With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one is who he or she seems. All of the family members have secret agendas that lead them to embark on their own spiritual quests for fulfillment and order.

Nine-year-old Eliza, stuck in a remedial fifth-grade class, knows she is a “student from whom great things should not be expected.” No one is more surprised than she when she wins her school spelling bee and advances to the district level. Her father, Saul, a Jewish scholar and cantor with a deep interest in the Kabbalah, decides to take Eliza under his tutelage. This means that 16-year-old Aaron is suddenly replaced in his father’s favor. Saul no longer has time to continue Aaron’s Torah study and guitar lessons. In response, Aaron seeks solace with the Hare Krishnas, a decision that enrages Saul when he eventually discovers his son’s actions.

Eliza’s mother, Miriam, a brilliant but distant lawyer, pays little attention to events taking place in the household. She is too busy leading a double life that keeps her barely hanging onto the edge of sanity. When Eliza qualifies for the national spelling bee, Saul realizes that Eliza’s gift with words runs much deeper than her good spelling abilities. He senses in her a potential to reach the ultimate heights of Jewish mysticism, an accomplishment he had found, to his frustration, that he was unable to achieve.

Thrilled to have her father’s attention and admiration, Eliza begins to study the patterns in letters and words. As a result, she enters a state of awareness in which words reveal themselves to her on a deep, spiritual level. She can envision a word dividing into all the other words contained within it. With her father’s coaching, she becomes obsessed with following the ancient Kabbalist teachings. When she finally achieves her goal, the terrifying and enrapturing experience changes her forever.

In Bee Season, Goldberg shows the way a family can fall apart from neglect and lack of communication. The characters must lose themselves in order to find themselves, some of them doing so more successfully than others. By the end, they have each crossed a line from which, for better or for worse, they can never step back. The ultimate goal of each character can be found in Professor Yechiel Goldberg’s explanation of the fundamental tenet of the Kabbalah: “Human beings are partners with God in maintaining and perfecting this world, and in maintaining and perfecting the unity of God.”

Saul and Eliza attempt to attain this relationship through Jewish mysticism and numerology. Aaron attempts to establish this partnership with God through the freedom he finds in an ancient religion he refuses to see as a cult. Miriam’s method of organizing and “fixing” the world is, arguably, more bizarre than her son’s, eventually leading to her arrest and incarceration in a mental institution.

SOURCES
Goldberg, Myla. Bee Season. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
———. “Juan Williams Talks with Myla Goldberg.” National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation (June 1, 2000).
Gray, Paul. “The Power of the Word.” Time (July 3, 2000): 62.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: Aaron Naumann, American fiction 2000s, Bee Season, coming-of-age fiction, contemporary Jewish American literature, Doubleday 2000 novels, Eliza Naumann, faith and identity in literature, family disintegration, feminist literature, Hare Krishna movement in fiction, Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah in literature, Miriam Naumann, Modern American Novels, Myla Goldberg, mysticism and language, psychological fiction, Saul Naumann, spelling bee novel, spiritual quest in fiction, words and spirituality