The Page 69 Test: "The Majority"

Monday, July 17, 2023

"The Majority"

Elizabeth L Silver is the author of the new novel, The Majority, as well as the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty, and the

novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton. Her work has been called “fantastic” by the Washington Post and “masterful” by The Wall Street Journal, has been published in seven languages, and optioned for film. The Execution of Noa P. Singleton was an Amazon Best Book of the Year, the Amazon Best Debut of the Month, a Kirkus Best Book of the Summer, Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year, and selection for the Target Emerging Author Series. The Tincture of Time was featured on PBS and NPR, and was an O Magazine/Oprah’s “Ten Books to Pick up Now."

Silver applied the Page 69 Test to The Majority and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Majority is the opening of one of the final chapters in Part 1. Recent college graduate, Sylvia, bumps into the rabbi of her youth who excluded her from certain Jewish customs that would have helped her mourn her mother’s passing more profoundly, and in many ways, helped push her to become a lawyer. When she was twelve, she was excluded from the Mourner’s Kaddish for her mother by this rabbi and she attempted to try and convince him soon after, that the laws, as they existed, were wrong and exclusionary. She even visited the synagogue weeks later to confront him about it and he barely gave her the time of day. That moment pushed her forward for years as she studied hard to prove him and society wrong. This moment, in which she bumps into the older rabbi in the park, is a long time coming, and doesn’t live up to her expectations.

Here’s the page:
One day as I was walking home from college through the park, I stumbled upon the rabbi from shiva. I was twenty-two years old.

“Rabbi,” I said, stopping him halfway between a playground and the sidewalk. He was focused, walking directly through the park in a diagonal line to the shul. I knew where it was. I had walked across this park nearly every day on my way home from school, from college, from outings with friends or dates, secretly hoping to see him. I never had. Not in the years following my mother’s death, not in the time I spent in the neighborhood (which was rare these days), studying late at the library, walking arm in arm with Earl or Leo or Ezekiel.

“Rabbi,” I said again, louder. There was no need to rush. He looked up. We were both alone. It was spring.

He was older now, too, the ratio of brown and gray in his hair reversed. I was taller than him by at least two inches, and showing more of my legs in a shorter skirt than I had ten years earlier. My head wasn’t covered.

“It’s Sylvia Olin,” I said to him. He stared at me without recognition. “Marty Olin’s daughter,” I added as a reminder. I didn’t bring up Mariana. He wouldn’t remember her anyway. Though he had given sermon after sermon about the Holocaust, he had never taken the time to get to know her.

His hand kept to his beard and he twirled the strands around his fingers over and over, thinking, until finding the right memory.
This scene is somewhat representative of the book, as it shows Sylvia in scene, confronting a person of power, and struggling with what to do with the issues presented. On the other hand, because the book takes place over four large timeframes, this is only one part of that narrative and timeframe, and shows Sylvia in her early 20s, which is only for a quarter of the book.