When writing his new novel "Joy Comes in the Morning," Jonathan Rosen tried to forget the fact that he was bringing the first female rabbi protagonist into print.

"I tried not to think about that because I think that when you feel communal or social responsibility, you're doomed. The only responsibility you really should feel, I think, is what you owe the character, and what you owe the character is to [make her] as whole and human as possible."

Rosen, who for a decade served as the cultural editor of the New York-based Jewish weekly, The Forward, was in San Francisco last month to promote the novel, his third book. Now he's the editorial director of the New York-based Nextbook, a nonprofit devoted to promoting Jewish literature.

The plot of the novel is as follows: Deborah, a Reform rabbi who does chaplain work in a hospital, comes across Henry, a Holocaust refugee who has attempted suicide after a stroke. In administering to him, she meets his son Lev, a science journalist who has left his fiancée at the altar. Lev is on a spiritual quest of sorts, and finds a partner in Deborah, who, even as a rabbi, has her own questions about faith.

The novel tackles a lot of weighty issues — love, death and family, faith in the post-Holocaust era. And as the title suggests — it comes from Psalm 30: "Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning" — the novel also deals with the question of whether great joy can follow pain and loss.

The title comes from a story that Rosen's father, a survivor of the Kindertransport who lost his parents in the Holocaust, once was working on.

"The title is not a simple assertion, it's a question," said Rosen. "What does it mean for joy to come in the aftermath of calamity? All Jews live in the aftermath of calamity; and not just Jews. The last century was a very barbaric century, and what does it mean for joy to come? How do we reconstitute our faith in God, in community, in a future?"

For his father, Rosen said, the fact that he went on to have a family was the joy that eventually came.

Rosen's wife is a Conservative rabbi, and, with his father sharing some characteristics with Henry, there are many such parallels.

But Rosen said his wife was unafraid that people would think that she was Deborah, the Reform rabbi. He, however, is not so sure. "I have more experience with how desperate people are to see reality behind fiction," he said. "Fiction is always a collaboration with the real world."

Rosen said he was particularly interested in tackling the issue of faith, since so much of Jewish American literature is secular.

"It was natural for me to take on the issue of faith because of who I am, but I was highly conscious that these writers who I really admire for their verbal and literary abilities are actively in flight from that," he said of writers such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. "Often, what made them seem sophisticated in the middle of the last century when they became so famous, made them seem slightly parochial to me."

Rosen believes that "religious questions are timeless questions and part of human experience, and they are certainly part of American culture, even if there's a group of people who would like to shut it out. It belongs in literature as much as it belongs anywhere else."

Rosen began writing the novel in 2000. It was still in progress on September 11, 2001. While his book could be considered a work of post-9/11 fiction, Rosen only vaguely alludes to 9/11 at the end of the book, when one of the characters takes a job in an office that's on the top floor of the World Trade Center.

"In a way, the questions that [the novel] addresses only become more urgent in the aftermath of 9/11," he said, "and 9/11 only grimly affirmed the enduring nature of these questions, mainly 'how do you rebuild community in the face of calamity and faith in the face of senseless slaughter?'"




"Joy Comes in the Morning" by Jonathan Rosen, (389 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25).