Pearl Abraham (b. 1960) is an American novelist, essayist, translator, and teacher of creative writing whose fiction maps the moral and intellectual ground where Hasidic Judaism meets secular modernity. She belongs to a small group of writers who report on the inner life of ultra-Orthodox communities from inside that life rather than from the outside. Across four novels, a story collection, essays, translations, and decades of teaching, she treats religious authority, intellectual hunger, exile, and the longing for transcendence as the recurring matter of serious fiction. Her central characters do not arrive at a settled identity. They negotiate one, and the negotiation never closes.
She was born in Jerusalem in 1960, the third of nine children, into a Hasidic home headed by a rabbi. Her childhood moved between Israel and New York City until the family settled in New York when she was twelve. Those years of relocation handed her several languages and several worlds. She learned first in Yiddish, then in English, then returned to Yiddish schooling, so that English became a third language she came to as a reader and chose as a writer. The back-and-forth between insular religious settlements and American streets gave her early and firsthand the conflict of competing identities that became her subject.
Abraham studied at Hunter College and earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at New York University. She built a career that joined fiction to teaching rather than separating them. She taught at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Houston before moving to Western New England University, where she taught English and creative writing, founded and directed the MFA in Fiction program, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2022. She also founded and edits S for Sentence, an online journal devoted to the craft of the sentence. For much of her teaching life she split her weeks between Manhattan and western Massachusetts.
Her debut novel, The Romance Reader (1995), made her reputation. It follows Rachel Benjamin, a young Hasidic woman whose appetite for secular books collides with the rules of her community. Earlier American fiction had tended to render Orthodox Jews from the outside, as a closed people observed at a distance. Abraham wrote from memory and from inside the warmth and the constraint at once. Critics admired the book for withholding easy verdicts. It refuses to cast Orthodoxy as mere cage or modernity as mere rescue, and gives weight to the costs and goods of each. Library Journal named it among its Best Books of 1995, and the novel found readers abroad. Its German edition, Die Romanleserin, held a place on Der Spiegel‘s bestseller list for months, proof that a story rooted in Brooklyn Hasidism could travel as a tale of intellectual awakening and the struggle between inherited tradition and a single will.
Her second novel, Giving Up America (1998), moved from adolescent revolt to adult marriage. It traces the slow erosion of a young Jewish couple as ambition, religious obligation, and cultural expectation pull against one another. The book turns away from communal confrontation toward the quieter erosions by which a marriage holds or fails. Reviewers credited her with rendering intimate emotional change without flattening it into argument.
In The Seventh Beggar (2005), Abraham turned to Jewish mysticism and philosophical speculation. She took her starting point from a tale by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) and braided contemporary characters through Kabbalistic themes, setting mystical inquiry beside artificial intelligence and computer science. The novel asks whether technical invention can stand in for spiritual imagination, and whether a confident rationalism accounts for the human reach toward transcendence. Harold Bloom (1930-2019) praised it as a striking reimagining of one of Nachman’s most cryptic stories. It reached the final three for the Koret Jewish Book Award in fiction. Although the book draws openly on Breslov, its intellectual temper also recalls the world of Chabad Hasidism in the home she came from, where rigorous study and devotional feeling press on each other. Her characters carry that pressure: they try to reconcile hard thinking with love and faith, and the effort gives the novel its heat.
Her fourth novel, American Taliban (2010), marked a departure. Loosely drawn from the case of John Walker Lindh (b. 1981), it follows an American surfer whose spiritual search carries him toward Islam and the Taliban. Abraham declines to read radicalization as politics alone. She presents it as one outcome of the search for meaning that drives seekers across traditions, and shows how idealism, curiosity, and the appetite for absolute truth can resolve into very different fates depending on circumstance and company.
Beside the novels she has published essays, reviews, poetry, translations, and short stories in The New York Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, Epoch, The Forward, and LitHub. Her first story collection, Animal Voices, Mineral Hum, made the shortlist for the 2018 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her essay “For the Sins…” was cited as a notable essay in The Best American Essays. Her story “Hasidic Noir,” published in Brooklyn Noir, won the 2006 Shamus Award for Best Short Story, which shows her ease in carrying Jewish material into an unexpected genre. She has translated the Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948), helping bring his dark, psychologically dense fiction of Eastern European Jewish life to English readers, and she edited the Dutch anthology Een Sterke Vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature.
A 2006 interview gives her own account of the questions that move her work, and the account is sharp. On God she refuses the conversion story her readers might expect. She does not report a childhood faith later shed. She says the love and fear of God simply missed her, despite the prayers said twice a day, and that she watched her religious classmates sway and pray and suspected some of them of performance, of building a reputation toward a good marriage. Her interest in God came late and not on religious terms. She holds God as an abstract human idea of a perfection toward which a person aspires, and she aligns herself with the ascetic mystic’s aim, the pursuit of a knowledge or experience the mystic reaches, while declining the title of mystic for herself. Meaning, for her, lives in knowledge, in good literature that tells us what it is to be human, in the making of decent literature, and in teaching it so that good readers come after her.
She is hard on piety, and harder on piety without learning. Growing up she saw it in girls and women shut out of the education their brothers received. As an adult she meets Jewish men and women who have access to knowledge and prefer not to know, who relish custom and ritual and law without asking what any of it signifies. On a panel about Orthodoxy she tried to open a rigorous conversation about what Orthodoxy means, how and why it began, and whether it remains a livable way, and she cited Maimonides (1138-1204) on piety for the masses and wisdom for the elite, and Henri Corbin (1903-1978) on dogma as the presupposed end of prophecy, the close of an individual’s path to eternity. The panel and the room would not follow her there. They wanted attendance figures for Upper West Side synagogues and personal confession. She allows that the failure to connect might have been her own.
Her theory of the novel sits at the center of the interview and runs against the market that sells her books. She reads the novel as an anti-authoritarian form born in reaction against the epic, with its heightened verse and idealized heroes, and against the prose romance written for entertainment. From the romance the novel took prose; from the epic it took a higher purpose. The form belongs to the town square and admits the carnival and the parody, and it was never meant as mere entertainment, which she leaves to the Harlequin, the thriller, the mystery, the spy saga. The word novel still carries the sense of the new, and a book that keeps the name owes something new, some reaction against what came before. Publishers, hunting the widest sale, have sold the literary novel as easy entertainment and so built false expectations in readers. She points to Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), as likely the first modern novel and an immediate bestseller dressed as a parody of chivalric romance, yet over nine hundred pages, not an easy read, and not in the way readers expect funny. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) called it crude and cruel, and she agrees, a book of one cruel prank after another, and full of pedantry, and alive far beyond its pages. The Seventh Beggar, she insists, rewards the reader who relaxes and lets intuition do the work, because a mystic’s story is organized by intuition rather than by the hunt for meaning.
She is most cutting on what she sees as a counterfeit Yiddishkeit in American Jewish fiction. Reading Steve Stern (b. 1947), Dara Horn (b. 1977), and Nicole Krauss (b. 1974), she says she knows by the first page that the writer’s Yiddish and Yiddish culture come from books and legend and a long-gone immigrant world rather than from speech. The nostalgia and the corn give it away. She hears the same corn from any Upper West Sider with a grandmother who spoke some Yiddish, and she notes that real Yiddish speakers in Williamsburg do not experience their language as tragicomic. This sweetened immigrant Yiddish is what general readers recognize and what confirms them in what they already feel, so they prefer it to a version stranger and truer, and non-Jewish readers walk away certain that Jews and Yiddish run to oy veys and kvetches, never learning that fine poetry once lived in the language, as in the work of Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971). To keep Yiddish light and funny and easy enough to please, she says, is a kind of sellout. She cites Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) on the impossibility of writing Yiddish in America.
She gives a measured reading of the controversy around Wendy Shalit (b. 1975), whose 2005 New York Times Book Review essay charged Jewish novelists with writing unfairly about Orthodox Judaism. Abraham grants Shalit a valid question, whether such books are art, and answers that much of it is entertainment, while calling Shalit’s conclusions confused. Good and bad literature, she holds, have nothing to do with religion. Stereotype, caricature, and sentiment make for easy reading and easy sales, and craft alone does not make art. Enduring art gives us characters who live on the page and walk off it and keep living for centuries, as Don Quixote and Hamlet do, and such characters come from the writer’s power to enter another fully, what John Keats (1795-1821) called negative capability, the capacity to become the other. She suspects Shalit left her off the list because she did not fit the thesis. She writes, she says, with sympathy for that world, and hopes her characters are not caricatures, and that time will settle the question.
She rejects the prophecy of Ted Solotaroff (1928-2008), who wrote in 1988 that the live Jewish edge in American fiction would pass to writers anchored in the observant community and drawn to the argument between Judaism and modernity under feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Holocaust. She calls the forecast blinkered and already disproved by events no one foresaw. Jews, she says, are no longer one of the interesting minorities, and the sophisticated Jewish reader skips work too anchored in Jewishness. She notes that Irving Howe (1920-1993) tried similar predictions and missed the new wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia. Her hope rides instead on hybridity. She points to Steve Reich (b. 1936), whose Tehillim sets Hebrew to rhythms drawn from African music, and to Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960), who crosses Spanish and Jewish strains, and she sees no reason such crossing should not feed literature as it has fed music. Don Quixote, again, the crossing of epic and romance, stands as her model, and she reads The Seventh Beggar, with its bluegrass and Hasidic festival, its golem and its computer, its braiding of Nachman’s seven beggars with the sevens of other tales, as a book of that hybrid impulse.
Abraham occupies a transitional place in Jewish-American letters. She stands between earlier novelists such as Chaim Potok (1929-2002), whose fiction centered on men negotiating Orthodox Judaism, and the later off-the-derech memoirists who chronicle departures from ultra-Orthodox life. Where many of those memoirs dwell on the mechanics of escape, her novels keep the intellectual seriousness and spiritual reach of the religious world her characters inhabit, even as they question its authority. Beside Rebecca Goldstein (b. 1950) and Allegra Goodman (b. 1967), she helped widen the range of contemporary Jewish-American fiction, and her sustained insider’s portrait of Hasidic life sets her apart from both. Her style joins Hasidic storytelling, above all the symbolic parables of Nachman, to modern psychological realism, and lets theological questions rise out of family life and ordinary conflict rather than abstract debate. Reading runs through her fiction as plot and as figure for transgression, transformation, and the widening of consciousness. Books become the thing that breaks the inherited frame and opens what lies past it. She is one interpreter, among the leading ones, of the country where tradition meets the modern self, and she reports from inside it.
The Pages That Remain: The Hero System of Pearl Abraham
Pearl Abraham sits on a panel about Orthodoxy and tries to start the conversation she came for. She cites Maimonides (1138-1204), who held that piety serves the masses and wisdom the elite. She cites Henri Corbin (1903-1978), for whom dogma presupposes the end of prophecy, the close of the road by which a single man might reach eternity. She asks the room what Orthodoxy means, when it began, why it arrived late to a people with a long prophetic past, and whether it remains a livable way. The room does not follow. The other panelists and the audience want the count of worshippers in Upper West Side synagogues. They want personal confession. She is playing for one stake and the room is playing for another, and the gap between the two games is the whole of her life as a writer.
A hero system, in Ernest Becker’s account, is the scheme a culture hands a man so he can feel he counts, and so hold off the knowledge that he will die. Change the scheme and you change what a man will die for, what shames him, what saves him. The panel fails because Abraham has carried a different scheme into the room. Hers is not the one most of her readers expect from a woman raised Hasidic, the third of nine children in a rabbi’s home, schooled first in Yiddish and brought to English as a third language. They expect the apostate’s tale, the cage and the escape. She refuses it. She has a higher value, and she names it without flinching. Meaning lives, she says, in Knowledge, in gnosis, and in good literature that tells a man what he is.
The death she is holding off is one she names herself. As a child, between five and seven, she feared sleep, and she reads that fear now as a fear of obliteration. As an adult she welcomes sleep and the thinking she does in dream. She notices, on a box of Dutch cigarettes her editor gives her, the warning Roken is dodelijk, smoking is deadly, and she notices that the American warning sneaks the hopeful word health into the same sentence while the Dutch says DEADLY and means it. The American will not say the word. The Dutch says it loud. Abraham hears the difference and tells the interviewer that death has become the motif of the conversation. Then she names her immortality project outright. When she returns to nothingness, she hopes a few of her pages remain, and an independence of spirit she passed to friends and students. The man who has read ten of these essays knows the shape of a denial of death. Here the subject hands it to you, unprompted, in her own words.
So her sacred value is Knowledge, and the trouble starts the moment you set the word beside other men who also hold it sacred and mean by it something else.
For Abraham, Knowledge is salvation. It is gnosis, an end in itself, the nearest a man comes to the divine, and the thing that survives him. For the trauma surgeon, Knowledge is the order of steps that keeps a body alive on the table, and Knowledge that cannot be used the instant it is needed is waste, a vanity. For her own youngest brother, a Hasidic scholar she telephones each week and loves to hear, Knowledge is avodah, service, the text climbed like a ladder toward God, study that worships rather than departs. For the war correspondent, Knowledge is the fact pinned down before the deadline and filed, Knowledge that must be published or it is nothing, the opposite of the mystic’s hoard. For the Trappist who keeps the great silence, Knowledge is what writing ruins, a thing soiled by the sentence that tries to carry it. Five men, one word, five gods. Abraham’s god is the made page that outlasts the maker. Her brother’s god is the One the page serves. The surgeon has no use for a page at all.
Watch the same fracture run through her second value, the individual. Corbin gives her the line she wants: dogma ends prophecy, ends the individual’s reach for eternity, and no novelist could want that end. For Abraham the single self is the unit of eternity, the one who attains, the one who overhears himself and changes, after the model she takes from Hamlet and Don Quixote. For the Marine in the fire team, the individual is the thing that gets the squad killed, and the dissolving of the self into the unit is the whole of virtue. For the farmer in a communal Hutterite colony, individualism is the first sin, the pride in the garden, the appetite that broke the world. For the founder chasing his round of funding, the individual is the genius who counts because he scales, and the crowd is only a market. Abraham’s individual saves his soul by standing apart. The Marine saves his by vanishing into the line. The word holds. The hero system underneath it does not.
Her third value is art, and by art she means the made thing that lasts, the character who walks off the page and keeps living for four hundred years, as she says Quixote and Hamlet do. The novel, for her, began as an anti-authoritarian form, reacting against the epic and its idealized heroics and against the romance written to amuse, and a book that keeps the name owes the world something new. For the publisher who prints her, art is a category that sells or fails to, the literary novel a product dressed as parody and sold past its difficulty, which is how she explains the false hope readers bring to her demanding books. For the aniconist who will paint no living thing, the made image that competes with creation is blasphemy, a theft from God. For the commissar, art serves the state or it is decadence to be corrected. For the radio man who fills four hours of drive-time, art is whatever holds the audience and pays the rent, and he would find her four hundred years a strange and useless span. Abraham wants the form that survives to deserve its survival, and she puts the painful question to herself as much as to others, since the Hasidic movement survived by making itself easy for the masses, and the novel risks the same bargain. The word art carries five futures. Hers reaches past her own death. The radio man’s ends at the next ratings book.
Now the reversal, which is where the man who has read ten of these essays earns his eleventh.
Abraham describes her own life as a subtraction. She left home, family, faith, she says, to become herself, and she is still becoming, as her characters are. The story she tells is the modern one, the removal of illusion, the clearing away of God and community until what is left is the bare self choosing freely. But she did not subtract a hero system. She traded one for another and kept the architecture whole. The Hasidic world she left runs on rigor, on an elite who study while the masses keep custom, on a text that outlives the body, on a teacher who passes a flame to students. Read her sentences again. She prizes rigor and despises piety without it. She quotes Maimonides on the wise few and the pious many and lands on the side of the few. She locates eternity in pages that survive her and in an independence of spirit handed to students. She made God, in her own phrase, an abstract man-made idea of a perfection a man climbs toward. She did not leave the structure. She relocated its God from the heavens to the bookshelf and kept everything else, the study, the elite, the transmission, the text that beats death. She is more Hasidic than she says. Not in creed. In form.
There is a fault running through her own system, and she names the materials for it without naming the fault. Her highest craft value is the one she takes from Keats (1795-1821), negative capability, the power to become the other, to enter a character so fully that he lives. Her highest creed value is the individual who stands apart and saves himself by not dissolving. The art demands the self vanish into another. The creed demands the self hold its ground. She becomes the surfer who walks toward the Taliban, the wife giving up on a marriage, the yeshiva boy lost in his own wanting, and out of that vanishing she makes the thing that marks her as singular and might outlast her. The man who would reach eternity as himself gets there only by becoming everyone else first. She lives in the gap and does not appear to find it a problem, which might be the most telling fact about her.
Set her act of leaving in front of several rooms at once and watch it change shape. To her brother the scholar, who reads the same texts and stayed, she is the one who took the rigor and dropped the service, who kept the ladder and threw away the heaven it leans on. To the off-the-derech memoirist who writes the mechanics of escape, she is the coward or the snob who will not call the old world a prison, who insists on its richness and so betrays the ones still trying to get out. To the nostalgic American Jewish writers she faults by name, she is the scold who guards a Yiddish she thinks she owns by birth and they only borrowed from books. To the publisher she is a difficult mid-list author who will not write the easy book. And to the traditionalist, the man whose hero system runs on blood and covenant and the chain of generations, leaving home, family, and faith to become oneself is the deepest defeat a person can choose, the surrender of the only eternity there is, which is descendants and a people and a covenant kept, traded for a private gnosis and a hope of pages. Five rooms. One woman walking out a door. A heroine, a traitor, a snob, a poor earner, a lost soul. The act does not change. The scheme that reads it does.
Three coordinates to keep her placed.
She tells the interviewer she sounds well connected and social and then corrects the record. She spends most of her time alone, in the company of her dachshund, Emma P. The hero of Knowledge works alone, and the room is where she fails, and the desk is where she is saved. Watch her always leave the room for the page.
She admires real scholarship and her brother’s open, heretic talk, and she meets grown men and women with access to knowledge who prefer not to know. Her contempt is not for the believer. It is for the man who keeps the custom and skips the study, who wants the comfort of the ladder without the climb. That contempt is the clearest sign that the old system never left her. It only changed its altar.
She hopes a few of her pages remain. That is the wager, stated plain, and it is the same wager the Hasid makes on the soul and the Marine makes on the unit and the founder makes on the company that scales past his death. The word she lives by is Knowledge, and the thing she wants from it is the thing every hero system promises and none can prove, which is that the man will not, after all, end.
The Drawbridge: Pearl Abraham and the Literary Field
Pearl Abraham opens a novel by Steve Stern (b. 1947) or Dara Horn (b. 1977) or Nicole Krauss (b. 1974) and closes the case by page one. She does not need to read further. The Yiddish on the page comes from books and legend, she says, from Henry Roth and an immigrant world long gone, and the nostalgia and the corn give the writer away. A real speaker of Yiddish in Williamsburg, she notes, does not experience his language as tragicomic, and would think you came from the moon if you said so. The judgment lands fast because it is not a judgment about a sentence. It is an act of placement. She is sorting writers into those who hold the real thing and those who hold a counterfeit, and the speed of the sort is the surest sign that something other than reading is at work.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) gave us the tools to see what. A literary field, in his account, is a space of positions arranged between two poles. At one pole sits restricted production, art made for other artists and for a small body of qualified readers, where the reward is recognition by peers and the slow consecration of time. At the other pole sits large-scale production, the book made to sell, measured by the market and the bestseller list. The two poles run on opposed principles. At the commercial pole, sales prove worth. At the autonomous pole, sales prove nothing, and a large audience can count against a man, since the crowd is held to want comfort and the easy thing. Bourdieu called this the economic world reversed. The writer who would accumulate the durable capital, the symbolic kind, learns to disavow the other kind, the money, and to wear his small sales as a mark of seriousness.
Abraham has done Bourdieu’s structural map for him, in her own words, and called it a theory of the novel. The novel, she says, began as an anti-authoritarian form, against the epic with its idealized heroics and against the prose romance written to amuse. It took prose from the romance and a higher purpose from the epic. A book that keeps the name owes the world something new, some reaction against what came before. Entertainment she assigns to the Harlequin, the thriller, the mystery, the spy saga. That is the autonomous pole describing itself and pushing the commercial pole to the far side of a line. When she adds that publishers, hunting the widest sale, have sold the literary novel as easy entertainment and built false hope in readers, she is naming the heteronomous force, the market, reaching across the line to colonize the high form. And when she asks whether the form that survives the market deserves to survive, since the Hasidic movement lived by making itself easy for the masses, she states the autonomy principle in moral dress. Worth, at her pole, runs against survival by sale.
Read her trajectory across the field and a career comes into focus. Her debut, The Romance Reader (1995), was a commercial success. Its German edition, Die Romanleserin, held a place on Der Spiegel‘s bestseller list for months. A Bourdieusian reading does not treat that as the prize. It treats it as a starting position, economic capital that can be converted into the durable kind only if it is followed by a turn toward autonomy and a disavowal of the market that produced it. Her later work makes the turn. The Seventh Beggar (2005) makes hard demands on the reader, takes its frame from a tale by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, braids Kabbalah through artificial intelligence, and asks to be read by the relaxed and confident few rather than the many. She founds and edits a journal devoted to the craft of the sentence, the sentence being the autonomous pole’s purest object, form attended to apart from any market. She founds and directs an MFA program, which makes her a consecrating house herself, one that forms the habitus of the next cohort and reproduces the standards by which the field judges. The arc moves from the bestseller list toward the small rigorous audience, and in this field that arc accrues symbolic capital rather than spends it.
The capital she trades in has a particular source, and here the analysis earns its keep. Abraham holds something her competitors cannot buy and cannot study their way into. She was born in Jerusalem into a rabbi’s home, the third of nine children, schooled first in Yiddish, carried between Israel and New York, brought to English as a third language. That trajectory deposits in her a stock of native capital, the insider’s Hasidic knowledge and a Yiddish learned from the mouth rather than the page. In the literary field, that stock converts into symbolic capital of a high order, the authority of the witness who reports from inside a closed world. Critics praised The Romance Reader for refusing the outsider’s easy verdict, and the refusal is legible as the dividend of native capital. She can render the warmth and the constraint at once because she carries both, and the carrying is not for sale.
Now watch the boundary war, which is a struggle over the rate of exchange. When Abraham closes the Stern or Horn or Krauss novel by page one, she rules that their Yiddish is borrowed capital, acquired from books and an immigrant nostalgia, and so counterfeit. The ruling is not disinterested. It defends the value of her own holdings. If book-Yiddish converted as well as mouth-Yiddish, her edge would shrink. The whole worth of the native stock rests on its scarcity and its resistance to purchase. A thing anyone can study is a thing anyone can hold, and a thing anyone can hold confers no distinction. So she draws the line precisely where her capital sits, with the lived and the spoken on the legitimate side and the studied and the borrowed on the vulgar side, and she calls the borrowed version a sellout, light and funny and easy enough to please, which is the charge the autonomous pole always brings against the commercial one. The authenticity claim is the form her cultural capital takes. Real Yiddish from the mouth is valuable because it cannot be bought, and she is its holder.
The irony sits in plain sight. Abraham performed the very conversion she denies the others. She took insider Hasidic knowledge and Yiddish literacy and turned them into literary standing, an MFA, teaching posts, the consecrated debut, the place in the histories of Jewish-American letters. The conversion is legitimate by the field’s own rules. What the analysis adds is that policing the boundary is how the newly consecrated secure the ground they have just taken. She crossed the bridge and pulled it up behind her. The native who converts her nativeness into art has the strongest reason to insist that no one else can do the same, since her standing depends on the conversion staying rare.
The struggle with Wendy Shalit (b. 1975) runs along a different axis and shows the same hand. Shalit charged, in a 2005 essay, that Jewish novelists wrote unfairly and negatively about Orthodox Judaism. The charge proposes a principle of evaluation in which fidelity to the religious community sets the standard. Abraham grants the question a hearing, asks whether the work is art, answers that much of it is entertainment, and then moves the axis. Good and bad literature, she holds, have nothing to do with religion. Stereotype and sentiment make for easy reading and easy sales, and craft alone does not make art, which lives in characters who walk off the page and keep living for four hundred years, after the model of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), and Hamlet, and after what John Keats (1795-1821) called negative capability, the power to become the other. The move is a position-taking. By ruling religion irrelevant and craft sovereign, she shifts the contest onto the ground where her capital pays best, the autonomous pole of pure literary value, and away from the ground of communal fidelity where a Shalit might score. She suspects Shalit left her off the list because she did not fit the thesis, and she might be right, but the deeper point is that the disinterested standard she raises is interested all the way down. Disinterest, at her pole, is a strategy, and a profitable one.
Geography does work for her too. She reports that Dutch and overseas critics read The Seventh Beggar better than American or Jewish ones, that her best interviewer was a Dutch journalist who got a full front page and never misquoted, that even the Dutch beauty magazines run smarter writers. The ranking is a claim about national subfields. She places the foreign field nearer the autonomous pole, more literary, more able to consecrate her on the terms she wants, and she places the American Jewish readership nearer the commercial pole, hungry for the nostalgic and the easy. When she says American Jews are no longer the people of the book, she is filing a complaint about the competence of her home audience to confer the recognition she values, and looking abroad for consecration instead. The German bestseller and the Dutch front page become, in her telling, marks of literary worth rather than mere sales, because they come from a field she rates as serious.
She handles the one fact that strains the whole arrangement with care. Don Quixote was an immediate bestseller, sold as a parody of chivalric romance, which threatens the rule that sales prove nothing. She rescues the rule by reframing the book. It runs over nine hundred pages, it is hard, it is not in the way readers expect funny, and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) called it crude and cruel. The bestseller is readmitted to the autonomous pole because a consecrated peer has certified its difficulty and its cruelty, and because time, four centuries of it, has done the slow work the market cannot do. Commercial success at the origin is forgiven once symbolic capital accumulates on top of it. That is the path she walked herself, from Der Spiegel toward the small rigorous reader, and Quixote is the precedent she reaches for to make the path honorable.
Three coordinates to keep her placed in the field.
She is rich in cultural capital and modest in the economic kind, the writer who teaches, edits a journal of the sentence, and reaches a small consecrated audience. That is a position, not an accident, and she has chosen it move by move, away from the bestseller and toward the few. Watch the choices, not the sales.
Her authenticity talk is the language her capital speaks. Each time she rules a rival’s Yiddish borrowed and her own real, she is setting the rate of exchange so that her holdings keep their worth. The contest looks like a quarrel about craft. It is a quarrel about whose capital counts.
Her crossed from the closed world into the literary field by converting the closed world into art, and she guards the crossing as if it could be made only once. The drawbridge is up. The native who turned her nativeness into standing has the surest motive to call every later crossing a counterfeit, and that motive, more than any judgment about a sentence, is what closes the case by page one.
The Set
The set gathers after the work is done, and the work, that night, was a panel. Someone asked Pearl Abraham (b. 1960) and the others on the dais what it means to be Jewish, and the writers said their lines and came down off the stage tired of saying them. Then Melvin Jules Bukiet (b. 1953) and Steve Stern (b. 1947) and Aryeh Lev Stollman (b. 1954) and Abraham go café-hopping, a thing Abraham traces to Tel Aviv, and Bukiet smokes and Abraham takes the smoke secondhand, though she carries biddies and cigarillos when she can get them, and the best source for biddies is Paul Auster (1947-2024), who keeps whole little boxes of them. This is the set in its own room. Watch what they prize and what they will not be caught wanting, and the room explains itself.
What they value is the made thing that lasts and the mind rigorous enough to make it. Knowledge stands at the top, gnosis, real scholarship, the open and heretic conversation a man can have only with another well-read and independent mind. Abraham telephones her youngest brother, a Hasidic scholar, once a week and loves to hear the esoteric ideas he is thinking, and she prizes him above most Orthodox men she meets because he stays open to the most honest and heretic talk. Around that core sit the lesser goods that serve it. The difficult book over the easy one. The sentence attended to as a sentence. The character who walks off the page and keeps living for four hundred years, after Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), and Hamlet. The reader who relaxes and lets intuition do the work. The negative capability John Keats (1795-1821) named, the power to become the other, which Abraham holds as the test of a real writer against a maker of caricature. Solitude is a good here too. Abraham says the set sounds well connected and then corrects the record. She spends most of her time alone, with her dachshund, Emma P, and the friendships run by email with only the rare face-to-face. The Dutch, she says, are the best at downtime. They call the gathering lounging.
The hero, to this set, is the writer who makes the enduring thing against the market and against the crowd. To live a life that counts is to leave pages that survive you. Abraham says outright that when she returns to nothingness she hopes a few of her pages remain, and an independence of spirit she passed to friends and students, and the whole set runs on some version of that wager. The villain is the sellout, the man who keeps his Yiddish light and funny and easy enough to please, the entertainer who fills the room and earns the living and calls it art. The shameful thing is to be middlebrow, to be nostalgic, to please the crowd, to perform Jewishness for applause at a bad Jewish event. Harold Bloom (1930-2019) sits near the top of the hero order as a consecrator. His praise of The Seventh Beggar counts because he is the kind of reader the set recognizes, and the same goes for the foreign critics who read her hard book better than the home ones did.
The status games run on who reads whom correctly. Abraham ranks readers the way another man ranks wines. Dutch and overseas critics over American ones, who she says did worse with The Seventh Beggar. Younger readers who go with the flow over Jewish critics who hunt too hard for meaning. The journalist Jan Donkers, who interviewed her for NRC, gets full marks because he is literary, skilled with the tape, gets things right, no misquotes, nothing out of context, and was given a full front page. Even the Dutch beauty magazines run smarter writers, she says, and names Ilonka Leenheer of Dutch Elle, who wrote a smart piece and was given the space to do it. Her Dutch editor, Pieter Swinkels, supplies the baby torpedoes and the cigarette box that says DEADLY in plain Dutch. The home audience loses the game. American Jews, she says, are no longer the people of the book.
The sharpest move in the game is the judgment by page one. Abraham opens a novel by Dara Horn (b. 1977) or Nicole Krauss (b. 1974) or Steve Stern and rules, before the second page, that the Yiddish on it comes from books and legend rather than the mouth, that the nostalgia and the corn give the writer away, that a real speaker in Williamsburg would think you came from the moon for calling his language tragicomic. The speed is the point. To place a celebrated peer that fast is to display the connoisseur’s ear, and the display is itself the status claim. The other moves are quieter. Proximity to the consecrated, the biddies bummed off Auster, the praise from Bloom. The claim that she performs better alone, takes full responsibility, and falters only when she shares a stage. The note that at summer camp she was the crush object rather than the crusher, that the value lay in being beloved. The dancer who was never a team player, whose achievements were solo, on stage, choreographed for the group but performed apart.
Their normative claims follow from the values, and they are firm. A novel ought to attempt something new and react against what came before, or it forfeits the name. A writer ought to refuse the nostalgic and the easy, since keeping the work light enough to please is a kind of sellout. A reader ought to bring negative capability and become the other, and a serious man ought to want to know rather than prefer custom and ritual and law without caring what they signify. Orthodoxy ought to be examined, Abraham says, asked what it means and when it began and whether it remains livable, and she cites Maimonides (1138-1204) on wisdom for the elite and piety for the masses, and Henri Corbin (1903-1978) on dogma as the presupposed end of prophecy. The room she was in that night would not go there. It wanted the count of worshippers in Upper West Side synagogues and it wanted confession. The set holds that the room failed a duty.
The essentialist claims sit under the oughts and give them their force. The novel is anti-authoritarian by nature, born against the epic and the romance, owing the world newness as a condition of its name. Real Yiddish is by nature spoken, carried in the mouth and the culture, and book-Yiddish is by nature counterfeit, which is why the page-one ear can detect it. Art is the thing that endures and lives, and entertainment is by nature the lesser kind, fit for the Harlequin and the thriller and the spy saga. Good and bad literature have nothing to do with religion, which separates the aesthetic from the devotional as two different orders of thing. The man who has had the real thing, Abraham says, does not easily fall for the fakes and wannabes, so discernment is treated as a settled property of the well-formed, not a mood. And Jews, she says, are no longer one of the interesting minorities, a claim about a changed condition of the people rather than a passing fashion.
The moral grammar fuses the aesthetic and the moral into one judgment. A corny sentence is not merely a weak sentence. It is a small betrayal, evidence of a man who chose the crowd over the truth. The deep axis runs from the authentic and rigorous and enduring at the good end to the nostalgic and easy and crowd-pleasing at the bad end, and the worst sin along it is the sellout, the trading of the real for the saleable. Bad faith is the other cardinal offense. Abraham confesses she suspected her swaying, praying classmates of performance, of seeking a good reputation toward a worthy marriage, and the suspicion is moral, not only social. To perform devotion you do not feel, to relish ritual you will not examine, to write the Yiddish of a grandmother you never heard, all fall under the same charge. The honest and heretic conversation is the highest good in this grammar, and the man who can sustain it, like her brother the scholar, earns the deepest respect the set gives. Loyalty runs to truth and craft rather than to the tribe. In this grammar, leaving home and family and faith to become oneself reads as the brave act, the becoming that never finishes, and the elite stands above the mass on a ladder that is intellectual before it is anything else.
That grammar inverts the one she was raised in, and the inversion is the whole of her distance from home. In the world of the rabbi’s house, the nine children, the mother afraid of God and death and hell, the father who loved Him, loyalty and continuity and covenant are the goods, piety is the virtue, and the chain of generations is the thing that beats death. In that grammar the individual who walks out the door is a loss, and leaving faith to become oneself is the surrender of the only eternity there is. Abraham keeps the rigor of that world and drops its God, or relocates Him, calling Him an abstract man-made idea of a perfection a man climbs toward. She admires real scholarship hugely and meets grown men and women with access to knowledge who prefer not to know, and her contempt falls on them rather than on the believer. The set she chose is built around that contempt. It is a diaspora of soloists who gather to complain about having had to perform their Jewishness, who conduct their friendships by email, who rate the Dutch over the home crowd, and who agree on one thing above all, that the made thing must be hard and true and that the easy version is a sellout dressed as art.
Three things to keep in view about the set.
It is loose and largely absent, held together by email and the rare café night and a shared list of the consecrated and the corny. Stern and Stollman live near Abraham upstate, and a painter friend is in the area for the occasional adventure, but the set is a network of people who each prize solitude, and the gathering is the exception, not the rule. Watch how rarely they are in the same room.
Its boundary is policed by the ear. Horn and Krauss and the other nostalgic writers stand just outside it, near enough to be read and ruled on, far enough to be the negative example the set defines itself against. Wendy Shalit (b. 1975) stands outside it on the other side, charging the writers with disloyalty to Orthodoxy, and the set answers by moving the question from loyalty to craft. Rebecca Goldstein (b. 1950) and Allegra Goodman (b. 1967) and the predecessor Chaim Potok (1929-2002) sit nearer the center, fellow workers in the same material, and the critics Ted Solotaroff (1928-2008) and Irving Howe (1920-1993) hover as prophets the set disputes.
Its highest figures are not in the room at all. The composers Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960), whose crossing of cultures Abraham holds up as the fertile path. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) on the impossibility of writing Yiddish in America, and Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971), who proved fine poetry once lived in the language. Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948), whom she translates, and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), whose tale gave her a novel, and Cervantes and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), who certified Quixote as cruel and alive. The living set drinks and smokes and lounges and complains, but it orients by the dead and the distant, the ones who made the thing that lasted, which is the only thing this set agrees a life is for.
The Voice
Abraham reports almost in passing and then moves past: she never had the religious phase. The other girls began to sway and pray longer and harder than anyone else, and she watched them and wondered, and suspected some of them of putting on a show toward a good marriage. The love and fear of God missed her, she says, despite the prayers said twice a day. That is not the memory of a believer who lost her faith. It is the memory of someone who stood outside the thing from the start and took notes. Everything else follows from that early position at the edge of the room.
She is a constitutional non-belonger, and she made the incapacity into a vocation. Look at the pattern and it holds across every domain. She was the crush object at summer camp, not the crusher, and she says the value lay in being beloved rather than in loving. She was a dancer, a soloist, never a team player. She left home, family, faith. Her friendships run by email with the rare face-to-face. She spends most of her time alone with a dachshund. Her great subject, in every novel, is a figure suspended between worlds and at home in neither, the Hasidic girl with the secret library, the surfer walking toward the Taliban, the couple whose marriage thins out into separate solitudes. She writes the only thing she knows from the inside, which is the experience of not fully belonging anywhere.
What saves a person built this way is not community, which she cannot enter, but knowledge, which she can. She names it plainly. Meaning lives, she says, in Knowledge, in gnosis. The word is exact and she chose it. She cites Henri Corbin, the scholar of Islamic and esoteric gnosis, on dogma as the end of prophecy and the close of the individual’s road to eternity. She cites Maimonides (1138-1204) on wisdom for the elite and piety for the masses, and she lands with the elite. She made God into an abstract idea of a perfection a man climbs toward, and set her aim at the knowledge the mystic reaches while declining the title of mystic. This is a recognizably Gnostic shape, and it is not loose to call it that. Knowledge saves rather than faith or works. The few ascend and the many stay below with their custom and ritual, which she meets in grown men and women who have access to knowledge and prefer not to know, and whom she holds in a contempt she never turns on the simple believer. The spark escapes the body. When she returns to nothingness she hopes a few pages remain. The religious architecture of her childhood did not leave her. She moved its God from the heavens to the bookshelf and kept the ladder, the elite, the ascent by study, the disdain for the merely embodied life.
She prizes negative capability, the power John Keats (1795-1821) named, the capacity to become the other so fully that the character lives. Here the woman who cannot belong, who watches from the edge, who exalts the single self, requires the opposite of all that. To make the thing she wants to make she has to dissolve into someone else. The watcher’s one available communion is imaginative, temporary, controlled, conducted on the page rather than in the room. Reading and writing are how the non-belonger touches other lives without the risk of the gazebo, the panel, the marriage. That is why reading runs through her fiction as both plot and salvation, the book that breaks the inherited frame and opens what lies past it. She is describing the only door she ever found.
The same position that gives her the watcher’s clear eye gives her a defensive streak that does not become her. Her trick of closing a rival’s novel by page one and ruling the Yiddish counterfeit is partly real ear and partly the guarding of a scarcity she depends on. If anyone could acquire what she inherited, her edge would shrink, and she draws the line of the authentic exactly where her own holdings sit. Her insistence that good and bad literature have nothing to do with religion is true as far as it goes and also moves the contest onto the one ground where she wins. And the career bears the marks of chosen marginality. Her debut sold abroad as a story of awakening, and she spent the years after walking away from that audience toward the difficult book and the small rigorous reader, until the complaint arrives that American Jews are no longer the people of the book, which is partly a complaint that they stopped reading her on her terms.
She refused the escape narrative when it was the easy sale, and kept the intelligence and the spiritual weight of the world she left even while questioning its authority, which is harder and rarer than either the loyalist’s defense or the apostate’s exposé. The honesty she prizes, the open and heretic conversation, she practices on herself more than most writers do, which is why the interview gives so much away without seeming to notice.
The Prose
Reviewers call the prose of Giving Up America sparse and exacting, and the debut a quiet performance, an assured book narrated in a muted voice that seems to whisper secrets to the reader. Kirkus put the matter best by calling it an austerity of method, a writer who makes few concessions to the ignorance of non-Jewish or assimilated readers and so delivers an unflinching portrait of a world closed to outsiders. The same review credited her with refusing the cardboard opposition between a rebel daughter and a repressive faith, and with letting the reader feel the limits of the girl’s own way of seeing her parents. Present tense runs under all of it. The line a reader pulled from American Taliban shows the cadence, a boy committed to living in the present in the present tense, the sentence built by accretion of short phrases rather than subordination.
The engine under the spareness is a rule she states herself, and it explains more than any adjective. Her pet peeve, she says, is the over-explained book clumsily addressed to the reader, and she cites Borges (1899-1986) on a historian of the Arabs who never mentions the camel because he does not have to, since the characters who live inside a world would not explain it to each other. That is the whole of her technique. She withholds the gloss. She trusts the reader to keep up or fall behind. The austerity the critics praise is the formal shape of a refusal to translate for the tourist.
The refusal carries a polemic. She told an interviewer that she did not meet Jewish sentimentalism and nostalgia until she left the rigor of the Hasidic world and ran into American Jewish literature, which she found packed with what Yiddish calls schmaltz, meaning fat. Her leanness is aimed at that fat. The trimmed sentence is the same judgment she passes on the nostalgic Yiddishists, made at the level of the line rather than the argument. Stollman, interviewing her, caught the payoff, that she renders Yiddish rhythms and culture without the dissonance one sometimes finds in such writing. The rhythm comes through and the corn does not, because she will not stop to point at either.
She is not only a minimalist, and The Seventh Beggar is where she reaches for more. She says she wanted to do more with form there, working in the fairy tale, legend, personal histories, and oral forms like the wedding jester’s rhymes, letting storytelling itself complicate the structure of the novel. The Romance Reader already carried some of this, punctuated by parody flights of the romance novels Rachel reads in secret. So the spareness is a baseline she departs from on purpose, and the departures are formal, structural, drawn from oral and folk genres rather than from ornament. She adds architecture, not adjectives.
She also varies the prose by who is holding the camera. In American Taliban she shifts at the end from the son to the mother and writes the mother far more emotionally, and she explains the split as truth to character: the secular rationalist mother is the sentimental one, while the son who embraces religion is not. The unsentimental style belongs to the believer and the warm style to the skeptic, which inverts what a reader expects and tells you she treats register as characterization rather than as a fixed house voice.
The limit shows up in the same book, and it is the most useful thing the criticism reveals, because the strength and the weakness are one gesture. The reticence that signals mastery when she writes the world she owns reads as absence when she writes a world she does not. Bookforum faulted the novel for an obsequious care for every community and for the wooden, hospitable tones she gives the Muslim characters, with a protagonist who stays inscrutable because he is never forced to act or defend himself. Kirkus went harder, calling the result, once she cuts away from the boy at the threshold of the Taliban, an ideological travelogue of a disengaged slacker. Read those complaints next to her Borges rule and the trouble is plain. Not explaining works when she knows the world from the inside, since the unsaid thing is present in her and reaches the page by pressure. Applied to Islam, a world she studied rather than lived, the unsaid thing is simply missing, and the same refusal to gloss leaves the characters flat and the convert opaque. The method that produced intimacy now produces a hole. She did not have for the mountains of Pakistan what she had for a rabbi’s house in upstate New York, and the prose, stripped as ever, could not hide the difference. It was built to hide nothing.
Her style is the formal print of the same temperament that runs through everything else about her. The watcher who stood at the edge of the praying girls and took notes is the writer who will not explain herself, who trims the fat, who withholds the gloss and trusts the few readers who can follow. When she writes from inside her own knowledge the reticence becomes authority and the muted voice carries the secret. When she writes from outside it the reticence becomes evasion and the muted voice goes quiet because there was nothing behind it to say. Her great strength and her characteristic failure are the same move, performed on different ground.
My July 11, 2006 Interview
I interviewed her this week via email (and got her answers back July 11, 2006).
* What's the wildest, craziest, riskiest thing you've ever done (aside from murdering your protagonist 80 pages in)?
A: You mean other than leave home, family, faith to become me, and it seems I am still forever becoming, as are my characters. I've had some adventures, but writing The Seventh Beggar may have been my greatest one so far.
* The dominant emotion I feel when reading your novels is sadness verging on depression. Is this your dominant emotion? Is this how you feel when you write? Do you seek to evoke an emotional reaction from your readers, and if so, what?
A: Sad and depressed? This comes as a surprise. I think, and am confirmed in this by mail from readers, that my novels are often funny. I'm probably the least depressed (or maybe I should say least neurotic) of Jewish writers, and I think some of these Jewish writers will confirm this. You may be responding to something different (than the standard Jewish American writing) in my narrative voice or in the voice of my characters, or maybe your sadness is based in a preconception that has more to do with what you think of Hasidism. What do you think?
I look to engage my reader's interest, of course, but I'm not all that focused on the reader as I write. I'm largely immersed in my characters and they tend to grow and lead the way. When I start to see and love the characters for who they've become, then I know that they are alive, that the novel may yet live. My writing tends to be character driven, which may be why the death of my protagonist is so painful to readers. It was certainly a challenge for me, as the writer.
* What's the story of you and God? You believed as a child, but dropped this belief when you went to college? Did God ever speak to you?
A: I can't say that I believed in God as a child; I just never experienced that religious phase that most teenagers go through, that time when your classmates begin to sway and pray longer and harder than anyone else. Based on the absence of any such inner urge, I could only watch and wonder; I'll confess that I sometimes judged them as pretenders — I thought they might be seeking a good reputation so as to beget a worthy mate in marriage.
I understood as a child that I ought to believe, but somehow, the love and fear of God missed me, despite my twice a day recitations of the O hear Israel. I knew even as a child that my Mom was very afraid (I'm not as certain of her love for God, as I am of my father's) and still is afraid of God, death, hell, and even as a child her fear felt childlike to me. I did, though, for a number of years, about 5-7, have a fear of going to sleep, which I think was a fear of obliteration. As an adult, though, I welcome sleep, and the kind of thinking I do in sleep and dream.
My interest in the concept of God came to me belatedly, and not on a religious level. I'm interested in the idea of divinity as an aspiration, a height or level of achievement, the ascetic mystic's interest, though I am not a mystic either. My goal is to attain as often as possible the divine knowledge or experience, intuitive and otherwise, that becomes available to the mystic. I may have had a few glimpses of it, in the course of my life, at work. Most people do, I think.
* When you participate in Jewish life, what encourages you and what discourages you?
A: Piety is a huge turnoff. And piety without rigor, without an intellectual grounding, is even worse. Growing up, I encountered a lot of that in girls and women who didn't have access to the education of their brothers. But I now meet grown Jewish men and women who have access to knowledge and prefer not to know. They seem to relish custom and ritual and law without quite knowing or caring what or whether it signifies. I was on a panel on Orthodoxy recently and I tried my best to set up a rigorous conversation about what orthodoxy means, and how and why it began — it actually arrived late to Judaism, which had a long prophetic tradition, unlike its all-too-early arrival to Christianity — and whether orthodoxy is still a viable way to live. I cited Maimonidies who said that orthodox piety is for the masses and wisdom is for the elite. Henri Corbin, the author of Alone with the Alone, writes that orthodoxy or dogma presupposes an end to prophecy, meaning individualism, an end to the possibility of an individual's attaining eternity. Who, in our day and age, would want that? Certainly no novelist. The audience and the other panelists did not want to or could not go there. They wanted to talk about the number of worshippers in Upper West Side synagogues, and they wanted personal confessionals. I should qualify this: it could have been my personal failure to communicate: I've been told that I perform better when I'm not sharing the stage with others, probably because then I take full responsibility.
I admire real scholarship. Hugely. I talk to my youngest brother approximately once a week and love hearing about the esoteric ideas he's thinking and writing about. He's a Hasidic scholar and writer, knows his way around the texts, and in tremendous contrast to most orthodox Jews I meet, he's open to the most honest and heretic conversations. Not that this is true of every Hasid, and the reverse is probably not true of every orthodox. It takes a well-read individual with an independent, rigorous mind to converse freely.
* When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What crowd did you hang out with in highschool, college? Today?
A: It shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't the most popular kid. For one thing, I wasn't a team player. My achievements tended toward individual ones: I was a dancer and performed on-stage, solo and within groups. In my Junior and Senior years of high school (and also summer camps), I was head of dance and I choreographed for musicals and plays. We staged a lot of these then, for some reason (I didn't attend a Hasidic school). My school hired a professional pianist and director who taught me a modicum of ballet and modern dance which generated rumors that I'd taken ballet classes. I developed a passion for dance and wanted to become a classical ballet dancer. On days off from school, I would take the local minibus to a ballet school on Main Street to study the photos in the windows. Of course, my parents would never allow me to wear tights and leotards, but in my second year of college, I signed up for dance classes, soon learned that I was too old for classical ballet, and decided to drop it. Entirely.
In college, as an undergraduate, I found parties a huge bore since everyone was stoned and I wasn't. Ditto at those final-tour Grateful Dead and The Who and Neil Young concerts. I had a boyfriend who loved The Who. I shared Bill Clinton's problem: I didn't/couldn't inhale smoke, so I tried eating pot, and once drinking it as ganga tea, experiences that left me with no love for it.
Today: do I hang out? I'm in touch with various writers and friends, and we sometimes hang; we call it lounging. My Dutch friends are especially good at downtime. Most of my writerly relationships are conducted largely via email, with only a rare face-to-face meeting. The Jewish contingent has its own ghetto dynamic going and it's especially fun when we manage to get Steve Stern, Melvin Bukiet, Aryeh Stollman and I together, usually after another bad Jewish event where we are asked to speak on what it means to be Jewish. Melvin and I have our own standing specialties: we go café hopping (I think this started in Tel Aviv), drink and smoke; I should say, he smokes, I mostly secondhand smoke — though I smoke biddies and cigarillos, when I can get them. Best source for biddies: bum them off Paul Auster, who carries whole little boxes of them. Excellent source for baby torpedoes: my Dutch editor, Pieter Swinkels. The label on the box, "Roken is dodelijk," adds flavor. Unlike the American warning, which manages to get the optimistic word health in it, the Dutch uses the word DEADLY loud and clear. Death, for better or worse, seems to have become a motif of this conversation.
I now spend quite a bit of time upstate where my social life seems to have taken off. And I'll be teaching at Western New England College, in Springfield, MA this year. There are more of us up here these days than in New York City. I have a friend in the area who is a painter and we get together for various adventures. And Aryeh Stollman and Steve Stern aren't far away.
Having said all that — it makes me sound well-connected and social — I should tell you that I'm really not. I spend most of my time alone, in the company of my dachshund, Emma P.
* I find a world without God and religion depressing. I'm curious where you find happiness and meaning if everything is just going to end in nothingness.
A: Oh God. I find meaning and happiness in Knowledge (gnosis). And in good literature, which tells us about ourselves, what it is to be human. And in trying to craft decent literature. And in teaching it, which I hope will create good readers of literature.
Meaning in God? Well, yes, since my concept of God is an abstract man-made idea of a perfection to aspire to. Re: Religion? Not if it means orthodoxy, or some other conventional form of it.
And nothingness? I can trace my beginning as a thinker back to the year in high school when I studied the commentaries on the concept of tohu va'vohu in Genesis. Every novel begins with a blank page; that's why writers are so neurotic during their year of publication. They have to go back to that blank page one. That, and also their publishers serving up the usual publishing debacles, and then the dearth of good readers. What will remain, when I have returned to NOTHINGNESS, are I hope a few of my pages. And an independence of spirit and wit that I hope to have imparted to friends and students.
* Being raised in a serious religion immunizes one from falling for wacky cults such as the Kabbalah Centre, I believe. Would you agree?
A: I do agree with you. When you've had the real thing, you don't easily fall for the fakes and wannabes. Indeed you remain quite discerning and you probably don't easily embrace anything else. I, for one example, had no interest in becoming an orthodox, modern orthodox, conservative or reform Jew.
* What do you think of the contemporary "spirituality" craze? It strikes me as cheap grace. People looking for the benefits of religion without paying the price that organized religion demands.
A: The Hasidic movement would not have survived if it hadn't made itself appealing to the masses. Perhaps you could say that about the novel as well. The ascetic lifestyle appeals only to the elite, the seriously rigorous. But the question remains: Is the form that survives worthy of survival? This is a painful question that writers and artists everywhere must ask themselves every day: To survive, to actually earn a living, one must make the work easy or accessible enough for the masses, but then is the art worthy enough to be called art, to engage in?
* I've heard the novel described as a bourgeois medium primarily suited for entertainment. Yet you make considerable demands on the reader in The Seventh Beggar. Do you think most of the readers of that book are up to that task? I notice that interviewers love asking you fancy shmancy questions about the various intricacies of the book and I can't help thinking that these intellectual concerns, stylistic concerns, otherness and being concerns, are miles removed from the average bloke picking up your book and hoping to have a good time.
A: Your question comes at a moment in which I am preparing for a lit class titled "The Development of the Novel," so this may come off as pedantry, but I don't mind joining the ranks of pedants such as Don Quixote and Charles Kinbote.
The novel as a genre began as an anti-authoritarian form, in reaction against the epic with its heightened language (verse) and false or idealized heroics, and also against the prose romance (chivalric or pastoral/Arcadian) produced for entertainment. From the romance, the novel took prose and refined it, from the epic it took worthiness, or a higher purpose. Yes, the form is based in the town square, it embraces the carnivale, or aspects of parody, but it is not and was never intended as mere entertainment. That remains the task of romances such as Harlequins and thrillers and mysteries and spy sagas. The word 'novel' still means new, though it's been around a few centuries now, and when all is said and done, the novel, to continue calling itself a novel, ought to attempt something new, to react against what came before it. Unfortunately the general public has not been informed of this. What's happened is that the publishers aiming to earn as much as possible have sold the literary novel as entertainment, which it can be, though it isn't mere entertainment or easy entertainment, and so has created a false set of expectations. Don Quixote, probably the first modern novel, was an immediate bestseller, sold as a parody of the chivalric romance, but the book isn't an easy read (it's over 900 pages long), and it isn't funny, though most readers who come to it expect it to be. Nabokov famously called it crude and cruel and it is that: it's filled with cruel prank after cruel prank. And with plenty of pedantry. But Don Quixote lives, both in and out of its 900 pages.
That said, The Seventh Beggar is entertaining — my publisher forgot to tell you that. Its best readers are the ones who relax and go with the flow without looking so hard for meaning. The book is intuitively organized and intuitively coherent — it is after all a mystic's story — and it takes a relaxed, confident reader to allow intuition to do the work of understanding. Younger readers do well with it. Non-Jewish critics, especially from overseas, did better with it then Jewish ones, which means what? That American Jews are no longer the people of the book? But I think we've already established that.
* At what age did you begin to have an erotic interest in boys? I assume your family and religious community put a squash on this. Did you run wild with the boys when you got your freedom? I'm sorry to be so vulgar, but there's very little wank material in your works.
A: You're wrong about the "wank material" in my work: Joel engages in an orgy of wanking in the first third of The Seventh Beggar. And Rachel of The Romance Reader has her fantasy variations on love, if not sex. And Deena, of Giving Up America, well, she's in the mode of renouncing love along with much else. At the age of, maybe ten, I had a crush on a friend of my brother's, Ari Weinstock, who taught me to ride his banana handle banana seat bicycle. My parents didn't fuss about it. Then I fell out of love with Jewish boys and in love with fictional MEN. Oddly enough, I didn't read much secular Jewish fiction. I was reading classics, such as The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights and A Tale of Two Cities, as page turners! By the time I was in my teens I was spending most of my time with women and though I didn't develop a crush for anyone in particular, I was the crush object or crushee (a word?) of various girls, usually a few years older than I, usually at summer camp, where we'd sit in a gazebo in the dark, and look at the stars. I must not have been erotically engaged since I found it rather vapid, didn't know what to say. The value of these crushes, I think, was more in being beloved rather than in the act of loving.
* How do you feel about the chutzpah of people such as Steve Stern writing in English trying to imitate of Yiddish when they are neither literate in Yiddish nor Hebrew? Shouldn't there be a license to do this?
A: Thing is, when I read [Steve] Stern and [Dara] Horn and [Nicole] Krauss, I don't have to go beyond page one to know that their knowledge of Yiddish and Yiddish culture is based in books (Henry Roth) and legend, and in an immigrant culture long bygone. The nostalgia and cornpone alone is a dead giveaway. I hear that sort of corn from every upper westsider who had a grandmother or father who spoke some Yiddish. They distort and mispronounce words (see Isaac Bashevis Singer on the impossibility of writing Yiddish in America), for example, "patchkeying," an Englishing of the word "patchkeh" — the most recent one I've heard. To them, Yiddish is sad and funny, though ask a real speaker of Yiddish in Williamsburgh whether his language is tragicomic and he'll think you're from the moon. If there's wit, it's in the speaker's skills, in succinct and witty phrasing, which is true of every language.
SIGNIFICANTLY, though, this immigrant nostalgic Yiddish is what general readers recognize, and the nostalgia and corn confirms them in what they already feel about Yiddish, which makes them feel good, and so they prefer reading this to reading a version that is unfamiliar, perhaps more than they want to know.
Non-Jewish readers, if they bother at all, come across all this nostalgia and corn and walk away confirmed in what they already think: that Jews and Yiddish are full of oy veys and other kvetches, that if this is art, it's art on a Chagall level. You'd never know that fine poetry, by say Yankev Glatshteyn, was once written in this language. At the end of the day, working in this nostalgic joking vein, keeping the Yiddish and Yiddish culture just light and funny and easy enough to please, is a kind of sellout.
* What did you think of Wendy Shalit's January 2005 essay in the NYT book review about Jewish novelists writing negatively and unfairly about Orthodox Judaism? I noticed she did not mention you.
A: Wendy Shalit was asking a valid question — she asked whether this is art, and the answer is that much of it is merely entertainment — but her conclusions were entirely obtuse, astonishingly confused. Good literature and bad literature have nothing to do with religion. Stereotypes, caricatures, and sentimentality are easy crowd pleasers, and make for easy reading. These writers are finding a market niche-Jewish Americans seeking entertainment disguised as literature — and filling it. Even if the work shows some craft, it doesn't necessarily qualify as art. Enduring art features authentic characters that live on the page, and walk off the page and continue to live for 400 years, as Don Quixote and Hamlet have. Such characters come from the writer's ability to enter deeply and empathetically into these characters, from what Keats famously called "a negative capability," which is an ability to become the OTHER. Shakespeare's characters are particularized humans who can think and change, and, after Harold Bloom, "overhear" themselves.
The controversy helped the writers sell books. And they all took full advantage of it with responses. I like to think that I was excluded because I didn't suit Wendy's thesis. For one thing, I write with empathy and sympathy for that world. And I hope my characters aren't caricatures, and I hope they live. Only time will tell, and so we'll have to postpone the question for a century or so.
* What do you think of this? Ted Solotaroff's comment in a 1988 New York Times Book Review essay that "[a]s assimilation continues to practice its diluting and dimming ways, it seems evident that the interesting Jewish bargain or edge in American fiction will be more and more in the keeping of writers…who are anchored in the present-day observant Jewish community and who are drawn to the intense and growing dialogue between Judaism and modernity under the impact of feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Holocaust."
A: It's an attempt at prophecy but it's blinkered and in any case, has already been proven false. All sorts of unforeseen things happen. For one thing: Jews are no longer one of the interesting minorities and, I'll take a leap here, we, perhaps I should say I, aren't even all that interesting to ourselves, never mind to others, except perhaps to the Christian Right writers of the Left Behind series, who want to co-opt our biblical history. The sophisticated Jewish reader looking for something to read is skipping Jewish work that is too anchored in the subject of Jewishness. Irving Howe, btw, attempted some similar predictions re: Jewish writing, and was wrong since he also didn't foresee that there would be a new wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia.
In music, the crossing of genres and cultures has been extremely fertile. Think of Steve Reich, whose Tehillim takes the rhythms and chants and forms of African music and sets Hebrew texts to them. Or Osvaldo Golijov, who crosses Spanish and Jewish strains. I don't see why hybridity shouldn't do as much for literature. It already is doing it. Talented assimilated Jews will find ways of expression that reflect their varied influences. Hybridity makes for some of the greatest work: Don Quixote, which crosses the epic with the prose romance, is again a perfect example. The Seventh Beggar has something of this hybrid impulse, with, the bluegrass/Hasidic festival, with the golem and Cog, with a tale that crosses Nachman's Seven Beggars with the "sevens" of other fairy tales.
Luke: "I'm sure you've been interviewed over 100x… Who was the best and the brightest?"
Pearl: "Dutch journalists are far and away better than American ones, more literary or something, at least the ones I've encountered. Jan Donkers who interviewed me for NRC was very good, not only literarily but also skilled at use of tape, at getting things right, no misquotes, nothing out of context, Really on, and uses the interview form with some panache. He got a full front page, so that may have helped. Also in the Netherlands, even the mags, such as beauty mags, have better educated, smarter, good writers/journalists. Dutch Elle for example has Ilonka Leenheer, who interviewed me and wrote up a really smart piece. And she was given enough space too."