Free I Can't Complain by Elinor Lipman Page A

“No one guessed that!” she exclaimed.
    I said, “I didn’t mean I guessed his actual
name
—just that we’d find it out.”
    “Still,” she said, with a firm shake of her blond head, “no one guessed that.”
    I told her I was looking forward to the upcoming
Sex and the City
movie.
    Her expression changed, from earnestness to consternation. She said, with what felt like great sincerity, “Oh! I hope you like the choices we made.”
    I said, “I will. I know I will.”

I Touch a Nerve
    I N THE 1970 S, WRITING for the
Massachusetts Teacher,
I helped sneak a headline into the magazine that later brought complaints. The one-paragraph item reported that the United Arab Emirates would be funding a Maryland school district. A coworker had submitted it with the gag headline, “Uh-oh. There Goes the School Hanukkah Festival.” We were greatly amused—we underlings never got jokes into print—when it ran that way.
    Letters arrived. Most fittingly, a member of the Arab De- fense League wrote to say that our headline, with its assumption of Arab anti-Semitism, offended him, and he was, of course, exactly in the right. Less expected were two letters from Jewish readers. They complained not because they recognized an offense to their Arab brethren, but because we had made a joke in boldface type that—as best as I could interpret—had a Jewish . . . what? Word? Punch line? Invitation to discriminate? Suggestion of passivity?
    It taught me this: people are touchy about words on the page and happy to tell you about it. I left education journalism for fiction and didn’t hear too many complaints about the political content of my hardly political novels until I wrote my fourth,
The Inn at Lake Devine.
Where I’ve gone wrong, in the words of one letter writer, is the implied endorsement of “rampant intermarriage” in my books. I myself didn’t know that intermarriage was the thesis of my novel, which begins with a thirteen-year-old narrator saying, “It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel; they didn’t want Jews; we were Jews.” Years before, when I sent that opening and a few pages more to my editor, she called and said, “This is it. This is your next novel.” I said, “But it’s all I have. I don’t know if I can sustain it.”
    “You have to,” she said.
    I asked why.
    “Because no one’s ever written about anti-Semitism in comedic fashion,” she answered.
    Comedic to her, maybe, but no laughing matter to readers praying that their real-life daughter won’t find, as my narrator did, love among the Lutherans. Random House published
The Inn at Lake Devine
in 1998 and Vintage in paperback a year later. Thus began my book group adventures among those whose hands shoot up to ask, “Don’t you think you have a social responsibility to make Jews marry Jews?”
    No, I do not. I have a social responsibility to tell an interesting tale. I explain: “This is
not
a story about a man and a woman who meet through a Jewish singles network.” And might they at least agree that a fitting punishment for an anti-Semitic innkeeper is to lose her sons to Jews? Add to that the loss of her inn. Her empire. Like
Hamlet
!
    I plead sociology: Mixed marriages to the left and right of me, long and successful ones, family, friends, neighbors. I grew up in a city with a large Catholic and Greek Orthodox population, which is to say I went to dances at the Transfiguration Church and to my senior prom with a boy named McCarthy. I married a Jew with the same degree of religiosity as my own, which is to say negligible. We raised our son in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the Unitarian Society delivers Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Easter, and election sermons. I try to explain my attitude—people should marry for love in this century—to the complainers (it’s always women and it’s always—don’t write me—Jewish women), who want me to recant. I might throw in another