Sunday Jews

Sunday Jews (2002) by American author Hortense Calisher follows Zipporah Duffy, née Zangwill, the matriarch of a glamorous clan of New Yorkers, as she first nurses and then grieves her beloved husband, Peter. A novel of social observation, Sunday Jews anatomizes upper-middle-class New York life and the spectrum of beliefs and identities found among Reform and non-practicing American Jews.

The book’s title refers (among other things) to the informal Sunday gatherings Zipporah has hosted for many years at her Manhattan apartment for friends and relatives. The novel opens at what will turn out to be the last of these events.

When we first encounter her, Zipporah is at the zenith of her happiness and her power. She presides with graceful authority over her large home in Central Park West, loved by her five children and her mixed-race housekeeper, Jennie. A social anthropologist unattached to any institution, Zipporah spends her life traveling to beautiful and exotic locales, funded by grants and fellowships. Her study of the different images of God found in cultures around the world has been well received. When she is at home, she spends her time checking up on family members whom she hasn’t heard from in a while and solving her friends’ problems.



Above all, she is still very much in love with her husband, Peter, a professor of philosophy greatly adored by his students. A lapsed Roman Catholic, Peter is happy for their family to adhere to Zipporah’s atheistic brand of Judaism.

Zipporah’s family is shocked, therefore, to learn at this latest Sunday gathering that she intends to sell the apartment where her children grew up. She and Peter are embarking on a long world tour so that he can visit some of the places she has seen during her career and longs to show him. She adds that from now on she will go by “Zoe.”

Her adult children, wrapped up in their own problems, are at best confused and at worst outraged by this announcement. Only her grandson, Bert, intuits Zipporah’s reasons. Peter has begun to show symptoms of senile dementia, and he doesn’t want his family to have to witness his decline and death.



The discussion is interrupted, however, when Jennie bursts in to announce that cousin Lev has been shot, and his young fiancée, Debra Cohen, is stranded in her hotel. The Duffys rush to the rescue.

Zipporah and Peter carry out their plan and retreat to Italy. There, Peter progresses painstakingly through the stages of dementia, becoming increasingly feeble and debilitated. Just when Zipporah is struggling to cope, Debra appears to return Zipporah’s kindness. A former Israeli military nurse, she helps Zipporah through Peter’s final days.

As Peter dies, Zipporah reflects deeply on their long and happy marriage, remembering their life together and thinking about the meaning of their experiences. She also meditates on her faith and the meaning of her Jewish identity.



When Peter dies, Debra disappears as mysteriously as she arrived. Zipporah is left alone with her grief.

Widowhood turns out to be a new beginning for Zipporah, however. She inherits a considerable fortune from a childless neighbor, and later begins a passionate affair with the spectacularly wealthy and cultured Foxy Mendenhall.

Interwoven with Zipporah’s story are the stories of her five children. Zipporah and Peter raised them with a universalist approach to religion and identity, but each child struggles with this heritage, each in a different way.



Oldest daughter Nell is the family beauty, a “Sephardic queen” who becomes a successful attorney and chooses to raise her children (by several different fathers) alone. These children are sent to Sunday schools of every faith, including Buddhist. Later, Nell learns that she must have a double mastectomy. Like her father before her, she retires to a small town in Italy, where the locals suspect her of being the apparition of a saint.

Younger daughter Erika becomes famous for her collection of Judaica, and yet decides to have her nose “fixed,” protesting all the while that it is “against all her principles.”

Middle son Charles is an amateur astronomer and a professional judge, hopeful of a position on the Supreme Court. He becomes embroiled in the breakdown of his marriage. Youngest son Zach is a successful artist and a charmer. He leaves his wife, Ernestine, for another woman called Ernestine, and then decides he cannot live without either of them. They sweetly comply, and each bears him twin sons.



The central plank of the family, from Zipporah’s point of view, is her grandson Bert, the son of her own eldest son, Gerald, a banker, and his wife, Fegelah (although she goes by Kitty). It troubles Zipporah to learn that Bert is training for the rabbinate (“Some Jews are too Jewish,” she comments), but is reassured to learn that he doesn’t believe in God. She is also pleased to learn that Bert’s teacher is a Scottish convert to Judaism.

Bert graduates, but avoids taking up a post. He is searching for a project, feeling that he is “in his heart a refugee from something.” Zipporah worries about him, recognizing that he has inherited his grandfather Peter’s integrity and subtlety of thought.

For ten years since Peter’s death, Zipporah has wondered about the whereabouts of Debra, whom she has not seen since that time. Bert decides to track her down, finding her in London, where they fall in love.