“Underneath a shell of politeness, pose, preparedness, we are all a tangled mess, secrets built around other secrets”. A secret, written on Surie’s body yet not legible to its surroundings, sits “like an explosive” at the heart of Goldie Goldbloom’s On Division. Together with an awestruck Lella Costa, we learn that Surie inhabits a world familiar to her author: she is Hasidic, lives in Williamsburg, NY, trains as a midwife. At fifty-seven, she is also pregnant with twins. Her husband Yidel doesn’t notice, the community cannot know. How will this secret be received?

Community has its own industry. A tell-all will be swiftly optioned by Netflix. Pandering to this or that community can get you elected. Where an over-used narrative would want the “close-knit” community to turn against Surie, Goldie Goldbloom favours balance, and the payoff feels different. At book launches, members of the Hasidic community confess to Goldie that they feel seen: this story is about them.

Recounting On Division, an elderly woman bawling her eyes out moves her husband to tears; he is a Rabbi who has not read a novel in a while, maybe ever. Lella Costa declares the book an “ever-questioning mosaic”, careful in its details, attuned to the sensory world. She reads a page from it, impassionate, emotional, thankful.

First drafted in ten days during a “creative holiday” with one of her sons, On Division is a testament to staying in and with a community. “Why should I leave? I am gay and I am stubborn, I said no” she remarks, laying bare the queer practice of troubling structures from within, especially when it’s your family, your community. “You stay because you receive something”. For her, it’s the big family gatherings, the rituals, congregating around food, connecting. In staying “in” the community while being “out” as queer, you can give a voice to those you do not expect and yet so desperately want others to hear.