpose: “I had not given much thought to ‘nations’ before. But a nation combined with Paul Newman was another thing entirely.” When Stephen suggested later that maybe he could find a job in Israel, Barbara’s assimilationist dreams gave way to Zionist ones. Stephen would give up his aspirations of climbing America’s class ladder, but only to take on Paul Newman’s character’s nationalist convictions (and maybe his sex appeal, too). And she would become his Eva Marie Saint, forsaking her ordinary life for a colonial adventure.

Jordy Rosenberg’s novel Night Night Fawn traces the collapse of this fantasy and all of Barbara’s other thwarted ambitions. Said ambitions end up being displaced onto her only daughter, who turns out to be an incorrigible lesbian, an intractable Marxist—a Trotskyite!—and eventually, horror of horrors, not a daughter at all. In some sense, Night Night Fawn resembles the trans literature we know—it’s structured around the central tragedy of a parent tormenting a child for their gender expression—but the primary object of Rosenberg’s attention here is the parent, not the child. Rosenberg retains the ethnographic lens common to so much trans fiction and memoir but turns it on Barbara, on both her Zionist and gender dogmatism. The Rosenberg family, like any other nuclear family, is supposed to transmit these most precious values from parent to child. Night Night Fawn attests to the many ways that this transmission can go badly wrong, and hints at something further—at the political and relational changes........

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