PositiveJewish Book CouncilSolomon Fields is a man divided: he has an artistic soul nurtured by his free-spirited grandmother that once brought him into the world of art journalism, but also a pragmatic brain cultivated by his Marxist-turned-neocon mother, which later landed him in the superficial, yet financially rewarding, world of New York advertising...When a mysterious woman approaches him with an ambiguous writing opportunity that might rekindle his artistic leanings, he resists at first...But as his life becomes less satisfying, he agrees to visit The Coded Garden, a sort of artists’ colony overseen by a wealthy svengali...The very question of what it means for Solomon to be Jewish is a debate between two opposing positions: his mother says they’re \'secular Jews,\' while his father calls them \'historical Jews\'...Jews are a race, or maybe they aren’t...Jews are white, or maybe they aren’t...It’s a question of heritage, or maybe it’s merely a disposition, as his father says: \'That you even want to know what makes you a Jew makes you a Jew\'...Ultimately, it’s the duality within Solomon that matters most...Even as Sebastian Light, the enigmatic, pseudonymous creator of The Coded Garden — \'a handsome man, a readymade guru\'— refuses to answer the most basic questions about his own life, he challenges Solomon to define himself...Is he part of the artistic world, or part of its shadowy nemesis, as Light sees it: \'New Yorkers. The media. The elites. The elect few making decisions about who gets attention, what is and is not quality, what is beauty and what is not\'...In the end, figuring out his own position is Solomon’s only way off this island — metaphorically and literally.
