A few weeks ago, I received an email from Debra Spark, an author familiar to me mainly through her impressive craft book, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and through my attendance at a lively AWP panel some years back that featured her. Spark was writing to me, she said, because she has a new book publishing soon and someone had told her that I know a few things about the Jewish book-blogging world. (Flattery may not get you everywhere, but it is getting Debra Spark into this post!)

All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to reading the new book, The Pretty Girl, a collection comprising six stories and a novella which, I understand, “revolve around artists, artistry, and the magical—sometimes malicious—deceptions they create.” (Check out the trailer here.) But maybe before I do that, I should perhaps read Spark’s 2009 Michigan Literary Award-winning novel, Good for the Jews, which intrigued me not only when I saw its title but also when I learned that it was loosely modeled on the Book of Esther. (Esther is the heroine of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which was celebrated last week.)

Next: Sometimes, it’s still a little hard to believe that David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is no longer among us. “The Depressed Person,” a short story that appeared in Harper’s before it was collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, remains, for reasons unnecessary to detail here, one of the most memorable stories I’ve ever read. If you, too, have been affected as a reader and/or as a writer by Wallace, you’ll want to take note of Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a collection of interviews and profiles coming from the University Press of Mississippi. Edited by Steven J. Burn, the book promises a previously unpublished interview (from 2005) and an expanded version of an interview originally published in Review of Contemporary Fiction. Warning: I’ve read through it already courtesy of NetGalley, and I wasn’t able to bring myself to finish the concluding piece, David Lipsky’s well-known Rolling Stone article, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” which was published after Wallace’s death. The preceding profiles and interviews were too vibrant, too engaged in the life and work  and genius of this brilliant writer, to permit such a sad about-face.

Until next month…

• Here on FWR, Eric Moe writes about his long, strange journey in writing Tri-Stan, a musical setting of David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko.”
• Scott F. Parker reads DFW’s “Good Old Neon” in light of the author’s suicide.
• Watch the trailer for Debra Spark’s The Pretty Girl.
• Catch up on all of Erika’s First Looks columns.

Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and they were MFA students together at Vermont College. This interview recently took place over email.

In terms of moving from stories to a novel, do you think writing a collection of stories made the job of writing a novel easier? Did having those prizes under your belt for your first book create pressure for your second?

Readers and writing students sometimes assume that writing stories is “practice” for writing a novel—that you start “small” and then grow—but I think most writers would say that’s not the case at all. Stories as an art form have their own set of demands. And lest anyone suggest that short fiction is a lesser art, we can look to the work of such story masters as Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Edith Pearlman, who won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and whose latest collection, Binocular Vision, was just nominated for the National Book Award.

That said, while writing stories first didn’t make writing a novel easier for me, writing fiction for a long time before tackling this particular novel made a difference. I began writing fiction around 1990 and published Wherever You Go in 2010. That’s 20 years. I teach writing, and one of the hardest things I’ve had to do is tell a student he or she needs to master more of the craft before shackling him/herself to a big project. It’s not that writing stories is easier; it’s just that you can labor on a story for a few months and then put it aside and start another. This allows you to let go of what’s not working and move on.

I was very grateful to have received those prizes. I was 53 years old when the collection came out, and a lot of water had flowed under the bridge by then. When I turned to the novel, I didn’t experience the prize-winning as pressure but as affirmation. Permission to keep going. A prolific story writer once told me that with each story she published, she was given permission to write another one. That’s what kept her submitting and submitting. That’s what those prizes felt like for me.

After writing stories, did you expect Wherever You Go to take seven years to complete? Why seven years?

I don’t entirely recall what I was thinking when I began the novel, which was actually the second half of a two-book contract (the first was the story collection)—probably more along the lines of it taking three or four years. It’s hard to sometimes remember why it took so long. It’s a little like childbirth: you don’t remember the pain, otherwise you’d never do it again. Though I can point to some factors. First, I wrote an entirely different story for a few years, about a group of young women in Jerusalem. When I finished, I saw that it was kind of flat, but on the sidelines were a couple of antsy guys who were almost pacing the perimeter of the narrative, begging to be explored. Who were they? Why were they so agitated? They had a lot of potential. So I pulled them forward and began to write their story, and eventually they became two of the main figures in Wherever You Go. I think that was in year three or so.

I also didn’t work on the book for seven solid years straight. I took a long break from the manuscript at one point, due to a medical issue, which was immediately followed by a visiting writer stint in Israel. All told, I didn’t look at the manuscript for almost nine months. It was the best thing I could have done. When I returned from Tel Aviv and looked at the pages, I knew exactly what I had to do. I wrote straight through and sent it to my agent and that was that. I’m not one of those writers who plans or outlines anything beforehand—thinking about a story doesn’t work for me, I have to discover it in the writing—so I’m groping my way for a very long time. I’ve learned to more or less trust the process and not get too anxious when I don’t know where I’m going for years on end.

One craft challenge is that you tell the story through three distinct and alternating third person points of view. How did you decide to use this structure? Were there points where you questioned your decision? What are the pitfalls to his approach that you think fiction writers should consider? What about the pleasures?

When I was still writing the unsuccessful story of the Jerusalem women, I was experimenting with a kind of omniscience—and it wasn’t working. There was too much distance; I couldn’t sink into any of the characters. I was also indulging an ironic, almost comic tone that was keeping me from getting at the truth of these people’s lives. It was, in retrospect, something of a defense on my part. I think I was reluctant to get inside these people for fear of what I’d find. As I said, that story was a little flat, and the flatness was related to the overly distant point of view. When I started over with the sideline characters, I wrote them in third-person and everything began to flow.

In terms of the structure, I knew from the get-go that I’d be exploring more than one person and that I was interested in the circumstances in which their paths would cross. So that dictated the structure. Three voices has a nice symmetry; it also lends itself to the image of a braid, which is how I ultimately saw the back-and-forth nature of the chapters. If you’ve ever made a braided bread—not coincidentally, the traditional Jewish challah is a braided bread—you also know that often you start the braiding in the middle, at the point where the three strands overlap most powerfully. That’s how it felt when constructing this book. I sensed early on, without knowing the specifics of the narrative, that the three lives would cross when a major event happened in the middle of the book. That too dictated the structure, even before I knew what that event was going to be.

Which is not to say the braiding was straightforward or obvious. I was continually rearranging the alternating sections. For a time, I thought I’d give 50 pages of the first character before shifting to the next; then I thought that would be too trying for a reader so I shortened the number of pages the reader would have about Character A before moving to Character B. Then I feared that structure would be jumpy. I laid out sections on my floor and moved them around. At one point, I hung a clothesline across my writing room and hung sections by clothespins to see how they’d flow. I needed to know what the experience would be like for the reader—what the reader would know or not know, how the reader would encounter the characters in the various permutations. In the end, you just have to hope what you chose is workable and satisfying. No book can be perfect, or perfect for every reader.

Of the pleasures of this approach is that I enjoy reading a narrative with multiple voices. I like the interplay, the variety of tones and rhythms, the subtext that exists in the spaces between the voices. So being able to create such a narrative was deeply enjoyable. I loved inhabiting the different consciousnesses and being able to use a range of colors and tones.

One of the biggest lessons I try to teach students is how to recognize the intrusion of an omniscient voice into their third person stories and novels—a voice that keeps them from getting or staying close to their point-of-view characters. Do you have any particular advice for getting closer?

One thing is to get rid of your preconceptions about a character and allow the character to speak for herself and reveal herself in gestures and conduct. Or if you can’t get rid of your preconceptions, then at least be aware of them. Too often this sort of distancing occurs when we’re engineering the story and don’t want the characters to mess up our plans by being themselves. So we keep things on the surface where we, the writer, are in charge, even to the detriment of the narrative.

One way to get your characters to reveal themselves is to put them in a scene and listen to them talk and watch their body language. Students and early stage writers often think the only way to get inside a character is by giving his or her interior thinking, which can be done to excess where we hear every thought or internal curse word, when many times the most vivid revelations come by way of gesture: the drumming of fingers on the table, the picking at the food, the moment a character chooses to look out the window instead of answering a ringing phone. With gestures like these, you need only a brief or fleeting interior thought to accompany it—and it says volumes. Then you’re getting closer.

I’m assuming there were some particularly difficult parts to write in the novel, given the presence of addiction, assault, exploding bombs and a devastating affair. Can you talk about how it felt to write these scenes? For instance, did Aaron stop short in his assault not only because he couldn’t go on but because you couldn’t? How much do you think a fiction writer should push herself to tell the ugly truths of people’s thoughts and actions?

I may have the opposite problem about telling ugly truths. I have a hard time illuminating the positive. One of the attractions of writing fiction for me is being able to illuminate the dark stuff, to write about the troubled and problematic. So I don’t have a problem with going there or writing about it, though I do have to watch that the tone is not overbearing for a reader.

Which points to a challenge I need to be aware of, which is to allow my troubled characters to rise above stereotype and their own darkness. For instance, an earlier version of the scene in which Aaron begins to assault the woman went substantially further. But then I realized that Aaron would never go that far; that he wasn’t such a bad kid, just a troubled kid. In writing about Regina, who is an addict, I discovered in the later drafts that the reader didn’t see enough of her other sides, her promise and brilliance, so I had to go back and add those to give a fuller picture. It was still the truth—that’s always the touchstone, you’ve got to write the truth—but I had left out some of the more positive elements in my desire to explore the darkness.

You didn’t mention how it felt to be exploding bombs and seeing people die in the novel. Care to comment?

Yes, there is a scene with a bombing. And it was—you’re correct—hard to write. I labored over those details. I wanted to get across the drama and gravity without making it gratuitously violent. I also needed it to be factually accurate. There was a point during my research when I wondered if the FBI would show up at my door because I was spending so many hours online reading about how to make bombs. And you are correct in flagging these as emotionally difficult scenes. I was sobered, as I was writing, by the enormity of what was taking place. I could see this invented building and garden and lawn in my head, and I could smell the burning.

You mentioned tone and coloration earlier. I find the tone of voice, assertion, and cadence that goes along with Aaron’s third person point of view to be particularly strong in an edgy, unnerving kind of way. Was this on purpose? Did you deliberately try to create different intensities or tones in the points of view? Was anyone’s point of view easier to write than another’s?

Thanks for that comment about Aaron’s voice. I loved writing that voice. His edginess and boldness were purposeful in that this was very clearly who Aaron was: a kid with a lot of issues and a lot of strong feelings, and not a lot of opportunity to express—or vent—earlier in his life. Feeding his voice was also a great deal of the political sentiment fueling the book. Aaron is angry and impatient with what he sees as excessively conciliatory views mouthed by either politicians or naive Americans who he believes don’t grasp the situation in Israel. I’ve heard these sentiments, heard voices like Aaron’s, so it was natural that he’d sound the way he does.

Yona’s was the hardest voice for me to write, the most reticent in terms of revealing herself to me. I think that’s because her story was the most personal. I had a much easier time with the two male characters—Aaron because he’s mouthing a lot of rhetoric, which I loved playing with, and Greenglass because his spiritual struggles were something I liked writing about. There are portions of his interior thinking that come straight out of some of the most beautiful Talmudic and biblical passages, and I loved writing those.

Though the three main characters have distinct sensibilities and yearnings—spiritual, psychological, ideological—which, in turn, lend themselves to different shadings and tones, there were times in the drafts when I had to modify the voices so they wouldn’t sound so similar. For instance, each character has problems with their fathers, and I had to work on that so the narrative wouldn’t be repetitive. As I said earlier, I like novels with multiple voices, but writers have to be careful that the voices have variety. I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections twice while working on this novel, mainly for the unplugged voices that carry that book. Those voices gave me permission—again, that word—to unplug my own characters’ voices. I also saw in The Corrections that I knew instantly whose consciousness was behind any given section because the voices were so vivid. Vividness is important. You want your reader to not just know your characters and be interested in their story but to be enlivened by the narration. You want them to be eager to hear those voices ringing off the page.

Curious that you mention characters’ problems with their fathers. The novel is hugely about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but do you also want readers to see this novel as ahistorical and about father-child disappointments? Did you intend the novel to weigh so heavily on fathers? From the start were you deliberately reaching for something more personal than political, or did that sort of just come about on its own?

No question that father-child relationships weigh heavily in this book. I didn’t put the father issue in there—just as I didn’t put the Israeli-Palestinian issue in there—but that’s what the characters were about and that’s where they brought me. When I said earlier that I’m one of those writers who doesn’t plan, I’m also one of those who doesn’t know what the themes or complications are going to be until the story is underway, until it’s being written. Once I began to explore Aaron and Greenglass, it was apparent that he had a troubled relationship with his famous novelist father. And once I had Greenglass walk into his parents’ New York living room and look around, I discovered he had a fraught dynamic with his father, too. So the family issues were right there alongside the political ones, and they grew up organically around the characters.

The family stories are as important to me as the political elements. Not surprisingly, they’re also connected. Our personal histories drive our choices, including political choices that may, on the surface, look like they’re based entirely on ideology but in truth are also based on psychology. That is what ultimately emerged while writing the book.

In trying to listen to your characters, what has been the hardest thing about writing fiction for you, if you can focus on just one thing?

Probably the hardest thing has been wanting to know what their story is before they’re ready to tell me. Or, as Ron Carlson put it so well in his book Ron Carlson Writes A Story, before the characters even know the story. Carlson talks about needing to “survive” the writing of the story, meaning needing, as the writer, to just stay there in the room, at the desk, in the chair, and wait. This is the hardest part.

I don’t mean only ignoring the impulse to get up for more coffee or to vacuum the rug or check your email. I mean the impulse to leap at some glimmer of an inkling about the storyline and then rush to create a whole narrative out of it because you can’t stand spending one more minute in the state of not-knowing. Carlson counsels staying close to the details your sentences offer you—someone walks over to a window: great: What does he see? Maybe that will help the narrative unscroll. It’s painstaking. That’s why I think so many writers want to outline. But I’m like Carlson; he says he can’t think his way through it. He has to wait for it to come out in the writing. That’s the hardest part. To sit in the chair and wait.

Aaron’s father churns out popular but melodramatic potboilers about the Holocaust. How did it feel to take on this theme? The novel is also risky in rendering a less than flattering picture of Jewish extremists in the West Bank. Were you worried how that might be taken by Jewish-American readers? As an American Jew yourself, who albeit lives and teaches in Israel for a portion of each year, were you worried about not getting the sensibilities right and being viewed as a literary interloper?

The use of the Holocaust for art is a loaded but important topic. There’s a lot of excellent literature that takes the Holocaust as its subject, for instance, Maus, by Art Spiegelman. But there is also a lot of not such excellent literature on the subject, and I ask myself where the line is, and what makes work exploitative and what makes it okay. I think we have to be careful about writers suddenly finding the Holocaust “rich” or “art-worthy.” I don’t mean to suggest that the only people allowed to touch the Holocaust must be, like Elie Wiesel, survivors. Rather, my concern is with what happens when the events themselves recede into history and become, instead, “mere” subjects to be used by writers interested in them primarily for what they offer in the way of built-in drama. Or, worse, for what they offer writers like Aaron’s father, which is built-in sympathy.

The novel also touches on another use of the Holocaust that is very touchy. And that’s the use of the Holocaust for bolstering Jewish identity. It’s an issue much discussed in Israel,  which carries deep and abiding scars of the Holocaust since so many of its citizens were and are survivors, and where many are saying we need to look at the shadow side of this self-identity. That shadow side is explored in the book through Aaron and his need to see the Palestinians as the new Nazis, i.e., the archetypal enemies of the Jews, and how that colors his thinking and drives his conduct.

As for my portrayal of Jewish extremists on the West Bank, I did worry how American Jewish readers would respond, though I have to admit I loved writing that material. These are ideologues and radicals; they live for their cause and are certain of the rightness of it and use pretty startling rhetoric. Actually, I’ve been fascinated by radicals ever since I was a student in the sixties. Their commitment, their passion, their ability to rationalize violence: who are these people? What allows them to justify what they do? I wanted to find out, so I wrote about them.

Fortunately, my concerns about American Jewish readers turned out to be largely unfounded. American Jews are sophisticated about Israel. They aren’t looking to read another Exodus.

That said, it was imperative that I get the details right and capture the sensibilities, and not come across as some carpetbagger or interloper writing about Israel from an American perch without sufficient insight into the society. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel in the last decade, either traveling there or teaching there, and I lived there for three years in the late 1970s, but, still, one worries. One of the most gratifying reviews came from an Israeli magazine that said it was hard to tell I wasn’t a native Israeli since I’d gotten the pulse of the country so right. That was enormously meaningful to me.

How do you think your starting to write fiction later than some people might have played into helping you write this novel? You had a career as a lawyer before taking up fiction at the age of 40. Does that experience make a difference? Did you ever feel discounted as a writer, or taken less seriously?

There are a lot of myths out there about writing, including that if you’re a real writer, it’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. And the converse: that if you pursued something else, you’re not the real thing. Then I think of the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a vice-president at an insurance company and apparently enjoyed it, or William Carlos Williams, a doctor. Or Chekhov, for that matter, another doctor. Or Annie Proulx, who first published in her 50s. Some of that myth-making is propagated by the media and our youth-obsessed society, which then seeps into the literary culture. I once got an excruciatingly apologetic email after my story collection came out, asking me for my age, because I was being considered for a prize as an “emerging writer” but the cut-off was something like 39. I was 53.

More disturbing than my own personal encounter with these myths is what it says about our society. It takes time to develop one’s craft and to find one’s voice. Not everyone is going to start doing that at age 22 or 25; not everyone has the financial luxury or life conditions at a relatively young age to allow them to spend years honing their craft either on their own or through continued schooling. This was put forth most trenchantly by the brilliant writer Tillie Olsen in her 1978 bookSilences , where she talked about why there are so few women’s voices in the literary canon, along with other voices at the bottom of the economic ladder. Which was where Olsen lived and struggled. Her fiction is extraordinary—her novella Tell Me A Riddle is deservedly a classic—but her output was small. Her life did not readily yield up the conditions for writing. This had nothing to do with her talent, her commitment, or her drive, and everything to do with the realities of her situation.

We all have situations we have to work with and around in order to do our writing. Economic pressures, family needs, illness, psychological hurdles, even—dare I say it?—other interests. Grace Paley was a political activist all her life and said that writing short stories and poetry, versus novels, suited her because it allowed for that. Piling on myths to make us further question our commitment or ability or talent is not helpful.

As to whether starting to write fiction later than some (most?) helped me write this novel, I don’t know. But I sometimes joke that one of the plusses of starting when I did is that, during the long years before I published anything, I didn’t have my parents looking over my shoulder and telling me to give up and go to law school already. Because I’d already done that.

Would it be fair to say that once you’re on the promotion road, nobody much cares about how old (or young) you are? What has been your experience in promoting Wherever You Go? Do you have advice for fiction writers, who nowadays realize that promotion is part of the job?

I know many writers dread or, at best, approach the promotional side of things with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a root canal, but there have been numerous unexpected pleasures for me associated with these efforts. Actually, the age factor has been one of them. Audiences at book talks tell me they find my relatively late foray into fiction inspiring, or at least interesting. People want to hear about risk-taking.

Overall, I’ve found the promotion to have a lot of upsides. One has been experiencing the generosity of other writers, who’ve put me in touch with reviewers or invited me to author events or, like you, hosted me at their campuses. It’s also been uplifting to meet so many readers. I gave more than a hundred book talks in the year after Wherever You Go was published, and though we wring our hands saying nobody is reading serious fiction,  that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve also discovered the vast world of book bloggers, people who read and write about books not for pay or professional advancement but out of the sheer love of reading. Which is pretty amazing. They’ve been very generous in their response to Wherever You Go, posting thoughtful and often wonderfully written reviews, many saying the subject matter was entirely new to them. All of this has been tremendously heartening and one way to combat the sometimes punishing toll that publishing can take on one’s spirit, where you’re at the mercy of critics or your book is ignored in the press or an Amazon reviewer has been mean to you or you’re enduring any number of the myriad ups and downs that exposure can bring.

I think fiction writers need to adjust their expectations about what their publisher can and cannot do in the way of promotion, and then decide how much they want to take on for themselves. Time spent on promotion—and it takes time, no question—is time not spent writing fiction; on the other hand, if you devote five or seven years to writing a novel, you may decide it’s worth devoting one more to getting the word out so that readers who’d be interested in your book will hear about it. I also think many of us suffer from a romanticized notion of what publishers used to do for writers back in the day. In fact, not every writer was sent on “the book tour,” and often those tours were terrible—near empty bookstores, inappropriate venues. Because of the Internet and the shift to a greater egalitarianism in the reviewing world, there are now many more opportunities for writers to get their work out there than there used to be. Rather than bemoaning a somewhat mythical past, I say we should seize the bull by the horns and be glad for such robust online activity around writing and literature and books.

Dare I ask, what do you suppose the bloggers will be blogging about for your next book? Can you tell us a little about it?

I’ve got a very early stage novel underway set in central Massachusetts about late middle-aged people who leave their conventional lives, where they did all the “right” things, to form a commune with the goal of making their lives truly their own before it’s all over. Talk about the psychological driving your choices. I’m 61 years old. This is much on my mind.

In closing, can you speak specifically to what you had in mind in calling this novel Wherever You Go? As you set out to write a new novel, do you suppose you are seeking to take us to the same “place”? What do you think we as writers and readers need or want to find, wherever we go?

The title comes from a famous passage in the biblical Book of Ruth in which Ruth, the Moabite, pledges allegiance to her mother-in-law Naomi after the men who bound them together have all died: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” It’s a poetic passage that invokes loyalty—to a person, a land, and a God. Which is, of course, one of the main themes explored in the book, the idea of committing oneself to a particular land and a particular vision of God’s plan, whatever the cost. I wanted to hint at the underside of that unconditional loyalty, suggest there’s a steep price to be paid for such fealty.

But, as you imply in your question, “wherever you go” has many meanings. This is a story about expatriates and individuals seeking to reinvent themselves in a new place, who take their baggage—literal and metaphorical—with them wherever they go. The question of how much your past drives your present is also one that the book wrestles with, the tension between the old and the new.

Until you posed this question, I hadn’t thought about the phrase “wherever you go” relating to what a fiction writer does for a reader, by being a kind of guide or, perhaps more aptly, a siren, luring them to go where we want them to go, asking them to accompany us on a journey. There is definitely something to that in the pact we make as writers with readers: I’m going to tell you the truth, but it will be through the means of invention. This requires that we as writers have to earn the reader’s trust and cooperation. We have to write with authority—get the details right, stay true to the characters, use all our powers of observation so that we illuminate the human condition with honesty and insight and compassion. This is the reader’s right. All of us— readers and writers—should settle for no less.

Further Links and Resources

In The Little Bride, Anna Solomon’s debut novel, 16-year-old Minna Losk travels from Odessa to America as a Jewish mail-order bride. Her motivation is born in from both fantasy and necessity. The journey represents a move toward a more prosperous life, safe from grueling housework and pogroms, a world in stark contrast to the one she has experienced so far—devoid of family, comfort, or a true childhood. She is disappointed to find that her new home isn’t a grand house in a city but a sod hut in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. And her new husband, Max, is a poor match for the desolate land he has chosen to farm. Old enough to be her father and rigidly Orthodox, Max is kind but perilously stubborn. In addition to grappling with new depths of loneliness, precarious weather conditions, and finger-numbing work, Minna finds herself the stepmother of two teenage sons, one of whom she grows increasingly attracted to over the course of a year.

Anna Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Slate’s “Double X,” and Kveller. Before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was a journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth.

In this conversation with Sara Schaff, Anna Solomon considers the nature of short stories versus novels, the process of writing and researching a first novel that is also historical fiction, and the unexpectedly encompassing nature of publicity and self-promotion.

Interview

Sara Schaff: In a recent interview with Erica Dreifus on her blog, you said you once thought that if you could learn to write short stories well, then you could learn to do anything, even write a novel.

Anna Solomon: It’s weird to say this, but I actually feel like a really masterful short story is harder than a good novel because it’s such a demanding form. It feels much more particular, and if things are not perfect, it’s much more obvious. I mean, I think there are perfect novels, but I think it’s less important that a novel is perfect.

There’s more room to breathe in a novel.

Yeah. I think some novels achieve that feeling of unity that you can get with a story, that sense of singularity where you can see it all in one piece. I often think of two different categories of novels—in one category are books like Housekeeping or So Long, See You Tomorrow. I think of books like that as being perfect in what they are, and I feel that part of that is because they’re on the short side and they’re quiet and kind of domestic books. Private books. And then there are books like the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Updike’s Rabbit books that I think of as great novels, but I don’t think of them as perfect novels. And part of what’s great about them is that they’re not perfect; they let so much in, they’re much less precious and fussy in a way. But books like Housekeeping and So Long, See You Tomorrow, I’ve read six times, and I feel like they’re these bibles.

How do you feel about your novel now, compared to your stories? Did writing it feel very different?

It did! You know, I’ve talked to friends who also were writing short stories before they began novels, and they said to me, “I felt like writing each chapter of the novel was like writing a short story, and I was just writing short story after short story.” For me the form felt so obviously different—the pacing, the structure, that part felt very natural to me. I don’t know if it’s partly that my short stories have always been on the long side and kind of begging to be expanded; I also wonder to what degree the subject matter is just so different than anything I’d written. I had never written a historical anything, and I had never thought I would, nor do I really read much historical fiction, but this was the story I wound up wanting to tell.

People who’ve read my stories and read the novel will say to me, oh, it’s totally you; it feels like your writing, which is a great comfort to me when I hear that because in some ways they feel so different.

The fine sentences, the well-drawn characters—that all feels like you. But yes, The Little Bride does feel very different. It’s an epic journey whereas your stories are more contained.

It’s funny because my goal while writing this book felt sort of small. It felt sort of like, okay, all I want to do here is try to write a novel. I just have to see if I can do it, you know? I wasn’t trying to be overly ambitious—when I say that it sounds funny now because I took on a part of history, and I’d never done that before, but in the way I was talking before about the small and large books, it felt to me like a small, quiet book. I know there’s all this epic-ness and sweeping history, but it felt like a book that was very close to its characters, and in that way, kind of contained.

You’re following Minna’s story.

Right, it’s very close to her, and it stays close to her. In the new book that I’ve started writing, the thing I know I want to do this time is open that out. There are many more points of view it’s allowed to go into. It feels much bigger and messier and that’s really exciting, too, but I definitely had to do this first.

I’m starting to research material for a historical novel, and it feels so daunting. What was your process in writing historical fiction—did you research first and develop a sense of the place, or did you start writing the story and then fill in gaps from there?

I definitely did them at the same time. And I think it’s totally daunting, too. Now that I’m facing this other novel, I’m still asking, how are you supposed to do this? And how do you do it as a fiction writer? What’s the obligation to history?

I was fortunate that I came across Rachel Bella Calof, this Russian mail-order bride whose story inspired the book. I was at a residency when I read her amazing memoir, and I was in this place where I was working on a book that was going nowhere, and I was in despair. I started reading Calof’s story, and I got to this line in the first section where she’s undergoing her “Look,” [the physical examination one had to have before being approved as a mail-order bride] and she says, “They inspected me like a horse.” It was one of those lines that said so much while saying so little. And the whole first chapter of the book just kind of came into being. And then I was like, “Oh, I need to learn more.”

But even then I was always writing. I didn’t really take much time off to just research. I felt like it was really important for me to just keep moving, and have the research grow out of what the story needed me to know. When I was writing the sections in Odessa and needed certain details, like the names of streets she might have run through, I would put X’s, and later I would go and look up names. There’s this great history of Odessa written by a Brown professor, and I would look through it, look through the maps. It didn’t feel to me like those names were essentials, that they were affecting the story, I guess. I certainly think that they can. Seemingly unimportant details can have a huge impact, obviously. But I tried to use the research as inspiration, as much as information that would hold me to something.

So you don’t get bogged down by trying to make everything accurate before you get the story.

Exactly. Because the characters, the actual story, felt a lot more important to me. I think that’s partly because of how I read. When I do read historical fiction, which is not that often, I tend not to be reading for the “Oh, I want to know what it was like to live during this time.” But a lot of people do read it in that way. So at other points, I would get this anxiety, like, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t accurate enough.” I think the book actually wound up being accurate in most ways, but if people wanted to go through it and pick it apart, either from a farming perspective or an Odessa perspective, they could say this or that isn’t exactly right.

But that could happen with any book. You set a story in contemporary times, in a place you know, and someone will find inaccuracies.

Well, exactly. And that’s one of the interesting things about historical fiction. If you open yourself up, the artifice of writing it all is much more pronounced. Writing contemporary fiction, there could be the illusion that it is “truth” in a way, but there’s no such illusion with historical fiction. Any attempt to recreate the past is going to have plenty of falsehoods. Can we even attempt to understand what someone 120 years ago might have been thinking or feeling? I think we can. Do I claim that it’s accurate? I don’t think I’m as interested in that accuracy as I’m interested in the truth of it, on a human level.

While writing this book, I was ignorant about a lot of things, and I think that was good. There were a lot of things I didn’t think to worry about, and that part of what just let me do it. My sense is that with each book I write, the book will be better, but I will also be more aware of these important questions, and that awareness is going to make the process, not necessarily more difficult, but more fraught. There’s something very freeing about ignorance.

I’ve heard other writers say that the second novel was actually harder. Because of the expectations attached to a second book.

Yes, and now I can understand my process and understand what worked and didn’t work and therefore expect myself to fix all of it, but I might not have all the tools yet.

The novel is both a page-turner and a character-driven story. In literary circles the term “plot-driven” can be pejorative, as if a good plot precludes good writing or good characters. But Minna’s character really drives the forward momentum of The Little Bride. What she does and how she reacts feel very real and organic. How did you write and develop her character and the story?

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about her character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

Minna, though quite young, is so aware of and unapologetic about her desires. She even describes herself as being selfish.

In one sense she’s unapologetic about her desires and openly selfish, and then in another she’s constantly trying to want something else, or to change her desires: “Maybe I could think about it in this way and then I would want what I have. Maybe I could squint my eyes in this way and the room would be different.” But then her actual desire rears up and she’s never able to actually quash it.

Since she was a young girl, she’s had this innate sense of difference toward others—other kids being more religious and other kids being less self-aware. She’s always felt like an outsider, and her self-awareness grows from that. She’s gotten so used to her position as an outsider that she has less need to fit in and please. Some part of her wants to join that world; she looks at the character Ruth and thinks, “If I could just be a good housewife, and I could want that then that would be satisfying and I could just be normal.” But she’s just not. She’s never satisfied with that. She’s also not really satisfied with being unsatisfied, and you could say that’s a particularly modern feeling. But there are certainly lots of characters who were written in much earlier times about very strong, dissatisfied women. Jane Eyre, for instance. Becky Sharp.

Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.

You know, I’ve never read that.

People don’t necessarily like the character of Spragg.

Well, people don’t necessarily like Minna either. [laughs]

I was wondering about the “likability” factor. How have readers reacted to Minna?

People either feel that she’s complex and real and they love that she’s not perfect and that she’s not always virtuous or giving. Those people love that she can be all these things. Or they feel, “She is mean and selfish and bad.” I had a friend who leads book clubs, and her book club read it and everyone loved it except one woman who just hated Minna. That’s going to happen.

I certainly want the characters I read to be complex and flawed. It’s important to me, because otherwise I would feel so lacking in my own character if I didn’t get to read other people who were struggling. But some people don’t read for that, and they want a sense of pure escape.

In terms of writing this book, looking back at your short stories, and thinking about the novel you’re writing now, do you see any similarities between your characters? What patterns are you noticing in your own writing?

On a purely external level, [the theme of] coming of age. There are a lot of 16ish-year-old girls – I’m pretty fascinated by that time – I think I always will be. I’m sure that it will change, too, as I get older, but it’s such a ripe moment for characters because there is so much change. That time in my life still feels so vivid, in ways that are not entirely pleasurable. [laughs] The complexity is certainly there.

There are themes that run through a lot of [the work]. One theme would be outsiders versus insiders. Place is also very important in almost all my short stories as well as the book; it becomes its own character. And it’s very important to my writing process.

Sex, too. Not just sex, but there’s a lot of complex sex going on. Part of it is power issues around sex.

And women and young women exploring their sexuality—matter-of-factly, unapologetically. Their exploration often feels like part of their longing for something else.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

In your story “What is Alaska Like?” the narrator’s relationship with Randolph Cunningham boils down to wanting to leave town and her job as a chambermaid. In “The Long Net,” June and her friend encounter a frightening pedophile at a campsite but the story turns on June’s longing for connection with her mom, wanting to be noticed.

It’s funny with “The Long Net” – that was a story where my growing awareness of my themes almost stopped me from writing it altogether. As I was writing I thought, wait, I’m writing “What is Alaska Like?” again. And then I thought, you know what, that’s what writers do. That’s okay. In many ways it felt like a maturing from “What is Alaska Like?” although I still love that story, too.

But those echos can help make a collection work.

Oh, I love that you called it a collection. I hope it will be a collection. It’s cool that you’ve read my stories more recently than I have. It’s such a gift to be read closely and have things be thought about in relationship to each other.

On some level, I write because I want other writers to read what I write and to appreciate it, so it’s been a change getting used to caring about sales. I sold my novel to Riverhead, and it turns out I’ve written a historical novel, and a Jewish novel, and a women’s novel. I’ve done all these things that turn out to be marketable, which of course my agent is thrilled about. The idea that it might actually sell well and catch on in book clubs is awesome. At the same time, I’d like my short stories to be taken seriously, too, despite the fact that stories tend to be tougher on a commercial level.

How do you feel about the self-promotion aspect of being a novelist today?

It was definitely a hard transition this past spring when I decided I had to get myself on Twitter. Well, I didn’t have to, but it’s turned out to be a really good thing. I actually wound up liking it, finding this amazing community of women writers, but also writers of all sorts, and feeling connected through it. I’m not the most natural at social media at all, but I do feel like I’ve been able embrace it.

I’ve also been finding the events totally great. I’m loving readings, I’m loving doing Q & A’s. I’ve been doing a musical and literary performance with my friend, Clare Burson, and that’s been going really well. That part of it I enjoy; it feels really gratifying. Part of me likes to perform, so that’s been great.

The harder fact of self-promotion is how encompassing and full time it is. I remember thinking last year, “When my book comes out, I’m probably going to have to give a good hour or two a week to publicity.” I really thought I would just be able to keep on keeping on with the writing. That [shift] has been hard for me, because I thrive on discipline and routine. It’s the first time in my serious writing life that I’ve taken this kind of break from fiction. I’m writing some essays, which I take seriously, but it’s not the same. And I’m not even doing those in a regular, every-day-sit-down-at-the-same-time fashion. The hardest part of promotion is not the idea of going out there and speaking on behalf of my book, but just the sheer amount of time and distraction. I could see why I would have been a better author fifty years ago, when you just went out, did a few readings, and then went back to your desk.

Further Links & Resources

Erika’s debut collection, Quiet Americans, is largely inspired by the histories and experiences of her paternal grandparents, German Jews who escaped Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s.

Andrew Furman (author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma) had this to say about the book:

In searing, pitch-perfect prose, Erika Dreifus evokes in Quiet Americans the heart-wrenching intersections between domesticity and war. Drenched in the blood-soaked history of the Holocaust—yet attentive to those quietest moments between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children—these stories gather unexpected force sentence by sentence, page by page. On several occasions during my reading, I needed to remind myself to breathe.

I read Erika’s Practicing Writer newsletter and blog faithfully for several years before launching Fiction Writers Review, so Erika—as a writer about writing and a fairy godmother of writing resources—was an inspiration to me long before we met. I still remember the thrill I felt when she mentioned FWR on her site for the first time; not long after, I convinced her to write a review for us. Reading the galley of her deeply moving collection and re-reading it in published form, I was again awed by Erika, this time by her brilliance as a fiction writer herself.

This interview took place over coffee during AWP 2011, a day after attending the exciting panel she organized and moderated, “Beyond Bagels and Lox: Jewish-American Fiction in the 21st Century,” and just hours after FWR’s own panel on criticism in the 21st century, “The Good Review.”

Interview

ANNE STAMESHKIN: First, let me say again how impressed…no, that’s too cold…how struck I was by Quiet Americans. And I enjoyed your panel on Jewish fiction yesterday. I only wish there’d been ample time to argue with a particular woman in the audience, the one who announced [to your panel of Jewish fiction writers] that she didn’t like to read Jewish fiction because she wants to know “what really happened,” not something “made up.” In your case, some of the stories are even more than half-true, based on your family’s experiences across three generations. So tell me—and that naysaying woman!—why you chose to relate these stories as fiction. Did you ever consider writing them as essays instead, or have you written essays about your legacy or your own experience as a third-generation American Jew?

ERIKA DREIFUS: I have written a couple of essays, but I never thought about writing a personal or family memoir about these stories, though they are, as you know, based on and inspired by my family. I have written nonfiction pieces about my handling of this legacy. I did an article for the Boston Globe when I got a German passport, and I described the process of getting it and why I had gotten it and decided to become a German citizen—a dual U.S.-German citizen. A lot of the bare-bones history behind these stories is in that essay.

And I’ve written an essay, a conference paper, called “Ever After? History, Healing, and ‘Holocaust Fiction’ in the Third Generation.” (For those who want to read it, I should mention that it includes a lot of British spellings: it was for a conference in London, and the publisher was in Germany.) Writing that essay helped me process and figure out more how my writing—my fiction that I’d been writing—connected to the history. The fiction allowed me certain freedoms—ways to focus on what I’d consider to be more “dramatic” moments, and really push to the corners the less dramatic things.

My story “For Services Rendered”—about a Jewish doctor who was given leave to emigrate from Germany because he had treated the daughter of a high-level Nazi—the complexity of that idea had fascinated me; the bit of truth was that when my grandmother came here, she became a nanny for a family, an affluent Jewish American family whose daughter was the patient of this pediatrician, a German refugee who had been told by his Nazi employer back in Germany, “You should get out of here.” And my father, as I was writing, he said, “you know, you could look this guy up; I still have his name, and you could do a nonfiction piece…” but I said, no, that’s not what I want to do. I wanted to explore it a different way. I almost didn’t want to know what the guy’s real name was—and I didn’t use his real name.

Oh, and I think the woman in the panel, the one who doesn’t like Jewish fiction…I’m pretty sure she has a nonfiction book coming out.

Ha! That’s one way to get publicity… But you do hear people saying “Feh, novels, stories. I want to read what’s true” across the board, about all kinds of fiction. It was interesting to hear it attached specifically to Jewish fiction…that desire to know what “really happened,” about the Holocaust. Yet no amount of sheer “what” can really ever tell us why or how this happened. Do you think there’s a way of getting at even more truth through fiction…when you can give a whole story, or as much as you choose to? Fewer and fewer people remain to tell their stories—and the prospect of reconstructing “true” narratives becomes ever more elusive. But I’d argue that a collection like yours refutes the notion that a book of fiction can’t portray what really happened, at least in a larger sense.

I agree, and I think a good example of this is in my story “Homecomings” [about a Jewish immigrant couple making their first trip back to Germany]. My grandparents did go back to Europe for the first time in 1972; they did stay with French cousins, because they—my grandmother—did not want to sleep in Germany.

In “Homecomings,” the characters were there during the Munich Olympics and the massacre. Were your grandparents?

They were not. And that’s the fiction! But at some point it occurred to me that they must have been there right before. And the reason I know they weren’t there during the Olympics is that in early September of ’72, they were in charge of me—my mom was away visiting a friend and the friend’s brand-new baby in the hospital, and my dad was at work, and I fell and broke my tooth, and it turned purplish-black and chipped, and my grandparents were very upset with each other—you know, somebody wasn’t watching her! I was three. So I knew they were not away in September. But my grandmother told me that they went back that year, and she just sat outside her old building and cried. She just cried. She couldn’t even get out of the car and was not interested in going into the apartment, which actually my father and I did in 1990.

We went back, and I think that’s another thing that helped the story. I had been to Mannheim, and I had seen the apartment and the street and the office, and the descriptions of the city itself…all the things that are mentioned in “Homecomings” are based on these real places and what I saw.

The flower shop in Mannheim / photo credit: The Dreifus Family

We knew there was this flower shop where she and her father used to go, and we found it, and there’s a picture of me in front of the office building where my great-grandfather once had his business. And my grandmother was still alive then in 1990, and when we got the pictures developed and she saw them…I should say that she wasn’t a crying sort of person. She was tough; there were few things that could make her cry. But she was just hit, with everything, when she saw a picture of me in the courtyard of their apartment building.

Ifflenstrasse, the street 'off the city's main ring' where Erika's grandmother lived / photo used with permission of The Dreifus Family

There’s that blurring of generations in moments like that. Yesterday during the panel, Margot Singer talked about her cousin’s realization, while visiting the Czech Republic, that this is where I would have grown up if things had been different. There is a line in one of your stories, after German Jews have relocated to the U.S. “Doesn’t everyone want to go home?” asks the husband. And his wife is just silent.

That idea of “home” and having lost one is powerful…in 1989, my grandparents went back again. My parents had given them a trip for their 75th birthdays. Again they didn’t sleep in Germany, but they did go into Mannheim. I think they went to go change money in a bank and some man was trying to tell my grandmother that she should move back to Mannheim, that she should come “home.” And she told us, “I really let him have it!” (Laughs.) She said, “I told him, ‘America’s my home!’”

Not a quiet American!

That’s the funny thing. No one who knew her would call her quiet…but my grandfather, he was. Though I don’t know how much of that was the language. I don’t think he ever felt comfortable in English. The way a conversation went with them on the phone, is that I’d have to remind her that I wanted to talk to him, too. And she would give him instructions: Grandpa, talk!

Speaking of the title, I love it, and it feels so fitting for the collection. In every story, even the ones that don’t take place in America, silence plays a powerful role. In your story “Matrilineal Descent,” for instance, Emma stays quiet while her heart breaks slowly over time—with drastic consequences, as this “quiet” still allows for vengeance. What did you want Quiet Americans to mean, or to suggest to readers? And were you referencing the Graham Greene book—the singular American to your plural?

It’s clear that I was influenced by Greene’s title to some degree—hey, it’s a great one—but I’ve actually worried about how to respond to questions about it. There isn’t an intended direct connection between that novel and my collection. My book isn’t an homage to or a criticism of his.

In most story collections, as you know, there is usually a story that shares its title with the collection…but the funny thing is that the title story wasn’t part of the initial book! The collection has gone through so many different iterations.

Tell me more about the book’s genesis. How did it take shape?

Three of the stories in Quiet Americans started out as pieces I wrote during my MFA program. I wrote a whole collection for my thesis, and the working title then was The Unchosen, because I had a story called “The Unchosen,” which has never been published, although I’ve submitted it everywhere. Alas, it lived up to its name: it was never chosen! (Laughs) Then I had a very long story called “Reparation,” so then that was the title for a long time. And then I decided that even though that story came close at a couple of places, there were various issues about it—one being of course how long it was—that made people not want to take it. But once I removed it from the book, I had to come up with yet another title.

You know that some of the story titles in the book are in other languages. “Lebensraum”…you know a lot of people—even really educated people—don’t know what that is. And “Mishpocha” is sort of limited to the Jewish reading community, so even though I felt that Lebensraum really was a good title for the whole collection—I could see it working well—I didn’t want to use it because I didn’t want to alienate people right away.

However, you did keep this title—and “Mishpocha”—for the stories themselves. Why?

I have a PhD in European history, but my potential readers are not necessarily in this specific field. And you can get through college and definitely high school without doing much European history these days! A whole book with an unfamiliar title might be off-putting. But I wanted to keep “Lebensraum” as the title of the story because I believe most short-story readers are curious and brave enough to read something under an unfamiliar word and then maybe even look it up.

So, getting back to the issue of the title…then I returned to the stories that were left, and “For Services Rendered” doesn’t really do it for the whole book, and “Homecomings” was, I felt, a little bland, and then I realized I could take a piece from a longer story I wasn’t going to able to use, the one that “Quiet Americans” used to be part of, and it really worked. As soon as I thought of this, I knew it was right. But it was a long time coming.

And that title can mean a lot of different things…are you quiet from fear? Are you assimilated when you’re quiet? There’s powerful gratitude felt by the American tourist in “Quiet Americans” when the British war vet speaks up to the insensitive Berlin tour guide.

I was surprised by how much I liked that this story was written in the second person. As many of FWR’s writer-readers know, that can be hard to pull off. Why did you make this choice for this particular story?

First, I love that you like the choice. A lot of editors who saw the story said, “Great story, but I just have a personal distaste for the second person.” I hope that the piece earns this through quiet…the writer is asking the reader to speak.

I agree. Reading it, the story feels confrontational in the best way. It feels like “you” are the one in this uncomfortable, even hostile, situation. And what would “you” do? it asks. Would “you” be able to speak up? It’s a different “you” of course—but it reminds me of the character-narrator addressed in a popular Lorrie Moore story, “How to Become a Writer…”

I love what Moore does with the second person in other Self-Help stories, too. “How to Be the Other Woman,” for one.

Agreed. I see a kinship between her second-person characters and yours…that implied sense of universal experience as well as an individual one.

I’m glad that came across! Lorrie Moore is one of my favorites.

After reading the three more directly linked stories in Quiet Americans, the trilogy beginning with “Matrilineal Descent,” I have to ask: did you ever consider shaping your book into a novel-in-stories, focusing on these recurring characters (who represent three generations of the same family, spanning twentieth-century Germany to present-day New York City)?

Yes and no. I have other stories, some from my MFA thesis, but they’re a little repetitive in terms of theme. So initially I did have ideas about putting more stories about this family (or versions of them) together in a book, but it just didn’t really work. It felt a little artificial…stretched. Maybe it was because I did not plan. If I had really set out to write the linked stories, then I could have done it. But on the other hand, I’ve tweaked them quite a bit…they’re not the same stories as the ones I originally wrote. For the book, I even changed some of the names to make the stories more cohesive…in “Homecomings,” I did this. It wasn’t always as obvious that the refugee couple in “Homecomings” was the same as the one in “Lebensraum.” Although in my mind, they were both inspired by my grandparents, I had initially named them differently and was originally imagining two different families…but then I realized they were in fact the same couple…and I went back and changed some details in one of the stories to fit this. It felt more right this way than it had been when I was trying to treat them differently.

One sort of interesting thing that I came to realize as I was shaping the collection is that, in a way, the “Quiet American” story could also be considered, even though the names aren’t used, to be a continuation of “Homecomings.” Because the details are really the same…the grandparents from Germany, the mention of Stuttgart for the consulate, and there are two grandchildren mentioned. So readers could decide that this is another story of that family, but you don’t have to decide that.

In these crazy publishing times, why write a collection, period, instead of a novel?

Actually, I did write a novel. When I went to the MFA program, it had just gotten agented, and I’d done a lot of revisions for the agent, and she was sending it out—so I didn’t want to workshop it. I didn’t want more feedback at that point; of course it was one thing to get notes from editors at houses, but quite another to bring it back into a workshop. So I started writing these stories, and they kept coming. And one really good thing about my program was that it demanded a lot of production. We had to present 8-25 pages twice during the residency week and then four times during the semester.

That’s a lot!

It is, and some people submitted multiple revisions of the same story or novel chapter during a semester, but I never did that. I mean, I did workshop “Lebensraum” and “Homecomings” in revisions during two different semesters with two different groups of people, and I may have submitted early iterations of “For Services Rendered” twice during the final semester, which was an especially trying one, but I wrote over twenty stories during my MFA years.

Why did you choose to do that instead of workshopping revisions?

There was a huge advantage to me of just getting all that material down and then going back and revising later. And this is why I wasn’t really focused on that novel. It was never published, and it remains the novel in the drawer, the proverbial first novel. To the question “Why short stories?” the practical answer is that this is what I worked on during those years. And of course I love reading short fiction, too.

What were you reading when you worked on this collection, and who are some other Jewish writers, or artists in other mediums, who inspire you? Who would you recommend to other people who are interested in reading and writing Jewish fiction?

I would recommend everyone who was on the panel, and everyone we recommended during it… [EDITOR'S NOTE: Scroll down for a grand reading list!] Some short story collections that have really spoken to me include Margot Singer’s The Pale of Settlement, and one on the after-history of the Holocaust is the wonderful novella-and-stories Awake in the Dark, by Shira Nayman. (One of the stories from it, “The House on Kronenstrasse,” appeared in the Atlantic’s Fiction Issue in 2005, and I interviewed her for JBooks. Both Nayman’s and Singer’s were books I felt a kinship with, ones I wished I’d written! Obviously with Singer’s there are stories about Israel that I never could have written, but I just admired it so much and felt so connected to it.

Have you spent much time in Israel?

Not enough. I went for the second time last year, in October. And I first went there in 1988. There’s not much I would redo in terms of my life, but one thing I wish I would have done when I was younger would be to have applied for a fellowship and to have spent more time there—a year or more, maybe—and to have become fluent in Hebrew. But I graduated from college the year of the first Gulf War; I remember my college roommate’s sister was in Israel in January of 1991, and it was a really scary time for American families to send their kids there. It would have probably been amazing to go when I was younger. But maybe I’ll get the opportunity for a longer stay somewhere in the future. I hope so. I do feel very attached to Israel.

And how much time have you spent in Germany?

Not a whole lot. The country I really know best outside of the United States is France. And I began this love affair with France and all things French when I was in middle school and started studying French, French literature and history…but the first time I went to Germany was 1990, during my semester in France. And it was right after the wall came down.

It was an exciting time. I brought back pieces of the wall. East Berlin—what had been East Berlin—was in bad shape. The pictures that I have from that trip…well, let’s just say the city has been completely reborn in the last twenty years.

Then I went back again a few months later with my dad. He was on business, and we went in the summer to Mannheim. Then my dad, my sister, my mom, and I went in 1993, and then I went again, to Stuttgart, in 2004.

During one of those trips, did you have an experience like the tourist in “Quiet Americans”? Or was this something you imagined (or feared) might happen?

I don’t know if you experience this, too, but when I write fiction that is at least partly autobiographical, I sometimes have trouble remembering what I’ve made up and what’s the real memory. And I definitely feel that way about this story… The idea of the RAF soldier…that didn’t happen on my bus. I got that idea from a conversation with someone else who had a similar experience. Some aspects of that story are definitely true. The reason I went on the bus tour is that I do have a terrible sense of direction, and I’ve made a habit since my first trip to Paris: get on the bus and figure out where everything is. But I can’t say with 100% certainty that I had what was my narrator’s impression: that this guide was very much focused on how everything in Stuttgart was destroyed or rebuilt and didn’t talk about much else.

When I read the story, I find myself questioning that memory. Did it really happen, or was it just my feeling?

And I’ve had this doubt emerge about a number of stories I’ve written. So to get back to that earlier question, this is another reason I’m so glad it’s fiction! Because if it were a memoir…I’m one of the people who believes that a memoir should be as true as the author can possibly make it. I don’t want to have an A Million Little Pieces moment. So even for fiction, I want to be very careful to say that I don’t remember exactly what happened.

As a Jewish American, did you grow up feeling more like part of a community, or like an outsider?

Growing up in Brooklyn, almost everyone we knew was Jewish. There were some Italians and Italian-Americans, Roman Catholics, but then we moved to the suburbs and we were the only Jews on our block, and I was the only Jew in my fourth-grade class, and it was a culture shock. And in the larger middle school and high school, and then in college, I got used to being around Jews again, and then at the MFA program, I found myself the rare Jew again. In France, as a high schooler, I lived with a family in the Alps, and one of the daughters asked me the first day I was there, “So, you’re Catholic?” I said, “No.” “Well then you’re Protestant.” And I told her I was Jewish. She said, “Really? I’ve never met a Jewish person before.” I slept in her room, and there was a cross over the bed. There was this back and forth, growing up, between belonging and being an outsider.

And I come up against this idea, from within the literary community, that being Jewish is “not so special,” that everyone’s met Jews and knows about Jews.

In cities like New York, it’s likely most people will run into someone Jewish at some point, but it’s amazing how segregated many communities…even urban ones…remain. Growing up in the burbs of a small city in Pennsylvania, I was asked more than once—and not maliciously!—if I had horns.

Yes! People say that everyone’s assimilated, and yesterday one of the panelists mentioned that he doesn’t want to read any more about so-called “obliterationist anxiety,” and my chest tightened. There are little things. I remember moving to New Jersey and there was a dance class that many of my classmates took, but it was at a country club that didn’t admit Jews. And I didn’t even want to dance in that class—I was so clumsy, it would have been a horrible thing!—but just knowing that something like that exists, when you’re 9 years old, and knowing my grandparents’ background, and watching the Holocaust miniseries on television (it had just aired the year before), which I probably shouldn’t have watched at that age, but I did….

What role do you think Israel, or the idea of a Jewish state, plays in this concept of “obliterationist anxiety”?

For me, personally, it’s all significant and everything is tied together. But it’s a complicated subject, Israel, especially in the context of the constant public discourse about it.

This brings up something very important to me and my writing more generally. In my history education, I was graced over many years to work with Stanley Hoffmann, technically a political scientist, but really a multiply-gifted individual who is really interested in moral issues and how complicated they are. I was his TA for his class on France between 1936-1944, and in that class and elsewhere, he really helped me not see things in black and white, how hard it is to make moral choices and, as he has said, that “it takes a lot of courage to be a hero.”

In “Mishpocha,” for instance, what happens on that street…that happened to me when I was walking in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And of course people in my parents’ generation read the story and say, “Well, of course you didn’t say anything. Who knows what might have happened to you?” But people in my generation—our generation, and those a little younger—those people can get upset when they read this, that I didn’t say something. When the incident came up in a workshop, there was quite a discussion. Now, I can be brave in some contexts: I’ll speak up in a class or curriculum committee and say, “Hey, this should really be on the syllabus!” But in other settings, like in that situation on the street, I’m not brave at all.

I wouldn’t know how to write about that moment in nonfiction. It was so searing to have it happen, but being able to bring it into a fictional piece felt…important, and I hope that it helps scaffold that story and gives more insight into the diversity of the Jewish American experience: this man was raised as a certain kind of Jew, and his wife as another. We live in such a multicultural society—but various online message boards will be teeming with rages about people “appropriating” other cultures. We all live together, and how limiting does it become to only write about people who are just like you? Unfortunately my “Reparation” story—the longer one I mentioned before—didn’t work for a number of reasons, but in it, I was trying to get at some of the issues between African Americans and Jews. Perhaps it was worrisome to editors that as a Jewish author, I was writing African American characters…but we’re not living in a Jewish ghetto. We do interact. So it feels unnatural to only have my Jewish characters interact with other Jews.

It’s obviously a complex question. Of course we want to get things right, and there’s often a fine line between appropriating and inhabiting…but writing just “what we know” or what we are is awfully limiting. After an Edward P. Jones reading I attended, someone asked him what his thoughts on writing other genders, races, etc., were. In his novel, The Known World, which I love, he wrote white women as convincingly as he did African American men, and he claimed to feel pretty confident doing so. But he admitted to feeling suspicious of white authors who try to write black characters—and really of any majority trying to write from the POV of any minority. I can understand his perspective on this (again, you’ve got to get it right!), but I wonder how, or if, we can get to a place where readers and editors can look at an author photo and not put up a wall if the author has a different gender or background from the characters.

Or a different life experience. I’ve been in workshops in which some participants—who were mothers themselves—knew I don’t have a child, and occasionally someone would just put up a wall, as you said, at certain things in my stories, saying, “No, that’s just not how it is when you have children,” or “She wouldn’t feel that way three weeks after having a baby,” or “She wouldn’t fit into her clothes yet.”—but these things vary so much from mother to mother, from person to person. The idea that I had overstepped by even trying to imagine motherhood…that you’re only allowed to write about certain things because you’ve lived them…to me, it contravenes the idea of fiction.

I find that if a character comes across as not believable, not real within a story’s world, that’s when I go to the author photo and think something generically judgmental…you know, “Come on, really, male writer? You think women are like this?”

I know what you mean. But then you get writers like Jacob Paul. I was so impressed with Sarah/Sara, the character and the book.

He wrote the character of Sarah/Sara beautifully—her voice, everything. I forgot the author was a man for huge spans of time.

His book gets into many interesting topics that I’m invested in, that I want to write about: 9/11, and Israel. It was a pleasure to review.

You’ve been writing book reviews for a while now—for as long as you’ve been writing fiction…

And teaching them, too!

I didn’t know that. Where did you teach writing reviews, and what was the context? I just learned today that Penn State’s MFA program offers a course on reviewing.

Overall, I’m surprised that more writing programs don’t offer courses in writing reviews. When I was freelancing and teaching, I taught a course online in writing book reviews. And through the Lesley MFA program, which has an extra interdisciplinary or independent study component, I ran a book review class for several semesters until I took a job at CUNY.

As discussed at the [AWP] Good Review panel, it can be hard—or at least problematic—to write reviews that are overly critical when you’re a writer yourself. And some people make the argument that writers shouldn’t be critics, that we have too much personal stake in the market/community, or some kind of ulterior motive. But there are huge pluses, too, right, to donning both hats? Let’s spin this toward the positive… What do you think are some advantages of being both a writer and a reviewer of books?

Charles Baxter made the excellent point that if you do workshopping and critiquing correctly, that’s actually a lot like reviewing. And ideally, being able to write a good critique about someone else’s work helps you learn about the craft yourself. And that’s sort of how I feel about reviewing, especially the reviews I do for FWR, which focus at least in part on craft elements, and which are written largely for an audience of fiction writers, and which review the work as fiction. The issues that come up in writing about Jacob Paul’s book—the use of point of view, a man writing a woman’s voice, and how a novelist or short-story writer can write successfully about these huge events (suicide bombings, 9/11)—it really does help clarify the way I think about these issues and how to frame them, craft-wise, in my own work.

Of course the review should first and foremost say something about another person’s work: the act of writing about it, of reviewing, helps focus your thinking about it. But doing so can only help your own work.

And is there an advantage to the community aspect of being a writer-reviewer? Do you like the idea of authors reviewing each others’ work out there. Do you like the idea of being reviewed by a fellow fiction writer, or would you prefer to be reviewed by a critic who identifies first and foremost as a critic?

One of the things I’ve really loved so far about my book being released is seeing how reviewers respond to the book; I’m thrilled that they get it. Some of them have been fiction writers, and they really seem to understand what I’m doing. Whether that’s because they’re just innately really smart [laughs], or because they’ve really thought about what goes into writing fiction because they do it themselves, I don’t know, but it’s good to have writers review other writers.

But it’s also hard…in another review-focused panel yesterday, they talked about negative reviews. I try not to write many negative reviews…I’ve written some, but not many. Recently I did write—for the Jewish Journal—a fairly negative review of a work of fiction in translation, an Israeli author’s book. I criticized both the translation and the story itself. Disclaimer: I can’t read Hebrew beyond street signs, but I could tell the translation was clumsy because it just wasn’t working in English. And I was troubled by the overall jumpiness and shifts in points of view: the two narrative strands weren’t integrated very well.

I wrote a pretty mixed review on an anthology of Jewish fiction called Promised Lands. It was scary to say negative things about it because some of the authors in there were quite acclaimed, and many of the stories in it were quite good, wonderful even…but some were not. Mostly I had concerns and questions about the way the larger book was put together, and I voiced these. These pointed to larger questions about how literary anthologies are put together, and I tried to broaden it to that discussion.

But mostly I try to review books of fiction that I can recommend to readers, books I admire and want others to admire and enjoy, too. And if we can talk about fiction as fiction, too, that’s wonderful. I feel so grateful to have lucked into this community at FWR. It’s like being part of an “ideal cohort.” I’m excited to continue working with the site—especially on our annual celebration of Short Story Month.

We love that you’re part of the FWR family. Thanks for taking the time to talk about your collection!

Further Links and Recommendations

Read “For Services Rendered,” a story from Quiet Americans discussed in this interview, via Book Buzzr:

Erika Dreifus loves to recommend books to readers interested in 21st-century Jewish fiction. The following list is drawn from a handout she created for her AWP panel’s attendees; you can find the original–which breaks these books down into thematic categories and includes related recommendations–on Erika’s website, which also links to a bevy of blogs and publications featuring Jewish lit.

• Albert, Elisa. How This Night Is Different (2006).
• Amend, Allison. Stations West (2010).
• Brown, Danit. Ask for a Convertible: Stories (2008).
• Brown, Rosellen. Half a Heart (2000).
• Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).
• Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated (2002).
• Furman, Andrew. Alligators May Be Present (2005).
• Goodman, Allegra. Kaaterskill Falls (1999).
• Hamburger, Aaron. Faith for Beginners (2005).
• Haworth, Kevin. The Discontinuity of Small Things (2005).
• Haworth, Kevin. “The Scribe” (2009).
• Horn, Dara. All Other Nights (2009).
• Kadish, Rachel. From a Sealed Room (1998).
• Leegant, Joan. Wherever You Go (2010).
• Litman, Ellen. The Last Chicken in America (2007).
• Lowenthal, Michael. Charity Girl (2005).
• Mirvis, Tova. The Ladies’ Auxiliary (1999).
• Obejas, Achy. Days of Awe (2001).
• Orringer, Julie. The Invisible Bridge (2010).
• Paul, Jacob. Sarah/Sara (2010).
• Reyn, Irina. What Happened to Anna K. (2008).
• Rosenbaum, Thane. The Golems of Gotham (2002).
• Setton, Ruth Knafo. The Road to Fez (2001).
• Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2001).
• Singer, Margot. The Pale of Settlement (2008).
• Sofer, Dalia. The Septembers of Shiraz (2007).
• Solomon, Anna. The Little Bride (2011).
• Stern, Steve. The Wedding Jester (1999).
• Vapnyar, Lara. Broccoli & Other Tales of Food and Love (2008).
• Weber, Katharine. Triangle (2006).

Initially published in Prairie Schooner (and therefore available online to those with JSTOR access), “Body Count” presents us with a protagonist who appears across the collection: Susan Stern. In 2002, Susan, an American-born Jew with close family in Israel, is living in New York, working in a newsroom. “In the morning, she pulled the news stories off the wire,” the story begins, and we soon learn that among these news stories are some about what is now called “the Battle of Jenin.” If you don’t recall this episode, you can look it up easily enough.

Or you can read “Body Count.”

“Body Count” not only does an extraordinary job interweaving “the political” with “the personal”—in this case, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on a contemporary conflict that continues to evoke in me reactions similar to those that we see in Singer’s protagonist—but it is also an excellent example of so many other types of fiction that I’m drawn to: fiction situated in the workplace, fiction about Jews in America, fiction that takes on big, complicated questions—even within the compressed space of a short story. “Body Count” is a story that I will keep rereading, and learning from, for a long time to come.

• Order the back issue of Prairie Schooner in which “Body Count” appears (Volume 81, Number 3, Fall 2007)
• Find a copy of The Pale of Settlement at an indie bookstore near you
• Learn more about Margot Singer and her work through her author website

Edith Pearlman’s first story in her new collection, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (Lookout Books, 2011), begins, “On the subway Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem.” Reading this, I knew I was in for a treat. That opening line of “Inbound” strikes the perfect balance between setting the stage and teasing with the yet unknown: Pearlman establishes the setting as a city through the word subway, and she gives us Sophie, a character who is whimsical, literary and thoughtful. As the story unfolds, we quickly learn that Sophie is a child, dragged along by her parents to visit Harvard, their alma mater and, they hope, her future alma mater as well. “Inbound” is a quiet story of a family, of a father willing the best for his child and struggling with disappointed expectations; it is the story of a mother doing her best to care for her family while at the same time being human and angry and tired; and it is the story of two sisters—Sophie, the main character and the bearer of all her parents’ hopes, and Lily, the younger sister with Down’s syndrome, who only speaks a couple of words of dialogue, but around whom the family revolves. Pearlman captures this family dynamic with the same sort of intelligent, humor-lightened introspection with which she begins the story. She writes that Sophie remembers her father telling friends that “Lily clarifies life,” but:

Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

In this description, Pearlman has the child of the story deliver the thematic trope of stickiness, but keeps Sophie believably a child through the use of characterizing details like “her mother had shown her how,” and “gumdrops left on a windowsill.” Sophie is precocious, but also very much a child; Pearlman sets this tone in the story’s opening line, and because of that opening, the story is able to continue forward, portraying a child both lost and found.

Image Credit: Flickr-Chiot

While “Inbound” is the story of a white, non-religious academic family, Pearlman’s next story, “Day of Awe,” begins, “He was the last Jew in the cursed land,” and the difference between these two openings hints at one of the truly great things about Pearlman’s writing: its diversity of story and setting. This story focuses on Robert, a Jewish patriarch visiting his son, Lex, and Jaime, his soon-to-be grandson, in an unnamed Latin American country. The epic tone of aloneness and heroism in the first line sets up the story of a man trying to get his bearings in a changing world, in which his gay son is adopting a boy who barely speaks Spanish, let alone English or Hebrew, and in which Robert will be forced to celebrate Yom Kippur as the lone Jew amongst “a gaggle of gentiles,” rather than the being able to “pray for forgiveness with nine others.” What is striking in reading these stories side-by-side is not just how they they differ with regard to characters, place, and tone, but also how these stories are united by the theme of searching for belonging and understanding. This theme pervades every one of Pearlman’s stories.

Binocular Vision is a book of new and collected works, with thirty-four stories in all—twenty-one older stories and thirteen new. While not delineated as such in the Table of Contents, the stories are grouped according to their original books, beginning with five stories from Pearlman’s first collection, Vaquita and Other Stories, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1996. After the Vaquita stories, the next five stories are from Love Amongst The Greats, and the next eight are from How to Fall, originally published in 2005. Beyond some minor polishing and the changing of a couple of titles (“Day of Awe” used to be, “To Reach This Season”), the stories are unchanged. The final three stories in the “Collected Works” section do not seem to have been previously collected in any other book, but they seem to have been written in the same eras as the others.

While the stories themselves are generally unchanged, they have been rearranged somewhat within their unofficial book groupings, allowing them to inform each other in a new way, and the effect of having them all gathered together is the creation of a broader, more cohesive universe.

All stories in a good collection talk to one another, but some talk more than others. Pearlman returns to the same unnamed Central American country several times, while other stories take place in Maine, Massachusetts, Israel, and Europe.

Rearranging the stories highlights their binding threads. For instance, placing “Vaquita” as the last story from Pearlman’s first book, and then “Allog” as the first story from Love Amongst the Greats allows us to read these stories one after the other—and we can see that the soprano mentioned in “Vaquita” is living in the apartment building in Jerusalem in “Allog.” The latter story opens: “There were five apartments in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.” In both stories, the soprano is one of those vital connections we all share—the connections of friendship and of proximity—bonds not validated by marriage or family, but as much a part of the fabric of life as any official relationship. Too often we ignore or belittle these proximal relationships, we think nothing of the other mailboxes in the apartment lobby and try to ignore our embarrassing human commonalities and frailties as we pound on the floor to get the downstairs neighbors to quiet their quarrel. Pearlman takes these connections and builds her fictional worlds around them, and in doing so, shows us what it is to be human.

Other stories are even more closely related, for instance the trilogy “If Love Were All,” “Purim Night,” and “The Coat,” each of which follows two characters, Sonya and Roland, during their time as relief workers during World War II and in the rebuilding years afterward. These connected stories work exactly as they should—each one standing apart with its own arc, climax, and resolution, each its own picture postcard of a life; and when read together, they reveal not only the panoramic of the relationship, but also the significance of previously unnoticed details.

Image Credit: Flickr-TailspinT

Beyond these connections, the most unifying element of Pearlman’s stories is the invented town of Godolphin, a suburb of Boston. In a 2005 interview with Sarabande Books (the publisher of How To Fall), Pearlman said of Godolphin that:

I dreamed of a place where odd people could be themselves . . . [Godolphin] has the human scale of a small town and provides the rich opportunities of a big city. It welcomes immigrants. It is home to austere Yankees and skeptical Jews and believing Catholics, to straights and gays, to families and solitaries. It is tolerant and inefficient and modest.

In this, her description of her dream place, Pearlman describes the world, because for all of humanity’s failures, ultimately our world does have room for each element that she names. While we may push and yell, some demanding individuality and others striving for homogeneity in which no one is the Other, we are, despite all of our efforts, endlessly different and the same. That is what literature shows us—great stories explore how our seemingly unique experiences are commonplace, while at the same time showing how people we thought we knew, could, in fact, be thinking, feeling and experiencing things that we never before imagined.

Image Credit: Flickr-Cia de Foto

Pearlman’s invention of Godolphin demonstrates that just as even the most casual of relationships marks people, they are likewise influenced, and influence, place. Characters fall in and out of love, they make mistakes, they yearn for belonging, they yearn for solitude, and they do this all somewhere, someplace—and most often, for Pearlman, that place is Godolphin.

While all of her stories are character and plot driven, one of her Godolphin stories is also expressly about both place and impermanence. The story “Mates” opens as “Keith and Mitsuko Maguire drifted into town like hobos, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fare like everyone else.” Again, with the opening line, Pearlman sets the tone, character, setting, and tension of the story. We understand that Godolphin is just outside of Boston; we know the characters’ names; and we know a bit about them because of these names. We understand that somehow the story will explore their difference, their way of seeming like hobos, unbounded by the constraints of obligation and place.

The story is told by a peripheral narrator, who describes in the course of a few pages how the Maguires came to town, lived there for twenty-five years while raising three sons, and then (in the week their youngest went to Medical School) decamped in the same manner with which they arrived, never to be seen again. The story is filled with the details of the town as the narrator expresses her wonder that the Maguires could have left so little an impression, and could have likewise been so little marked by the town. Of course, even while doing so, the narrator demonstrates the paradoxical opposite of impermanence as she explores all ways the Maguires resisted labels and connections and yet couldn’t help but be tied into the fabric of the community. She says:

The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filigreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired.

As the narrator tells it, this becoming integrated into a community is inevitable. She comments later that “[m]any townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs – shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware.” Pearlman argues through her story that whatever makes up our daily routine is what defines our life; we are the sum of our daily existence, and thus, for a large part, we are where we live.

Image Credit: Flickr-Ed Yourdon

Descriptions of Godolphin are interwoven with details about the Maguires. Recalling the family’s arrival day, the narrator comments, “They were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks.” Later they spent the night in the Godolphin Inn. Through small details like this—a place name here, a tree there—a town emerges. It does not take elaborate descriptions or flowery words to evoke a place; rather it requires an eye for the small, often domestic details of where we live. Writing place requires noticing qualities of shadow and light, as Pearlman does in “Vailles” when she writes of the nanny who seeks solitude in her Godolphin basement apartment: “meager sunlight slipped like an envelope into one after another of her high windows and then lay on the floor as if waiting to be picked up.” Through that sentence and through the story, the character of the nanny is revealed as one who seeks humble comforts, and who shapes a life in which she knows herself, rather than the self others impose on her. And we understand this, in part, because we have seen her apartment. Home is the most intimate of landscapes, and the setting that speaks most to our character—we are both from, and are the creators of, the places we call home.

This reminder that we are all from somewhere makes it all the more appropriate that Binocular Vision is published by Lookout Books, the new press from the University of North Carolina—Wilmington’s Creative Writing Department, which also publishes Ecotone, a journal dedicated to “Reimagining Place.” It seems fitting that Lookout Books would assert in their publishing philosophy the goal “to publish a vibrant rather than docile literature of place.” That sums up Pearlman’s approach rather precisely.

Since the book launched in January, glowing reviews have appeared in places like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Both of these reviews began in the same way, with the reviewers admitting how they had never before heard of Edith Pearlman, and I admit now that I was also among their number. However, just as Ann Patchett predicted in her Introduction to Binocular Vision, this book seems to be the vehicle “with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure.” Binocular Vision is, in many ways, Edith Pearlman’s opening line, broadcasting her character, her tone, and her ability to the larger world. She is setting a firm stake in the literary landscape that she is a writer to be reckoned with, and even more importantly, that she is a teller of stories that delight, challenge and inspire the reader.

Further Links and Resources

Edith Pearlman © Jonathan Sachs

Erika Dreifus / photo credit: Lisa Hancock

In the beginning, I read. I read histories and testimonies. I read Anne Frank’s diary, and “books for children” with titles like Mischling, Second Degree and The Endless Steppe. I read Elie Wiesel. I read Schindler’s List before it became a movie. In college and graduate school, I read more. Much more. I began to notice a shift in authorship. Rather than reading books by those who had lived through Nazi persecution, I was discovering memoirs and fiction by that generation’s children. These were “second-generation” writers, I learned: 2G.

My interest in the subject matter was deeply personal. My father’s parents, German Jews, had immigrated to the United States as young adults—each, alone—in the late 1930s. They met in New York and married in 1941. My father, their only child, was born in 1944. The first of two grandchildren, I arrived in 1969. We were very close. In literal terms, our south Brooklyn apartment was footsteps from theirs; after my parents and sister and I moved to New Jersey in 1978, our visits were frequent and our phone calls even more so.

In my twenties, I began writing about this legacy in a few nonfiction pieces. Then I started writing fiction. Increasingly, I found that my fiction was inspired by my grandparents’ refugee experiences and their own family histories. This focus continued after my grandmother’s passing—she was the last surviving grandparent—at the start of my second semester in an MFA program in January 2002. It has resulted in one novel manuscript (unpublished) and one short-story collection, Quiet Americans (published earlier this year).

But when I began this work, I didn’t know that elsewhere—at other desks, in other countries—other writers were similarly engaged. Also born in or on the edges of the 1970s, these writers, too, have published fictional narratives inspired in some way by their grandparents’ encounters with Nazism, and by their own Holocaust-related family histories of war, immigration, and survival.

Among them are three novelists: Julie Orringer (b. 1973), whose The Invisible Bridge was published in 2010 to considerable acclaim and re-issued in paperback a few months ago; Alison Pick (b. 1975), whose Far to Go, published in the author’s native Canada last fall, has won that country’s Jewish Book Award for fiction and will be released in the U.S. in May 2011; and British writer Natasha Solomons (b. 1980), whose debut novel was published last year in the U.K. as Mr. Rosenblum’s List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman and in the U.S. as Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English.

Julie Orringer / photo credit: Stephanie Rausser

Alison Pick

Natasha Solomons / photo credit: Mike Carsley

Whether in front matter, acknowledgments, author bios, or easily-accessed interviews, all three of these writers have spoken openly about their books’ roots in their grandparents’ histories. Moreover, rather than focusing on the sequelae of this family experience on their own lives and psyches—a tendency for which critic Ruth Franklin has sharply (at moments, perhaps too sharply) criticized certain second-generation fiction writers in her important and equally recent book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction—they have spun stories grounded in their grandparents’ prewar and wartime European worlds (and in the case of Mr. Rosenblum, extending into the 1950s).

Reading these novels by Orringer, Pick, and Solomons in the months leading up to and following my own book’s publication, I found an unusual sense of companionship, as an author and as a grandchild.

And as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) approaches—this year, it will begin at sundown on Sunday, May 1—it seems especially appropriate to recognize these works from an emerging literary cohort.

First, a comment. Some readers—I’ve encountered a few—may believe that, for lack of better phrasing, “too many” “Holocaust stories” are “already” out there. That, again for lack of more felicitous wording, there’s “nothing new” to be gained from work that evokes this cataclysm. To this, I can respond no more eloquently than by quoting Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar, co-author with her son, Doron S. Ben-Atar, of What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust:

The variety of Holocaust experiences is equal to the number of survivors. A terrible common reality engulfed all of us, and yet when I speak to other survivors I sometimes have the distinct impression that each of us, despite having been in the same “there,” has been in a different place. We experienced the horrors as differently as we reacted to the events at the end of the war: the sudden freedom, the liberation we dreamed of, and the return home to find nothing and, most horribly, nearly no one.

Moreover, by shifting the literary terrain away from the by now horrifyingly familiar ghettos, gas chambers, and attics to encompass other stories, including those of people who—like Solomons’ grandparents, or mine— managed to leave their European homelands before World War II’s actual outbreak—we spotlight characters who, as Solomons has so beautifully explained in an interview, lived “on the edges of history,” and their less-recognizable conflicts, plotlines, and settings.

***

Let us begin with Natasha Solomons’ book, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English. As I noted in a review for Jewish Book World last year, the “About the Author” section at the conclusion of this novel states that Mr. Rosenblum “is based on [Solomons'] own grandparents’ experience.” The novel focuses on Jack (né Jakob) Rosenblum, who emigrates from Germany with his wife, Sadie, and their baby daughter in the summer of 1937. Upon arrival, Jack receives a “dusky blue pamphlet entitled While you are in England: Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee.” If Jack cherishes a Bible, this pamphlet is it: “He obeyed the list with more fervour than the most ardent Bar Mitzvah boy did the laws of Kashrut….” Over time, he expands and adds to the list based on his own observations.

Sadie Rosenblum does not share her husband’s enthusiasm for throwing off their past (or for his “verdammt list”). She is haunted by the family left behind—and lost—in Germany. This domestic conflict underlies the novel.

But the challenge that actively drives the plot is Jack’s postwar quest to build a golf course in Dorset, which results from his being denied golf-club membership—the final list item, “the quintessential characteristic of the true English gentleman.” In Solomons’ book, then, two specific strands of experience emerge: the immigrant quest to assimilate (in this case, with the immigrant’s Jewishness playing at least as much a role as his Germanness); and a type of “survivor’s guilt” experienced by someone who survived by seeking refuge in another country.

***

How, when, and where to seek refuge from Nazism are questions at the foundations of the conflicts and tensions in Alison Pick’s Far to Go. Two narratives alternate: one set in the late 1930s and one much more “presentist.” The former narrative dominates, in both page count and power; as at least one reviewer has noted, it is this historical storyline that more compellingly captures the reader’s attention and emotions. (I empathize with the challenge that Pick faced here: One of the repeated responses my then-agent and I received when we circulated my aforementioned novel manuscript was that the book’s “historical” chapters far outshone the ones set closer to the present. In any case, Far to Go’s secondary narrative seems deliberately opaque, evidently a mystery that the reader is intended to comprehend only as the book nears its end.)

The main story opens in September 1938, on the eve of the Munich agreement that delivered the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler. Pavel Bauer is a prosperous factory owner—Jewish—living in a “sleepy Bohemian town” with his wife, Anneliese; their little boy, Pepik; and Pepik’s devoted, non-Jewish governess, Marta. Backgrounded by the steady Nazi takeover of territory from Munich forward, the novel depicts a specific slice of Jewish experience in the Nazi era: in Czechoslovakia, the land that Pick’s paternal grandparents fled in 1941.

Far to Go also spotlights the Kindertransport, by which thousands of Jewish children living in Germany or German-annexed territories (including Czechoslovakia) were able to seek refuge in Great Britain. Reading this novel, one is reminded anew about fiction’s power to illuminate “emotional truths.” One of Pick’s most significant artistic successes is this: It is impossible to absorb scenes at the train station, where little Pepik’s parents and Marta manage to separate themselves from the child, or the subsequent ones in which Pepik finds himself alone on that train and bewildered by what follows once he reaches his destination, without sensing at least a glimmer of the anguish that the actual, nonfictional families must have experienced.

Kindertransport Memorial, Liverpool Station, London

In a radio interview, Pick described her family background. Like Pavel Bauer, Pick’s Czech grandfather owned a factory. But it was another family altogether—that of the factory’s similarly Jewish plant manager—that appears to have supplied the spark for the Kindertransport storyline. (Here, too, I hear echoes of my own fiction-writing experience: the true-life inspiration for my book’s opening story, “For Services Rendered,” came not from the lived experience of my own relatives, but rather from my grandmother’s fairly matter-of-fact mentions of a refugee pediatrician she first encountered when, as a new immigrant in the U.S., she obtained a job as a nanny for a little girl who was this pediatrician’s patient.)

***

With Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, we find ourselves again in other settings: the Hungary of the author’s grandparents, and the Paris of the 1930s where both her grandfather and her protagonist, Andras Lévi, went to study architecture. One of the current bugaboos of review-speak is the phrase “pitch-perfect,” but I hold a PhD in Modern French history as well as an MFA in creative writing, and I can assure you that “pitch-perfect” is exactly the right term to describe the 1930s Paris of the first half of Orringer’s novel. As beautiful and romantic as the city remains—Paris is where Andras falls in love with another Hungarian Jewish émigré, Klara, whom he eventually marries—it is nonetheless moving inexorably toward war, with all of the accompanying xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other ugliness that were indeed part of the true historical picture. In the novel, these forces propel Andras and Klara back to Hungary when Andras’s student visa cannot be renewed in France.

Orringer’s mastery of Paris and French history make me have faith in her subsequent rendering of wartime Hungary, too. And, as Janet Maslin noted in her New York Times review, “‘The Invisible Bridge’ is unusual partly because Hungary was unusual.’” Indeed, deportations of Jews from Hungary to the death camps did not commence until 1944. Which is not to say that life before 1944 for Hungarian Jews like Orringer’s grandparents—or her characters—was easy or secure. Far from it, as the plot of the novel’s second section, which I will not detail here, shows.

I will tell you, however, that throughout both the French and Hungarian portions of the book—which is to say, for the vast majority of my reading time—it seemed as though I were immersed in a classic nineteenth-century realist novel. I am by no means the only reader to have discerned this, and in an excellent interview for the Moment magazine blog, Orringer affirmed that it was at least partially her intent to write exactly that kind of book. But she also wanted to write something “very contemporary.” Toward the book’s end, Orringer does two things to remind us not only of the story’s relevance in the present, but also of her personal connection to the material.

Wislawa Symborska / photo credit: Mariusz Kubik

In her epilogue, Orringer writes of the Lévis’ granddaughter: “She’d learned about that war in school, of course—who had died, who killed whom, how, and why—though her books hadn’t had much to say about Hungary. She’d learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason.” And: “There were strands of darker stories. She didn’t know how she’d heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison. Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers. Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn’t thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind.”

Indeed they did. I’ll go so far as to suggest that for all of us, even two generations later, in the United States or Canada or Great Britain or wherever our grandparents were able to raise our parents and, eventually, watch us grow up, the stories—fragmented or not—have done their work in our minds. If they hadn’t, it’s unlikely that these books would have been written.

Further Links and Resources

By age and family history, if not by genre, this literary cohort also includes Johanna Adorján (b. 1971). Adorján’s book, An Exclusive Love (trans. Anthea Bell), was published in Germany in 2009 and released in an English edition in the U.S. earlier this year. Technically, An Exclusive Love is a memoir. It focuses on Adorján’s paternal grandparents, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled Budapest during the 1956 uprising there, and rebuilt their lives in Denmark. This is all important and essential background, and Adorján is careful to delineate what she knows about it and what she has been unable to find out. But the book’s driving force is Adorján’s effort to reconstruct a single day in her grandparents’ lives: October 13, 1991, the day they committed suicide together. In the very best sense, An Exclusive Love is a memoir that reads like a novel, combining the strengths of both literary worlds and, importantly, remaining steadfastly honest about what “really happened” and what can only be envisaged.

Other relatively recent books of fiction that I’ve found striking at least in part for the authors’ inclusion of “grandparent” characters with origins in Nazi Europe include Our Holocaust, by Israeli author Amir Gutfreund (trans. Jessica Cohen), and The Pale of Settlement, a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. For a brief summary of the former, which won Israel’s Sapir Prize, see its Kirkus review, which also alludes to the book’s autobiographical/familial elements. For interviews with Margot Singer about the latter, including discussions of the relevance of her own grandparents’ histories, see Reform Judaism magazine and Southeast Review Online. (See also my review for Kenyon Review Online.)

Ruth Franklin’s above-mentioned A Thousand Darknesses in fact concludes with a section on “The Third Generation” (available in part via Google books). Franklin does not delve into the family histories of the authors she cites as belonging to this cohort. (Did Michael Chabon’s grandparents come from Nazi-dominated Europe? For Franklin, the question is quite possibly irrelevant.) But simply by training her expert critical eye on fiction that she characterizes as “third-generation,” Franklin advances the discussion significantly. She hesitates, she says, to call writers of this cohort “‘Holocaust writers,’ because although their works do touch on the subject, tangentially or more directly, it is never their main focus. Indeed, this is part of their literary liberation.” In addition to Chabon, her exemplars include Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer. She focuses on the ways in which these writers “have turned Jewish literary tradition inside out” and in particular, their use of fantasy.

A story of the healing that follows an act of terrorism, Sarah/Sara doesn’t open with an apocalyptic vision of passenger planes plunging into the steel and glass of the World Trade Center towers, with a slow motion blossom of flames, or with screaming, although as a firsthand witness and survivor of the day’s events, Jacob Paul knows all the terrible details. The book is not so self-indulgent as a work of fiction and, therefore, avoids anything that even remotely resembles the trite, instead presenting material that is far more delicate, and more meaningful. In its opening pages, the reader finds only refracted echoes of 9/11 shimmering in Sarah’s mind like subdued sound bites, as she kayaks in silence along the Alaskan coastline. Her father, we soon find, was the 9/11 survivor. He did not, however, escape the Jerusalem suicide bomber that has, years later, left Sarah spiritually and physically scarred.

Sarah makes camp, she eats, she drinks, she sleeps and, in the morning, strikes and paddles onward, searching. With a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch tied to the bow like a mascot, the silent, beautiful landscape rolls slowly by, and the book’s protagonist grapples with her identity, her spirituality, and the dark inner voice that consistently reminds her of the ease with which she could disappear completely in the icy waters of the wilderness. Finding no comfort in the past, Sarah pushes into her future, both physically and in the journal she carries. As she paddles, she attempts to invent Sara, the woman she will become.

Neacola River, Alaska / Photograph by Robert B. Haas / Courtesy: Nationalgeographic.com

Sarah/Sara is executed with the deliberate care of a true artisan, and nothing is rushed. Paul’s protagonist forges onward in a new world that has become cold and hostile, and every dip of her paddle in the icy waters of her surroundings, every painful step she takes on frozen, blackened feet, brings her, and us, a little bit closer to the truth that she seeks: how can we find meaning in a world that can lash out at us with no warning, and with such violence?

Conversation

Aaron Cance: You’ve written on your website that books “play out the danger of wedding oneself too strongly to a single reading of a text, readings that make personal and political change impossible to achieve without either reinventing the text or reinventing one’s identity.” The text that Sarah clings to in your novel seems to be her faith, and she struggles to reinvent her identity to reconcile herself with it.

Jacob Paul: Sarah has a couple texts that work this way: Psalms and Job are two that she struggles with. She is trying to find something in the text to interpret her own position in the world. She feels that she has been faithful [to God] in every way, but only continues to be tested. Sarah’s test is the same as Job’s, and the compensation seems to be much the same: the reward for constancy is more trouble.

Is this why she continues to rewrite herself, through the use of her journal?

Sarah’s invention of a future life is something she should have complete control over, yet she even loses control over this imagined destiny. However futile her visualization of the future is, though, it is still essential to surviving what she experiences daily.

I think that any imagined future any of us could create for ourselves is an impossible aspiration, yet we continue to do so. This seems, in and of itself, to be a great act of faith: to imagine a desirable future in order to survive on a daily basis.

I think there’s definitely truth to that. When you try to create this future, however, it always changes on you.

So many aspects of Sarah/Sara hinge on notions of faith and believing. Were there Biblical reasons for Sarah’s changing of her own name at some point in her healing process?

I was originally thinking about it only in the context of a modern day English name and her name in the Hebrew, but there is a whole set of beliefs in the Jewish faith that one’s life force comes from the written name. There is a tradition of changing one’s name as a method of getting oneself out of the book that has been written about you, of changing one’s destiny. Sarah wants to find a new identity that is something she feels she isn’t bound by.

Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888—Paul Gauguin / Credit: National Galleries of Scotland

I find it really interesting that in the book of Genesis, it is Jacob who changes his name after wrestling with a manifestation of God. The man tells him that he will no longer be known as Jacob, but will be called Israel because he has “struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” This seems, very much, to parallel Sarah’s own struggles, her own journey. It is very easy to put your faith in a God that we conceive ourselves. A God that exists outside the realm of our own imagination and influence is a force that is far more frightening.

Right. There seems to be the algorithmic God and the unknowable God. The algorithmic God works in a way that is very comprehensible to us. If you’re in trouble, you pray. In return for prayer, your problems are to be resolved and you receive blessings. This God is very much tied into the Protestant ethic where, without any ultimate way of measuring God’s grace, we decided that prosperity was a workable measure. This, however, doesn’t work with the unknowable God. But, without the unknowable God that sometimes acts in ways we can’t possibly comprehend, you can’t define the image of the God that we are all comfortable with. Sarah struggles with these two pieces. Her spiritual struggle is manifested in the story as her inability to reconcile these pieces, and, without their reconciliation she won’t get out of the Arctic.

Aside from the fact that it mirrors the isolation that must, in fact, accompany both her spiritual struggle and her efforts to heal herself in the wake of both of the terrorist attacks she has survived, why did you choose to set the story in the Arctic? Why the Alaskan coastline?

Actually, I’ve always been fascinated with the dangers encountered in the wilderness vs. the dangers of the inner city. The wilderness setting of Sarah/Sara has also to be also, somehow, the unknown, or the space beyond the imagination. It is still a place that is legitimately unknown. You can still find remnants of our incursions into this space: empty oil drums laying about on the beaches or early warning radar dishes that have been set into place to warn us that the Russians are about to nuke us. It is an unknowable, yet potentially beautiful space, as well. You’re also right in saying that she would be alone in the Arctic. She is alone, and in motion.

Why have you chosen to use a female protagonist? You’ve written on your website that you have no interest in being a spokesperson for women. Nor do you have any interest in speaking for 9/11 survivors. You refer to Sarah simply as a “unique creation,” yet she happens to be both of these things. Did you feel concern about potential disapproval about either of these aspects of your character?

Of the two, it was much more difficult to write Sarah as a 9/11 survivor. This may have been an act of hubris. We create things that we hope will, someday, become objects of value. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many writers–Foer, DeLillo, and Roth, to name just a few–all came out with 9/11 novels. I was initially bothered by this. I wanted to say, “Fuck you; I was there.” This reaction is reflected in Sarah’s father in the book. This passed for a couple reasons. First was the realization that we’re all survivors of one type or another. Second, these texts can never really become authoritative positions on the experiences of a group of people, no matter how well written they are or how well credentialed their creators might be. William Styron couldn’t have produced a better work by being the grandchild of an African slave. There’s no uniform experience of being a 9/11 survivor, no uniform experience of being a woman. These are things that can’t be owned by anyone.

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the architecture behind the narrative of Sarah/Sara. Without giving away anything important, I like that Sarah never leaves the Arctic.

Right. In the story, Sarah never really gets out of the Arctic. Samuel Clemens said “all stories should end before the children get married.” The conclusion of Sarah’s spiritual journey is implied, but not given. Her redemptive act is to decide if the lights that she sees off in the distance are really her salvation, and her redemptive path is to destroy her father’s kayak and set off on her own. The moment of her redemption is also the moment where she separates herself from texts, marked in the novel by her abandonment of her journal, her decision to leave it behind. She frees herself from the sense that texts are controllable or monolithic.

The abandonment of her other physical possessions that precedes the leaving behind of her journal brought to mind the Oscar Wilde essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in which Wilde cautions his readers about constructing one’s identity with physical possessions. Would it be fair to read this abandonment as a realization, on Sarah’s part, that the myriad things that we surround ourselves with are, ultimately, meaningless, that in order to find real meaning we must discover it inside ourselves?

There is a secondary implication about such materialism in Sarah’s abandonment of the things she carries. She finds that the things she has are not sufficient sources of meaning. Sarah is always paring away things from her life. Even as she thinks about the future, and what pieces of furniture she’ll take from her deceased parents’ home, she is thinking about what she’ll leave behind. She trims every physical thing away from her life except an amulet that she plans to give to her imagined future love, Udi, yet that, too, is lost.

Was Sarah/Sara also a part of your own healing process, a part of your own search for meaning after 9/11?

I think the space of all cathartic writing is filled with the grappling with particular types of questions or problems. I always tell my students that writing is thinking, and that they can’t know what they’re thinking until they’ve actually written it down. Only after it’s written will they know what’s usable to them. The types of questions that I had about faith before 9/11 were dramatically different than what they were after.

Who are a couple writers who have inspired you?

I really started reading Saul Bellow late in the game, but I can’t help but to feel that everything that I had written up to that point had also, somehow, been influenced by him. I really like Stanley Elkin.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a Holocaust novel, which is something I never thought I’d do.

Jacob smiles, unguardedly, and we open a bottle of his home brew, dividing it into a couple glasses in silent, mutual agreement that something that you spend a great deal of time creating should never be quickly consumed. Two days afterward, Jacob would start an extensive reading tour, mostly by way of his bicycle, embarking on a journey of his own along the coast, then inward.

from Flickr

Further Links and Resources

- Jacob Paul’s website features more information about Sarah/Sara, details about his bicycle book tour, and information about his current writing projects.

- Read Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus’s review of Sarah/Sara for FWR.

- A short piece about Paul’s experience finding an agent and publishing Sarah/Sara is available online at Poets & Writers.

- In this video for the JBC, Jacob Paul talks about Sarah/Sara:

When I asked Janice Eidus where she’d like to meet for our interview, she responded with, “Well, I have an absolutely literary idea…” Which is how we wound up at the Algonquin Hotel, sipping tea on a perfect October afternoon, and pondering sex, death, feminism, and vampires. Dorothy Parker would have been proud.

Called “one of the freshest and most idiosyncratic voices from the fiction frontier” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Eidus, much like Parker herself, isn’t afraid to tackle the big issues with her own brand of wit, humor, and heart. A two-time O. Henry Prize winner, she is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Redbook Prize, and an Independent Publishers Award in Religion.

A novelist, short story writer and essayist, Eidus’s work spans genres and subjects, but she is particularly passionate about Jewish identity, contemporary culture, and women’s issues. Her previous publications include the novels The War of the Rosens, Urban Bliss, and Faithful Rebecca, as well as the short story collections The Celibacy Club and Vito Loves Geraldine. She is also widely published in anthologies, including Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex and The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories.

Eidus’s newest novel, The Last Jewish Virgin, was just published this month by Red Hen Press. NPR’s Marion Winik has called it “Twilight…with a sense of humor, a brain, and a feminist subtext.” So Twilight was where we began as we sat down to discuss Eidus’s novel, what it means to judge a book by its cover, and why vampires are people, too.

Interview

LAUREN HALL: I suppose we have to begin with the elephant in the room. There’s been a flood of supernatural fiction — both YA and adult — in the wake of Twilight’s success, which makes for a very crowded market. Were you at all concerned about finding an audience for The Last Jewish Virgin?

JANICE EIDUS: (Laughs.) You know, I have been obsessed with vampires since I was a little girl.

Really?

Yes. I have seen them be hot, and not hot, and in and out and cool and totally out of the mainstream, but my interest has never, never wavered. I think there will always been an audience for people who are interested in the vampire myth. And I think there are a number of things that contribute to it. One is that those of us who are obsessed with it and love it so much can’t get enough of seeing how people make it new. How do you reinvent it? How do you reinvent it for these times, for your vision? And for every schlocky thing that fails, there’s something brilliant and amazing. The myth is constantly being renewed, like the vampire itself is constantly being renewed.

I also think there’s such a fascination at this particular point in time because one of the draws of the vampire myth is eternal life and eternal love. You don’t die and your beloved doesn’t die. We’re living post 9/11, in a terrible economic recession that does not seem to be ending, and every day we open the newspaper and there seems to be a new plague with no cure. There’s no rhyme or reason. You walk your child to school in the morning, you get on an airplane, you get on a bus, and you have no idea if you’re going to make it through the day. I think we’re being forced to confront our mortality all the time in new ways. And I think the vampire myth is oddly comforting to people.

Margot Adler, the NPR commentator, is obsessed with vampires, too, and she talks about another part of the vampire myth: she talks about power. Vampires have tremendous power over mortals, and they have to confront how they will use that power, which ultimately makes them very human. Because we’re constantly having to deal with ethical and moral issues. So, I feel that they’re really us. Vampires are us. I think there will always be an audience for Twilight, for me, for the next person.

At times, the pace of The Last Jewish Virgin feels more like a classic Gothic novel than contemporary fiction; the suspense builds in such a languid and sensual way. Did you draw inspiration from Gothic novels as you considered your writing process?

Absolutely. One of the great pleasures of working on this book was that I revisited much of my most beloved vampire literature and film. It’s been incredible to go back to books that I’ve loved so long. You know, people often compare Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and say it’s the minor book, but for me, it’s equally major.

I really felt that I was reaching backward and reinterpreting, reinventing, paying homage, subverting it a little bit, tweaking it, having tremendous fun with it…but basically, in my heart, I pay tremendous honor.

You define the term bashert in the beginning of the book as Yiddish for “destiny,” usually used in the context of one’s Heavenly foreordained spouse or soulmate, which is the case in this story. But equally important is the relationship between the protagonist, Lilith, and her mother, Beth. In many ways, they’re also each other’s beloved. Was this a jumping off point for you in telling this story, or is it something that arose through your writing process?

It was totally a part of my process. In a way, the vampire myth became a catalyst for me to examine things that ranged from very theoretical to very, very personal to me. I adopted my daughter during a period when my own mother was very sick, so I was caretaking my mother as I was taking care of this new little baby, and dealing with things on both ends. My mother and I had always had a very conflicted relationship – there were ways in which we were incredibly alike, and ways in which we were not.

For me, one of the things that was so interesting was looking at Lilith and Beth and the ways in which they were alike that perhaps they didn’t even know how alike they were. They are each other’s beloved, and each one really needs to be heroic toward the other, to try to save the other.

Without giving anything away, the choice that Lilith makes in the end is just as much about saving her mother’s identity as it is about discovering her own.

You know, I think in many ways, this book is also the reinvention of the classic coming of age tale.

Initiation story?

Exactly. Where a young person who’s an innocent really has to confront sex and death for the first time. And what is done with that, how identity is formed. Lilith is acutely aware of the fact that she’s forming her own identity. She’s forming it in opposition to her mother in a lot of ways, which a lot of young girls do.

The title is The Last Jewish Virgin. How important was it that she be a virgin?

Very important. And that was something I really had to wrestle with. She had to be a virgin because I really wanted to reengage with the classic vampire myth, where the male vampire needs the blood of young female virgins to survive. And I thought: I have to do that, I have to honor that, I don’t want to mess with that. But then what would her motivation be – this young, beautiful, intelligent woman living in Manhattan – to stay a virgin? And what worked perfectly in terms of who she is, is a young woman who is so obsessed with wanting to get ahead in her career that everything else strikes her as in the way. And that would include lust and love and sex. She believes, mistakenly, that those things are kind of sloppy emotions, which she associates with her feminist, idealistic mother. And she sees her mother’s idealism, which to me is kind of heroic, as naïve and old-fashioned.

You also write short story collections. How did you know The Last Jewish Virgin would be a novel rather than a short story?

With every novel that I’ve written, I’ve known almost from the moment I’ve started it that it had to be a novel and not a story. It’s a visual thing. It’s as if I start it, and I see a landscape. And if the landscape goes on and on and on, and I can see where it ends very far in the distance, I know this is a novel. And if it’s a story, I see a small landscape of some sort that’s very enclosed and very concrete. That really is my process, and I’ve never been wrong.

I’ll also say, retrospectively, that writing a story is like being in an incredibly intense love affair. Writing a novel is a committed, long marriage. You idealize it in the beginning, you get disillusioned, and then you have to find a way to get back and fall in love with it again now that you know its problems and foibles.

And sometimes you get divorced?

Oh, I’ve had that, too. I’ve had some novel divorces, I promise you. Sometimes I’ve even got as much as three quarters of the way through, before I knew this had to be a divorce.

How do you do that?

You just do it. You’re ruthless. I can be so ruthless about my own work.

You believe in killing your darlings.

I do. And part of it is this visual image again; the landscape starts to fade, and it’s not there for me anymore. Luckily, there haven’t been too many of these. I think maybe two novels that I started and really never finished. But the others I finished. Some of them you always know, you never waver, you know exactly where you’re going. Others, the process is really circuitous. But you still know there’s a place you’re going to that’s far off and that you need to reach.

Walk me through the months leading up to a first draft. How do you start?

Well, I’ll tell you exactly how this novel started. I was on a plane, and I started thinking about vampires, and I started making notes longhand about characters. So I had characters, but no plot. Again, this landscape started appearing to me, and I started just writing, stream of consciousness. And then the voice came to me. I knew whose voice I was telling it in, and I knew the voice was looking back. I knew this was someone looking back from a different place. And then it started to come to me. I remember at one point I had a beginning and an end and no middle. But I just kept writing. I really believe that people who compare writing to a Zen practice are right. Not that I practice Zen, I don’t, but I know what they mean. Really, it’s the practice. You just have to get there and write. I’m one of those writers who say, “If I had to wait for my muse every day to appear, I’d have written one poem in my entire life.” You know, you write when you don’t have the muse, you write in less than ideal physical circumstances, you just write.

Do you protect time every day to write?

I wish I could tell you that I do; that would be my ideal life. But, no. There are days when, you know, Parent/Teacher night, or getting my daughter her flu shot – which in New York becomes a Herculean task – mean that I absolutely can’t get to it. But I burn with the desire. I literally burn with the desire. I would go crazy if three days in a row went by where I couldn’t write. And that almost never happens.

We own a house in Mexico in the mountains of San Miguel de Allende, which is a beautiful, beautiful town. We go there a few times a year, and I always bring a computer with me, but I try not to use it. I feel so connected to the place and to its history, and I just work in longhand when I’m there. I sit for days and days and I write in longhand. I love it, because I slow down when I’m there – you can’t be in Mexico and not slow down. Also, I happen to love my own handwriting. It’s very big and loopy and swirly, and when I look at it, I feel inspired to go on.

Do you think a change of scenery for a writer plays into the way a particular story evolves?

I do. I really do. I won’t universalize it, but for me, and for many people I know, where we are finds its way in. Even if it’s just because you physically feel different. I love to be on the go when I’m writing. I cannot just sit home for hours and hours in solitude. I love writing in hotel bars. I love writing in cafes. I write on airplanes. I used to write on the subway, but that one I cannot do any longer. (laughs) I did for years, though. I love the stimulation of seeing people. For me, working in a hotel bar, I see the other people, I’m interested in the other people, but I’m also very alone. And that, I love. I mean, there’s nothing more disappointing than going to write somewhere and running into someone you know.

You are also a private writing teacher and coach. How do you respond to those who think writing cannot be taught?

I’ve been hearing that for years, and yet I love teaching writing! At the moment, I’m actually doing two kinds of teaching. I have my private writing clients, and I’m also teaching at a low residency MFA program at Carlow University. What I’ll say is that I can’t give someone a vision. I can’t give them the drive. But, when someone comes to me with a story, I feel that as a teacher, by talking to them and looking at their work, I can try to understand what it is they’re trying to say, what it is they’re trying to express, and help them learn how to express it better. Help them find their truest voice as a writer. I’ve met writing teachers over the years who’ve told me that they feel the best thing they can do is help their students write more like them. I am ideologically opposed to that. I think it’s the worst thing you can do. And the range of the students and clients that I have shows that.

Do you change your approach with someone who’s an emerging writer versus someone who’s more established?

I don’t change my approach; I go more slowly. I try to always be constructive, because, honestly, my experience is that no matter how widely published you are, no matter what age you are, you’re still really vulnerable. People are really vulnerable. And I am as honest and constructive with my students who have won awards as I am with the one who is coming to me for the first time.

I can often tell very quickly who isn’t going to stick with writing. And that usually will begin with someone who comes to me and says something like, “I’m 39 years old, and if I haven’t finished and published a novel by the time I’m 40, I’m not meant to be a writer.” And you know, if I can’t help them to see that by the time they’re 40 we might still be working on the same 50 pages, the frustration level gets too high, and that makes me sad.

Do you think it’s more an issue of talent or perseverance?

That’s such an interesting question. I think that without the perseverance, you can’t do anything. Years ago, I taught a private workshop in my apartment to three women writers. They had all sought me out, they were all friends, and they all wanted to work with me. They were great women, I would say they were equally talented, and only one of them stuck with it. And she’s gone on and done really, really well. But I couldn’t have told you when they first started which of the three women would do that. I was hoping it would be all three of them. But I believe the other two were just as happy not writing.

What’s a greater source of accomplishment: seeing your own work in print or helping a student see his or hers?

Well, when I see my students publish – there’s a Yiddish word, kvell – I really, really kvell. I’m probably harder on myself, but I’m certainly happy when I have a publication. I’ve never gotten over that happiness, whether it’s a book, a story, or a piece in an anthology. But there is a kind of maternal quality that I have toward my students, and I’m not so maternal toward myself.

Going back to your interest in the visual, I have your galley here, which of course is not how The Last Jewish Virgin will look when it’s published. How involved are you in what your book covers look like?

As a writer you never know how much input you’ll have, but in this case, the publisher came to me and asked me if I had any ideas for an image for the cover. They sent me some images, and they weren’t what I had in mind, so I then described and found some images for them. Ultimately, I was very happy with what they chose.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but when you’re confronted by endless stacks at Barnes & Noble, you have to wonder how many times people just gravitate toward the images that speak to them.

They say title and visual, that’s what people are drawn to. I, in fact, have been thinking about writing an essay about that, so it’s very interesting that you’re asking. I’ve been thinking about writing about what it feels like as a writer to have input, what it feels like not to have input in your own cover. How a cover speaks for you or doesn’t speak for you.

What happens when one of your books comes out with cover art that you feel is not evocative of what’s inside?

I’ve had friends who have had that experience; they were really appalled by the cover. The hope is that gradually you will learn to live with it, but it’s hard to understand. I feel really lucky, because I have not once had a cover I didn’t ultimately love. I’ve had a lot of input in many of them, so in some ways it’s not a coincidence, but even in the ones where I didn’t have input, I’ve just really been lucky that way.

What’s next for you? Any new projects on the horizon?

I have two big projects on the horizon. I’m working on a Young Adult novel that I’m describing as Romeo & Juliet with a Jewish twist in Brooklyn. And I’m also going to be working on an anthology having to do with illness – healing from illness and living with illness and growing from illness and writing from illness.

That’s very topical right now.

Very, very topical right now. In my case, I was diagnosed as having celiac disease about ten or eleven years ago, but I’ve had it my whole life. It’s something that has really changed my life; it’s like another part-time job that I have to do. It’s been an interesting process, and I’m interested in talking with other writers and about it.

Do you consider yourself primarily a fiction writer? I know you write nonfiction as well.

All my books have been fiction, but I’ve written so many essays, and I’ve taught creative nonfiction so much that I guess I feel in my heart that I’m both now. I’ve been doing fiction longer, but I actually feel that they’re kind of evening out, and I like that. Fiction came much easier to me, I always had a quirky world view and I felt very playful with fiction. I had a harder time figuring out how to structure nonfiction so that it stayed interesting and I wasn’t just writing by the numbers. But now I would say absolutely that I can approach both of them with the same amount of ease.

In both genres you’re asking the same questions, it’s just the end result that differs, isn’t it? I mean, no one wants to read about a fictional character that doesn’t feel true to life.

Absolutely. Even a vampire has to be true to life.

I read a great quote from you in Bitch, where you said, “I think the reason there’s never been a Great American Novel written by a woman is that there have been, but they don’t tend to be about fishing or war.” I want to put that on a t-shirt. But beyond that, I’d love to hear about other women writers who inspire you.

Oh, there have been so many. I was just thinking this morning, going back to the idea of Gothic novels, about the British writer Sarah Waters. She’s a really interesting writer, and she is reinventing Gothic. I wait for every new book of hers to come out. I love Margaret Atwood. I really love her work, and I love that you never know what she’s going to do. She’s honest, passionate, and authentic no matter what she does. And she’s prolific, but at no expense to the quality of her work. I really admire her. I love Edwidge Danticat. She’s a Haitian-American writer, and she’s written both fiction and non-fiction. She’s a beautiful stylist, she has this kind of deceptively simple style, and she really finds ways to weave in politics and family complexity and women coming of age.

And then I was greatly influenced by Angela Carter. She’s somebody who reinvented literature, as far as I can tell. The first book of hers I discovered was called The Bloody Chamber, and it was a book of short stories in which she reinvented fairy tales in the most sexual, feminist, intelligent, visual way. And then there’s a nonfiction writer, Vivian Gornick, who wrote a memoir called Fierce Attachments, which was one of the first memoirs I ever read. It is a searing mother daughter memoir, just so amazingly insightful, honest, and so evocative of place and time. These are just a few women whose work I really, really like, and have definitely influenced me.

Do you think the term women’s writing, troubling as it may be, holds any weight? Is women’s writing a genre, or is it just a construct?

It’s such a good question. You know, I’d like to say it’s just a construct. And I’d like to say that we’re all writing from the same places, the same passions, the same world views, looking to find truth as we know it and can seek it. And yet, we know that men tend not to read women’s books as much. We know that women are often writing for other women. We know that women, in some ways, have a secret language that we use in person, and it’s there in fiction, too. But, ideally, I would like to say that there’s just writing. And in an ideal world, we would all read across genre and gender and age and geography. That’s the world I want to live in.

And the world you want to write in?

And the world I want to write in. And when I sit down at my page, I believe it is the world I’m writing in.

Further Links and Resources

- Meg Pokrass talks with Janice Eidus as part of the Fictionaut Five series.

- Guest-blogging at Madam Mayo, Eidus offers “5 Vampire Links to Sink Your Teeth Into.”

- Shopping for a copy of The Last Jewish Virgin? Consider ordering yours from indie bookstore Powell’s.

- Browse the bookshelves of (free) Gothic literature at Project Gutenberg.

- Learn more about Eidus’s other novels and story collections on her website, and read an excerpt from Vito Loves Geraldine’s title story.

- Via FC2, here’s a brief excerpt from Faithful Rebecca.

- Download this PDF to learn more about Carlow University’s low-residency MFA program (which includes sessions in Pittsburgh and Carlow, Ireland). Janice also teaches writing privately: details are here.

After patriarch Mort Foxman passes away, the Foxman clan is forced to sit through what might be the craziest shiva of all time. Narrating this mess of mourning is Judd Foxman, a sad sack with a great comic voice. Just before his father’s death, Judd came home with a birthday cake for his wife, only to find her “lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her.” The fact that “some guy” is Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss doesn’t stop Judd from attacking with “a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake with thirty-three burning candles.”

This forces his marriage to end “the way things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.”

Alone and resentful, newly single Judd returns to his childhood home in Knob’s End, New York. Even though his father was not religious, Mort’s dying wish was that his family would reunite to sit shiva for a full week. This family includes: Inappropriate Mom, a bestselling author on child rearing, who favors too-revealing blouses; Phillip, the baby of the family, who dates a cougar therapist; Wendy, the oldest sister, who’s raising three kids in a sexless marriage; and Paul, the oldest brother, who lost his college baseball scholarship after a Rottweiler incident. Presiding over the shiva is family friend Boner, a young rabbi trying to make Judaism cool by wearing Armani suits and diamond studs.

Over the course of the shiva, the brothers give each other black eyes, Judd realizes his adulterous wife is pregnant, and his mother begins an affair with the woman who lives across the street. Some twists and gags are a bit far-fetched—smoking a joint in temple, the brothers cause the sprinklers to turn on—and the author’s need for each character to reach a meaningful epiphany feels forced. But overall, this novel and its narrator’s voice are so smart and funny, they make its flaws seem negligible.

Jonathan Tropper

In one of Tropper’s finest (and most brutal) passages, Judd slams the parade of shiva callers coming through the doors:

“These middle-aged women in the early stages of disrepair…genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart.”

Judd’s observations might seem cruel, but they are also startlingly specific, keenly true.

The novel’s real triumph is in transcending mere laugh-out-loud moments with the poignancy of Judd’s descriptions. Seeing (and mocking) others, he can’t help but examine himself. He grapples with questions of his own mortality and options: what should he do next? He loved his wife and was good to her, but still their marriage disintegrated. Like the rest of the Foxman clan, he’s not where he thought or hoped he would be as middle age approaches. But by the book’s end, Judd realizes that “anything can happen,” that the future isn’t mapped out. That it wouldn’t be interesting if it were. And if there’s an epiphany worth believing in, it’s Judd’s: Even (and especially) after a swinging bout of dysfunction, even if you can’t stand the sight of your family, deep down you know, you can always go home.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, read an excerpt from This is Where I Leave You.

- Listen to today’s interview (8-25-2010) with Jonathan Tropper on WAMC.

- In this Penguin video, Tropper introduces his latest novel and discusses the challenge of “setting an entire novel in the framework of seven days”:

- Watch and read an interview and Q&A with Tropper at Bookbrowse. And here’s a feature/interview with Tropper in TimeOut New York.

- Over drinks at Brooklyn Public House, Asylum editor Anthony Layser talks with Tropper about This Is Where I Leave You. Does Tropper have a Matthew McConaughey clause protecting his book from sappy romantic comedy adaptations? Is his description of getting kicked in the balls the best of its literary kind? Watch and learn…

- Find out more about Tropper’s other books on his website: How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B.

- Browse excerpts from The Book of Joe on Random House’s website.