In Jessica Elisheva Emerson’s first novel, Olive Days, Rina, a wife and mother of two, reminisces about summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp, where she rolled her body over the fallen fruit of olive trees. The olives leave tiny purple explosions on her Shabbas whites, stains her mother never manages to remove. It’s a small act of rebellion, and Rina delights in the permanent marks it leaves. “Her last summer in the orchard, the summer she thought her body might actually implode and shrivel to a pit if someone else didn’t get inside it,” Emerson writes, “she was so taken with her olive bed that she pressed a large, round one into her mouth and bit through it.”
Even so, the olive trees—and the art Rina creates of them—never quite provide the expression that she craves. Perhaps it’s because almost no one else seems to notice the stains.
Now an adult, Rina lives in Los Angeles’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Pico-Robertson, devoted to her children but awash in unending responsibilities. She wakes early to cook, keeps kosher, carts her children to school and activities, and volunteers in her community. She observes the holidays and keeps Shabbas with steadfast commitment; the rhythm of her life is determined by her faith. The catch, however, is that Rina does not believe in God.
A night of wife-swapping, on which her husband insists, brings Rina’s unhappiness into focus and accelerates her dissatisfaction into anger. She knows no other life, and she doesn’t want to abandon her family. But she must find something else to hold.
Mentally untethered, she chases physical cravings. She has a brief affair with a rabbi, but she doesn’t find fulfillment until she meets a married art instructor, Will. The two engage in a passionate affair, falling into risky sex and a compulsive need for each other. “That’s how you make me feel: known,” Will tells her. Rina reorganizes her life to see Will more frequently. Both of them seem to care only about each other and their children, whom they discreetly introduce.
Even in the process of betraying their marriages, Will and Rina are fascinated by each other’s cultures. She asks about his Mexican American family history and calls him her cariño. He begins quietly taking conversion classes. On a weekend away, he recites a midrash to her by firelight as they lie together in bed.
If the affair gives Rina liberation, it offers Will religion.
Emerson’s writing is heavy in detail but never bogs down on the page. Her vivid descriptions of Los Angeles have one eye on greenery and the other on concrete, framing unexpected metaphors and connecting moments of beauty and devotion. Watching the jacarandas start to bloom, Rina thinks, “In a month they would be crowned with tufts of violet blooms and greenery, but now the purple was intermittent, as if placed with care. She thought of how she used to envision god’s eyelashes in a sun-striped sky, imagined Justice, a benevolent being, shaking blossoms onto the jacarandas like her grandmother had done paprika over a pot of bean soup.”
At the same time, Olive Days is a book of bodies. Rina screws and sweats and feels the warmth of lit candles and the smell of smoke. She plunges her hand into challah dough and holds it to her child’s head to gauge his fever. Although her actions defy rationality as her affair becomes riskier, we remain in her body throughout. Her perceptions emerge most sharply when it comes to sex. In cars, in closets, in their respective marriage beds, she and Will collide in details that are both corporeal and tender.
Little else happens in the novel outside the affair. Even drastic situations—as when, early in the novel, Will’s young son is struck by a car—are presented as they affect Rina and, subsequently, Will’s treatment of Rina. A clever and brief switch in narration two-thirds through propels Olive Days to its conclusion while also revealing the depths of delusion between the lovers, how deeply they have fallen.
Still, there remains a fundamental disconnect between them. For Rina, the affair is an expression of liberation, freeing her from the expectations of Orthodoxy, which have begun to feel hollow, as well as from the unending demands of domesticity. The relationship inspires her. Yet Will, though also locked in an unhappy marriage, lacks many of these obstacles. He is closer to boredom in his marriage than confinement. When he begins the process of conversion, it’s difficult to tell how much of that has to do with his devotion to Rina and how much is about his desire to be part of something larger than himself.
As the stakes of the love affair get higher, Emerson deftly navigates the balance of inevitability. There is no clear ending. A love affair this passionate cannot possibly last. But the damage has been done, the stains made permanent. Where else could it go but on?•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
