Shabbat

Shabbat is a Jewish observance woven into the novel’s intimate domestic world: it belongs to a set of practices through which faith shapes family routines, bodily boundaries, and ideas of communal continuity. Its significance lies less in a formal account of the observance than in the contrasting ways the characters accommodate, resist, or live within religious life.

Household Practice and Religious Observance

Adam Wizman’s wife, Valérie Berdah, turns toward increasingly strict religious observance after the family returns from Israel to France. She takes the name Sarah, changes how she dresses, and asks to cover her hair. Her new commitments include keeping Shabbat, observing dietary restrictions, and following the laws of family purity, which regulate physical contact between spouses during and after menstruation. The observance is thus presented alongside a broader reorganization of everyday life rather than as an isolated ritual.

Adam’s experience of this religious household is uneasy. During the period when physical contact is prohibited, Sarah sleeps on a mattress on the floor, an arrangement he cannot bear to see. The detail makes religious practice visible in the couple’s shared space and shows how its rules can affect not only belief but intimacy and the meaning of marriage.

Identity, Family, and Separation

Adam’s attachment to Jewish identity is inseparable from his fear that leaving his family would mean abandoning a Jewish home and the duties he associates with it. He delays making a life with Claire Farel, in part because he is not ready to lose his place in the community or to be regarded as someone who has forsaken his household. The novel links this hesitation to a sense of inherited obligation: Jewish belonging is a matter of transmission and survival as well as personal faith.

That tension persists after Adam and Claire form a life together. When Adam’s son Alexandre Farel visits their apartment, Claire explains that Adam has not imposed religious practice on her, but that, out of respect for him, she has accepted major holidays and eating only foods permitted by Judaism. Their home therefore observes selected practices without presenting the couple as identical in belief or temperament. Adam’s quietness and periods of existential anxiety coexist with Claire’s willingness to accommodate some of his traditions.

Different Responses to Religious Life

The novel sets these domestic arrangements against Sarah’s later life in Brooklyn. After moving there with her daughters, she lives in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights and raises her younger daughter in that milieu. Mila Wizman, who leaves to return to France and live with her father, describes the pressure she experienced: rules governed how she dressed, walked, and thought, and her mother contemplated asking the community rabbi to find her a husband once she turned eighteen. Her account presents religious belonging not as a single, shared experience but as a contested family environment, especially for a young woman resisting its expectations.

Across these households, Shabbat is one element in a larger pattern of religious observance and identity. It appears beside dietary practice, family-purity rules, communal belonging, and the obligations Adam associates with Jewish continuity. The novel’s emphasis remains on lived consequences: practices can sustain a sense of heritage, organize domestic life, and also become part of the conflicts that divide spouses, parents, and children.