Bee Season
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| Author | Myla Goldberg |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group |
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Publication date
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25 May 2000 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 304 p. (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | (hardback edition) |
| OCLC | 42641634 |
| 813/.54 21 | |
| LC Class | PS3557.O35819 B44 2000 |
| Followed by | Wickett's Remedy (2005) |
Bee Season is a 2000 novel by Myla Goldberg. It follows a young girl as she attempts to win the national spelling bee, and the repercussions of her success on the other members of her family.
Eleven-year-old Eliza Naumann is the only "ordinary" member in a family of gifted people living in Abington Township, PA. Her father Saul is a cantor at the local synagogue and a keen student of Jewish texts; her mother Miriam is apparently a successful lawyer and her brother Aaron is a gifted student who is able to read and recite in Hebrew and is allowed into his father's study, where he plays the guitar with his father.
One day Eliza surprises herself by winning the class spelling bee, then the school bee at McKinley Elementary School. At first Saul is unaware of her success, but then he becomes increasingly involved with her. Eliza is invited into his study to practice, and Aaron for the first time finds the door closed to him. But as Eliza progresses through the district bee and prepares for the national bee, the troubled lives of her family come into sharp focus. Saul, who has tried to reach God, first through drugs and then through study, becomes convinced that Eliza's talent shows a propensity for mysticism greater than his, which has the potential to lead her to shefa, the influx of the Divine. He gradually introduces her to the writings of Abraham Abulafia, a Medieval kabbalist writer, and it becomes clear that his ambitions for her go far beyond the winning of the spelling bee.
Aaron, who had a "religious experience" at the age of eight (it was actually the wing-light of a plane), finds himself disillusioned with Judaism and begins to look elsewhere, first to Christianity and then to Buddhism. Through a chance encounter in a park he discovers the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and becomes a devotee, unknown to his family. Miriam, who has always had an obsessive personality, has not worked for years, instead being a kleptomaniac who spends her time stealing small items from department stores, believing that they are small parts of herself from which she has become separated, a concept she formed when Saul told her about Tikkun olam, the "fixing of the world".
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