Luke Ford

In Schenectady the General Electric works runs its shifts and the town carries the company’s name in the air. Inside a house there, a girl listens to what her parents do not say. Six languages move through the rooms. German stays out of the family’s mouth at home, though both parents carry it from the old country. The girl is Elizabeth Rosner (b. 1959). Her father survived Buchenwald. Her mother survived the war hidden in the Polish countryside. The girl learns the shape of their history before she learns its facts, and the shape is silence with weight inside it.

The home is the subject. Rosner spends a writing life returning to it.

Her parents met after the war, married, and crossed to America. Her father reached Buchenwald at fifteen and came out at sixteen, he and a brother the last of their family left alive. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the countryside for two years, until the Russians drove the Germans out of Poland. The two of them brought that arithmetic of loss into a postwar American town built on turbines and electric light. Rosner grows up among neighbors whose fathers punch a clock at GE and come home to ordinary supper. Her own supper holds a war nobody will name. She watches her parents the way a child watches weather, reading pressure she cannot yet measure.

She leaves for Stanford, then takes a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Irvine, and studies further at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. She writes poems first. The poems teach her a discipline of rhythm and compression she never sets down, and her prose keeps the habit. She teaches. She publishes essays. Fiction comes later, and when it comes it carries the poet’s ear.

Her first novel, The Speed of Light (2001), reaches readers in nine languages. Julian, son of survivors, lives a contained life until a German photographer enters it, a woman shadowed by her own family’s part in the Nazi years. Rosner sets the children of victims and the children of perpetrators in the same frame and asks what passes between them. She does not hand down guilt as a fixed inheritance. She tests whether speech can cross the line that history drew. The book takes the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, lands on the American Library Association‘s Notable list, and reaches the shortlist for the French Prix Femina étranger. It marks her as a novelist who comes at the Holocaust through one room and two faces rather than through the machinery of historical reconstruction.

Blue Nude (2006) turns away from explicit Jewish material and keeps the deeper question. An American painter in Paris befriends an undocumented African immigrant, and the novel moves through displacement, race, and the duties of an artist toward a living model and a living man. The San Francisco Chronicle names it among the year’s best. Trauma still organizes the book, though it wears different clothes.

She comes home to her family’s ground in Electric City (2014), set in Schenectady. She braids family history into the town’s history, the immigrant labor and the postwar identity and the current that runs under all of it, visible and not. NPR lists it among its best books of the year. The same year she publishes Gravity, a collection built over some twenty years, poems that read the body as a place where grief is stored and sometimes, without warning, lifted.

Then she sets down a book that gathers everything.

The first trip is 1983. She travels with her father to Weimar, the cultured town a short distance from the camp, the town of Goethe and Schiller and Bach. Her father knows the German he refused at home, and here it comes back to him. He faints on arrival. The body keeps its own record. They go up to the beech forest the camp was named for, Buchenwald, and the gray of the place settles over the gray of memory. He shows her where a boy of fifteen learned what men can do to men.

The second trip is 1995. The Germans hold a commemoration, and former prisoners, their liberators, and the town’s residents come together at a gathering the organizers call the Survivors’ Café. The name gives Rosner her title and her image: the long tables, the coffee, the old men who were once starved boys, the children and grandchildren of every party to the thing. At one of these tables her father falls into conversation with a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels the descendants of perpetrators and carries a guilt she has not laid down. He answers her in the German he had buried. Rosner watches her father and the German woman find the same wound from opposite sides, the inheritance of the killers and the inheritance of the killed meeting over a cup at a folding table in Thuringia. On this trip he passes a kidney stone. On the last trip, in 2015, he loses a tooth. Three journeys, three small surrenders of the body, each one the war collecting a late installment.

Out of these trips comes Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). The book is memoir and more than memoir. Rosner reads deep in the literature of atrocity and in the new science of epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into us and passes forward. She wants to know how a daughter inherits a wound she never received, and she finds language for what she has felt since the silent suppers in Schenectady. She opens with what she names the Alphabet of Inadequate Language, an acrostic that runs from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, a confession that words come up short before they begin. She holds two truths at once. The cycle of trauma asks to be interrupted through care and therapy. The stories ask to be carried forward so the past survives the death of the last witness. She quotes a survivor who predicts the Holocaust will die with its survivors, and she sets her hope against him: that the generations after will keep individual losses as singular, a man, a child, a name, and not let them dissolve into the round numbers of mass death.

She does not keep the inquiry inside the Holocaust. She moves to the descendants of American slaves, to the children of the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the population marked by September 11. Reviewers split on the reach. Some find the gathering of catastrophes too wide for one book. Others find in the synthesis a true advance, clinicians among them who had waited for a book that puts the research on intergenerational trauma beside a daughter’s account. The work reaches the finalist round for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) calls it powerful.

Her father, near ninety, tells her that she is almost lucky to have this to write about. He means the Holocaust. He means the material of her life’s work. He says it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she carries the line as she carries the rest. In 2017 she brings him an early copy at his home in Schenectady. He is eighty-eight. He holds the book. She had wanted him to hold it before the threshold arrived, the day when no survivor is left to hold anything. Her mother does not see the book. She died in 2000, the girl who hid in the forest for two years now gone the quiet way.

Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening (2024) widens the project. Rosner grew up in a house of six languages, and she turns that childhood into an inquiry about listening as a discipline and an ethic. She braids memoir with neuroscience, psychology, multilingual experience, animal communication, music, and philosophy. She argues that attention is a skill a person can train, that deep listening builds empathy, and that empathy might begin to mend what violence breaks. The book reads as the natural sum of the earlier ones. She had spent decades on the transmission of memory. Here she studies the act that receives it.

Her nonfiction reaches into craft as well. She contributed to The House on Via Gombito: Writing Tutorials from the Center for Writers (2014), with reflections on structure and the writing process, work that fits a long practice of mentoring. Her essays and criticism appear in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lectures on trauma, remembrance, creativity, listening, and the ethics of storytelling, and she crosses freely between literature and psychology and history and neuroscience rather than speaking only as a novelist.

She teaches creative writing for years, at the University of California, Berkeley Extension and at conferences across the country, and she works as an editor and manuscript consultant and writing coach. Writers come to her for the craft and for the harder thing under it, the vision a book needs before its sentences can find their order.

A reader can name the line that holds her work together. She refuses to sentimentalize the suffering or the recovery. Trauma in her pages is neither a permanent name a person wears nor an obstacle a person clears and forgets. Healing is an ongoing labor of witness, conversation, and attention, never finished and never guaranteed. Her novels rarely stage the historical horror at the center of the frame. They watch the horror keep working in ordinary lives decades on, in a marriage, a studio, a kitchen, a body that faints in Weimar.

She is rooted in Jewish history and she keeps reaching past it, to genocide and displacement and racial violence and migration and inherited grief, holding the universal and the particular in the same hand. Memory in her account is an active practice of listening and answering, the present taking responsibility for the dead.

Rosner lives in Berkeley, California, and goes on writing fiction, poetry, essays, and nonfiction while she lectures here and abroad on memory and resilience and the art of listening. She occupies a place in American letters that few others hold, where literary art meets psychology and neuroscience and Holocaust study and the plain question of how a person inherits a history and what a person owes it. She put the answer in one sentence in Survivor Café. She carries the words. She passes them on.

The Carrier

At a folding table at Buchenwald in 1995, three people drink coffee and listen, and each one listens for a different thing.

The first is a man who came into the camp at fifteen and came out at sixteen, one of two from his family left alive. He has not spoken German at home in America for half a century. Here the language returns to his mouth like a tooth he thought he had lost. He listens the way a man listens at the edge of a grave he climbed out of once. Across the table sits a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels other grandchildren of the men who ran places like this. She listens for absolution, or for the nearest thing to it that a survivor might hand a German across a cup of coffee. Beside her father sits Elizabeth Rosner (b. 1959). She listens to both of them, and under both of them, for the dead who are not at the table and who will never be at the table, the family subtracted before she was born.

The organizers call the gathering a Survivors’ Café. The name is gentle and the place is not. Beech trees stand around the cleared ground the way beech trees stand around any clearing in Thuringia, indifferent, German, old. The coffee is hot. The talk is quiet. And the single act these people share, listening, means something different in each chair.

That difference is the whole problem of a hero system, and it is the way into Rosner.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a human being lives under two terrors and builds a life to manage them. The first terror is the body’s, the knowledge that the animal dies and rots and ends. The second terror is the meaning’s, the suspicion that the life counted for nothing, that the cosmos will not notice the going. Becker said we answer both with what he called a hero system, a scheme of value that tells a man what counts as significance and hands him a part to play in it. Inside the system he earns a symbolic life that outlasts the physical one. The lawyer wins. The mother raises sons. The scientist publishes. The monk dissolves into God. Each buys the same thing with different coin: the sense that he will not, finally, be erased.

Becker’s sharpest point is the one Rosner’s table illustrates. A hero system does not only rank actions. It assigns meanings. The same word changes its content as it crosses from one system to the next, and a man can hear his own sacred word in another’s mouth and not recognize it. Sacred values are local. They earn their force inside a particular scheme of significance and lose it when carried out.

Take Rosner’s sacred word. Listening.

Walk it through a few hero systems and watch it change shape.

A trial lawyer listens. He listens across a courtroom to a witness he means to break, and his listening is a held breath waiting for the seam in a story, the date that shifts, the verb that hedges. He earns his standing in an order built on combat, and a good ear is a weapon there. He listens to win. When he hears a man falter, his pulse lifts. Listening, in his system, is predation with manners.

A Carthusian listens too, in a stone cell above a valley, under a rule of silence that runs for most of his waking life. He listens for God, which means he listens against himself, against the chatter that proves he is still a separate man with wants. His hero system rewards erasure. The more of him goes quiet, the closer he comes to the thing he wants, which is to stop wanting. Listening, for him, is self-subtraction offered up as worship. Set him beside the lawyer and the word will not hold its meaning across the gap. One listens to assert. The other listens to vanish.

A sonar operator in the sail of a submarine wears headphones in the dark and listens to the sea. He sorts shrimp from screw, biologic from a contact that should not be there. His listening guards the tribe inside the hull. A missed sound is a hundred dead men. He earns his place by vigilance, and the sea answers him with threat or with nothing. His ear serves fear. Listening, in his system, is the body of the watch standing between the crew and the deep.

A simultaneous interpreter sits in a glass booth above a hall and listens in one language while speaking in another, three seconds behind the man at the rostrum, never her own words, always his. Her hero system prizes the vanishing act. The better she works, the less anyone knows she is there. A diplomat hears his counterpart and forgets that a woman in a booth lifted the meaning across the chasm and set it down whole on the far side. She earns significance by erasing her own trace. Listening, for her, is carriage. She is a channel and takes pride in leaving the water clear.

A hospice nurse listens at a bedside to a man with days left, and she listens for what he needs said before he cannot say it. She does not listen to win or to vanish or to guard. She listens to accompany. Her system rewards presence at the one door no one walks through twice with company. Listening, in her chair, is the refusal to let a man die unheard.

Five chairs, five sacred ears, five meanings. The word travels and the content does not. Becker would say each ear earns a different immortality, and he would be right.

Now set Rosner in a sixth chair and the word changes again.

Her listening braids several of these and belongs to none. She listens like the interpreter, to carry meaning across a gulf, but the gulf she works is death, and the speakers on the far side cannot lean toward her. She listens like the hospice nurse, in the presence of the dying, but her dying came two generations back and reach her as silence and as the look on a father’s face. She listens like the Carthusian, against the noise of her own life, to hear a register most people screen out. She does not listen like the lawyer, for the crack she can exploit, and she does not listen like the sonar man, for the threat she can sink. Her ear serves transmission, and what it carries is the named dead.

This is where the inheritance shows. Rosner took her title, Third Ear (2024), from a line that runs back through Theodor Reik (1888-1969) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche used the phrase in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to mock readers who could not hear the music inside German prose, the ones who lacked, he said, a third ear. Reik, a Viennese analyst and an early student of Freud, lifted the phrase for Listening with the Third Ear (1948) and turned it toward the consulting room. The third ear, for Reik, hears what the patient does not say, the meaning that moves under the words and arrives through a gesture, a pause, a tightening of the hand. Rosner inherits the term and turns it again. Her third ear hears the dead. It is an organ for picking up the frequency that silence carries, the register her parents broadcast at the supper table in Schenectady without ever choosing a word.

That table is the subtraction story. Most hero systems answer a loss. Rosner’s answers a loss she never witnessed. Her family in Europe was taken before her birth. Her father came out of Buchenwald with a brother and almost no one else. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the Polish countryside for two years. They married, crossed to America, and built a house in a General Electric town, and inside that house they spoke six languages and refused the seventh, German, the language of the killing. Their daughter grew up reading pressure she could not measure. She inherited a wound with no memory of the wounding. The thing was subtracted before she could lose it, and her listening became the search for an event she did not attend.

Becker helps name the two terrors that drive her.

The first is the camps, the ash, the body burned into the round number. The second is harder, and it is the one she works. Becker called significance the deeper hunger, and Rosner found the form of insignificance she fears most. She fears the second death, the one that comes when the last witness dies and the story goes with him, when the individual loss dissolves into the statistic and a man who had a name and a knife and a brother becomes a fraction of six million. She says it plainly in Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). A survivor she interviews predicts the Holocaust will die with the survivors. She sets her hope against him, that the generations after will keep the dead singular, a man, a child, a name, against the gravity that pulls every atrocity toward arithmetic.

Her hero system answers both terrors at once. If she carries the words, the dead are not finally dead. And if she is the carrier, she is not finally insignificant. She has a cosmic job. The role solves her death and her meaning in a single move, which is what a hero system does when it works.

She reaches for biology to seal the claim. In Survivor Café she takes up epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into the body and passes forward, and she finds in it a proof that the wound lives in her, that she carries the parents’ trauma in her own wiring, in mother’s milk drenched in sadness. The science does identity work here. It tells her she is not separate from the dead. The murdered run in her chemistry, which means she is already what she wants to be, a vessel, a continuation, a place where the lost keep going. A reader can grant the feeling and still notice the load the science is asked to bear. The research on intergenerational transmission is young and contested, and studies out of Israel cut both ways. Rosner needs it to mean more than it has shown, because her hero system needs the wound to live in the body and not only in the telling.

Watch what the system costs her, because the cost is the honest part.

A carrier needs cargo, and the cargo is grief. Her hero role asks the wound to stay open. Transmission and healing pull in opposite directions, and she knows it. She writes that the culture must interrupt the cycle of trauma through care, and in the same book she writes that the culture needs the stories kept alive so the past is not forgotten. A healed wound transmits nothing. An open wound transmits forever. She holds both and cannot fully reconcile them, and the strain shows in the work, which circles the camps and returns and circles again. The third ear that hears the dead must keep the channel open, and an open channel is another name for a wound that will not close.

There is a second cost. The carrier’s claim can crowd the carried. To make oneself the vessel of the dead is to stand between the dead and everyone else, and the posture can shade from service into ownership. Her father felt the edge of it and named it. Near ninety, he told her she was almost lucky to have this to write about. He meant the Holocaust. He meant that his catastrophe had become her material, her standing, her subject. He said it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she kept the line, which is to her credit, since it indicts the very role she has chosen. The man who lived it hands the daughter who inherited it a small, exact warning about the trade she has made.

A third cost shows in the reach. Survivor Café moves from Buchenwald to the descendants of American slaves, to the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima, to the population marked by September 11. The move is generous and it adds value, because it offers the carrier’s gift to others and refuses to hoard the wound as Jewish property alone. It also dilutes. A book that holds every atrocity holds each one more loosely, and reviewers split on the reach for that reason. The hero system wants to be universal, because a universal carrier is a larger hero, and the universalizing pull works against the singular naming the same book defends. She wants the dead kept singular and she wants the form of inheritance kept universal, and those two wants do not sit easy together.

None of this unmakes the work. It locates it. Rosner is not a chronicler of the camps, which she did not see, and she is not a survivor, which she says clearly. She is a carrier, and the carrier is a real and old office, older than the term, the one the tribe assigns to the person who keeps the names. The Alphabet of Inadequate Language that opens Survivor Café, running from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, is the carrier’s confession that the freight exceeds the cart, that words come up short and remain the only thing she was handed. She carries them anyway. That is the part she will not put down.

So three coordinates, for the reader who wants to know where to watch.

Watch the open wound. Her hero system runs on transmission, and transmission needs the cut to stay fresh, so look for the moments when healing and remembering pull against each other and she chooses remembering. She will keep the channel open because the role requires it, and the cost lands on her own body, which is the body she says the dead already inhabit.

Watch the science. When she reaches for epigenetics, she is reaching for proof that she is not separate from the lost. The reach tells you less about the research than about the need, which is the need to belong to the dead by blood and not only by love.

And watch the father’s warning. He gave her the truest line in her own book, the one about luck, and it cuts at the office she holds. A carrier earns significance by standing close to the dead, and the man who climbed out of the grave once told her, across the distance between the one who lived it and the one who tells it, what that closeness can become. She wrote it down. She listened with the third ear, and what it heard, that time, was the cost of listening.

Novelist Elizabeth Rosner – Blue Nude, The Speed of Light

I call her Tuesday, September 12, 2006.

She's the middle child. "My parents were Holocaust survivors and that found its way into everything. They wanted us to be able to take care of ourselves. That I wanted to become an artist made them nervous."

"My father was from Hamburg, Germany, and my mother was from Vilna, Lithuania.

"My father was a research scientist and then an entrepreneur. My mother was a homemaker and then an interpreter."

"They were big on education. My boyfriend calls me an overachiever. It was instilled in all of us."

Luke: "What you found that children of Holocaust survivors have in common?"

Elizabeth: "We feel that we're carrying our parents' histories. We want to compensate our parents for what they endured. Sometimes this is imposed by the parents — when kids are named after the dead, after lost children. Some children resent this and leave their parents.

"There's an unusually high frequency of artists and psychotherapists. We want to express ourselves and to heal."

Luke: "How do you react to the rampant victimology in our society? How do you ration your compassion?"

Elizabeth: "I want to say that compassion should never be rationed. It should be infinite."

Luke: "Do you ever tell anyone, 'Buck up! I'm a child of Holocaust survivors!'"

Elizabeth laughs. "No. People feel equally strongly about their own drama. I have a hierarchy about which dramas are more deserving of empathy.

"I grew up in an environment in which my suffering was never counted as legitimate. It was measured against something so extreme, so incomparably excruciating… I was denied a sensibility about my suffering."

Luke: "Should survivors of great evil and their children be held to the same standards of moral accountability as anyone else or do they deserve a break?"

Elizabeth: "That question comes up around Israel. In some ways, people who've suffered should be held to a higher moral standard."

"I was always infuriated and saddened when I'd hear anything that sounded like racism from my parents or from other survivors. You of all people should know that that is completely unacceptable under any circumstances."

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"

Elizabeth: "I was somewhere between the nerds and the cool people. I never felt like I belonged to any of the crowds."

Luke: "What attitude were you raised with vis-à-vis God and Judaism?"

Elizabeth: "It was complicated. We were Modern Orthodox in our affiliation. My parents had huge disagreements about how to observe [Jewish law]. We kept kosher. We kept the Sabbath. My father and the kids would walk to synagogue on Saturday mornings and my mother would go shopping. We went out to dinner, we'd eat fish and vegetables and she'd have a shrimp cocktail. It'd piss my father off. My mother's way of being Jewish was internal, how she felt and identified. My father was more about observance and rules and affiliations. Yet, it was shocking to me to find out in my early teens that my father did not believe in God. It wasn't a theology for him but a way of life.

"It was a brutal way to grow up. I became a feminist at a young age because I felt so pissed off about being a second class citizen. My father and I had fight after fight about it. He blamed my mother for setting a bad example.

"I went to a public school and then to Hebrew school in the afternoons.

"When I became an adult, I rejected [Judaism and God]. I became a kosher vegetarian. It was a way of retaining a tribal identity. I searched in vain for a Jewish community but I'm not much of a joiner. I was looking for a place with more liberal interpretations of love and no longer referring to God with male pronouns, but even that didn't do it for me. I had mixed feelings about declaring myself as part of us vs. them.

"I feel a lot more drawn to Buddhist and other Asian notions of God that are more abstract and less patriarchal and domineering, more god in the self, god in the collective, god in oneness."

Luke: "That picture of you on the dust jacket of Blue Nude. Is it just me or is that a very sensual photo?"

Elizabeth: "It is. The photos for Speed of Light and Blue Nude were taken on the same day by the same photographer. It was a five hour session. I hadn't written Blue Nude yet. I decided to use that photo for that book because I felt it went with the book. A lot of the themes in Blue Nude are reflected in that photograph."

Luke: "How important is it to you to look good?"

Elizabeth: "That's a loaded question. In our culture there's so much emphasis on appearance. We respond to beauty. That was reinforced by my mother. The theme in Blue Nude — can beauty save your life? That has a literal association for me with the Holocaust. I did hear stories from my mother that implied or even stated explicitly that a particular kind of non-ethnic beauty saved her life.

"One of the reasons that I chose writing over other art forms was that it wasn't going to be about me and what I looked like."

"The things that writers do to get their books read and how willing they have to be to put themselves out there. John Updike wrote recently that in the early stages of his career, he never went on the road. He never put himself out there. It was just the books went out. Now there's so much emphasis on book tours and interviews and making sure your name is on everybody's internet site.

"I was dumbstruck by how many people asked me if they were going to turn my book into a movie. I'm asked if I'm going on a book tour and how many cities I'll be going to. Everybody knows the marketing lingo now."

Luke: "How necessary were the science definitions in The Speed of Light?"

Elizabeth: "To whom?"

Luke: "To you."

Elizabeth: "I loved them as metaphor.They were useful to me as a fourth voice in the novel, as a way for Julian's inner voice to become visible to the reader. Structurally they were important for transitions and framing.

"There were times when I thought that if some readers skip these, I'd be OK with that. They were there for people who wanted to make use of them.

"I had a lot more in my draft than my editor allowed me to keep. He was right.

"Did you not like them?"

Luke: "I started skipping them."

"Do you write your books so that they are a pleasure to read or is there something more important to you than the reader's pleasure?"

Elizabeth: "I'm not thinking about pleasure, either my own or the reader's. I'm trying to get at some emotional honesty. I want the reader to feel met in some deep place."

"I have a short attention span. I watched a lot of television as a kid. I can be focused but for a short period. So I listen for the sound of one of my characters and that would last as long as it lasted [even if just for two paragraphs in the case of The Speed of Light]. For a while, I just wrote in pieces thinking I'd assemble them and they'd be longer but it felt more mosaic and I just had to surrender to telling the novel as a braid of three overlapping interweaving narrations. Any number of readers said that was challenging for them. Most people who talked to me said that once they got used to it, they loved it.

"When I started working on Blue Nude, I knew I did not want to repeat that structure. It felt right to linger longer with each character [there are two main characters, a German artist and an Israeli model]."

Luke: "How has your choice of vocation affected you?"

Elizabeth: "I have a lot of freedom. I'm free of the day-to-day grind. I choose my own schedule. I have a more insecure life, wondering when my next check is going to come. I feel that I use my best self when I write.

"I felt the same way about teaching, which I did for 20 years at the college level [Elizabeth graduated with her MFA from U.C. Irvine in 1985].

"When I get up on stage or at a book store to talk about my work, I feel lucky to do that. Having this conversation with you feels like a great privilege to me. There was a lot about my childhood that made me feel I wasn't being listened to. Now I feel seen and I feel listened to."

Luke: "If a reader feels that Julian and Paula [two of the three main characters in Light] are self-absorbed spoiled brats, is that a legitimate interpretation?"

Elizabeth: "Are you speaking personally?"

Luke: Yes. I wanted to say to them, "If you had to work for a living, you wouldn't have this privilege of self-absorption." Did you have sense of them?

Elizabeth: "I saw them as damaged and needing to grow. I was more empathetic towards them and less judgmental. I feel that's my job as a writer. If I had those judgments, I wouldn't have been able to keep going.

"I had more critical feelings about [the German artist] Danzig in Blue Nude than I did about either Julian or Paula. Danzig's more narcissistic.

"Writing for me is an exercise in compassion."

Luke: "You love that word 'compassion.'"

"How has your choice of vocation affected your relationships?"

Elizabeth: "It matters what people close to me think of my work and their willingness to read my work and talk about it with me and respond to it, preferably positively. I remember having a brief involvement with someone who was dismissive of my writing, and that was completely unacceptable. When I write, it's on my mind all the time and I want to be able to talk about it."

"It's heightened my sensitivity. I'm more easily affected by other people."

Elizabeth Rosner writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine May 28, 2006:

Twenty-five years ago, while an undergraduate at Stanford, I got a job on campus as a lifeguard, deepening a love of swimming and water that has lasted throughout my life. I took the duties seriously and studied the swimmers with professional vigilance, relieved at the end of each day that no emergency rescue had been required. But the greatest challenge of the job was standing poolside in a bathing suit with my body on display.

Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair washing, the application of lotion and makeup — preparations for re-entering the other world of walking upright on solid land.

I call her Thursday afternoon, Sept 14, 2006.

Luke: "When did you first attempt a novel?"

Elizabeth: "When I was in graduate school in my early twenties, I was supposed to be writing fiction. I kept on feeling pulled toward memoir, so I wrote a pretend fictionalized memoir that felt like a deformed baby. I got my degree but I wasn't happy with the writing outcome. I gave the narrator the name Irene so I could trick myself that I was still writing in first person. As someone pointed out, every time I inserted an ellipse, I was hiding something, which was a good point that I did not take kindly to at the time.

"I ended up discovering that it was a [free verse] poetry collection in disguise.

"All my poetry is free verse.

"My prose has always been lyrical and my poetry prosaic.

"In my new novel, I'm working in autobiographical territory. I'm expecting it to become more fictionalized as I work with it. It might end up a memoir."

Luke: "How do you know that people are engaging with your poetry when the audience for poetry is so tiny?"

Elizabeth: "That's the truth. I don't know. I imagined that more people would find my poetry after I became published as a novelist but I'm not sure that has happened. I have this collection of poems that I sell when I do readings and speaking engagements. It is the autobiographical companion to my novels."

Luke: "How did your life change after you published a novel?"

Elizabeth: "I felt legitimized. Even so, there was something about the publication of the second novel that really affirmed that. Several people said to me after the second book came out, 'Now you're a real novelist.' As though the one book was a fluke.

"I left my teaching job when my first book was bought. That was a leap to full-time writing that I wouldn't have made [without a book contract]."

"For a long time as a kid, I was aware of being different from my peers. I grew up in a WASPy part of upstate New York (Schenectady). I was an Orthodox Jew with parents who survived the Holocaust. I was odd. When people would talk about WWII, it was so abstract, and I would think, 'My parents were there.'

"A lot of my parents closest friends were also European Jews but most of my friends were not Jewish.

"I graduated highschool at 16 and went to live in the Philippines for a year by way of a scholarship from Rotary International, who, many years later, sponsored me to live in Australia for a year.

"That (the Philippines) added a bizarre layer to my life, living in this Catholic and exotic landscape, where, again, I was a complete freak."

Luke: "Have you sought out situations where you would be isolated?"

Elizabeth: "It's starting to sound like that. I know I've sought out experiences where I would be challenged. My father turned 16 in Buchenwald. I had a profound realization of how different my life was from his, and at some level, I wanted to test myself in a difficult place. I don't have anything like a death wish. I don't choose life endangering things."

"I lived in Israel for three months in 1980. I was 20. I stayed on a radical kibbutz in defiance of my father. It was about experiencing Israel through my own awareness, not as it was imposed upon me by my family.

"I was with Israelis who were communists. They were Zionists in a completely different way.

"I had an Israeli boyfriend but it never occurred to me to imagine my life there. I never felt like I belonged there. I have mixed feelings about even traveling there now."

Luke: "Did you find teaching enervating?"

Elizabeth: "Yeah. I love teaching, but to teach well, you have to draw from the same sources as writing. You have to be present and spontaneous and attentive. I use that up in the classroom and when I get home, I'm empty."

Jon Papernick (b. 1970) keeps a bookstore in his memory the way other men keep a first house. He grew up in Toronto, across a wide road from a shopping mall, and the mall held a bookstore, and the bookstore held the only quiet he wanted. He went there when he had nowhere else to be. He read the spines. He wondered what waited inside each one. A boy who treats a chain store at the edge of a parking lot as a sanctuary tends to become a writer, and Papernick did.

His family belonged to Holy Blossom Temple, the flagship congregation of Canadian Reform Judaism. His childhood rabbi, W. Gunther Plaut (1912–2012), wrote the Torah commentary that sat open on Reform pulpits across the continent. Papernick grew up inside a confident liberal Judaism, the kind that trusts reason and history and the slow improvement of the world. That inheritance gave him a frame to argue with for the rest of his life.

The first quarrel arrived in first grade. His parents sent him to a Hebrew day school, and the Hebrew teacher, an Israeli, ran her room by force. She brought down a ruler on a desk when a child drifted. The crack of it carried down the hall. One day the boy raised his hand and asked to leave for the bathroom. He failed the Hebrew side of the school that year. The episode reads now like a small parable of the man he became. He wanted the tradition. He could not abide the ruler. He spent six books circling that exact pressure point, where reverence meets coercion and a person has to decide how much of himself he will surrender to a cause.

He took a degree at York University and then a Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence College, where he wrote the stories that became his first book. Between the classroom and the book came Jerusalem.

He went in the mid-1990s and worked as a reporter of sorts for a wire service. He arrived in the weeks after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995), shot by a young religious Jew who believed the prime minister had betrayed the land. The Oslo peace process was dying. Extremism rose on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side at once, and a foreign reporter in his twenties could feel it the way you feel weather. He stood at checkpoints. He filed copy. He listened to men explain, in calm voices, why other men deserved to die. He came home with the raw material for a career, and with a conviction that fanaticism is not exotic. It grows in ordinary soil, from fear and wounded pride and the wish for certainty.

That conviction shapes The Ascent of Eli Israel, his 2002 debut from Arcade. The seven stories sit inside the collapsing peace, among settlers, soldiers, immigrants, and Palestinians caught in the cycle of fear and reprisal. He refuses the slogans of either side. He watches what prolonged violence does to a single soul. Ghosts and visions and scraps of Jewish folklore drift through the realism, and they read less as fantasy than as trauma wearing a costume. The New York Times gave the book a full-page review and described a muscular certainty in his best work. Publishers Weekly starred it. A first collection rarely lands that way. His did.

He kept teaching while he wrote. He held workshops at Pratt Institute, Brandeis University, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and GrubStreet in Boston, and he joined the low-residency MFA faculty at Albertus Magnus College. In 2007 he came to Emerson College, where he has stayed as Writer-in-Residence, Senior Writer-in-Residence, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing. He chairs theses. He sits with graduate students. He has built a second working life inside the New England literary world.

His second collection, There Is No Other, came from Exile Editions in 2010 and widened the map. The stories move from Israel to Brooklyn to the cul-de-sacs of suburban America and the apartments of the working poor. Iraq War veterans, Holocaust survivors, addicts, lonely adolescents, and the disabled move through them. Judaism stays at the center, yet he treats it now as one of several rooms a wounded person might enter looking for grace. Dara Horn (b. 1977) wrote that each story lands a punch that leaves the reader revising what he thought love and life meant.

The summer the second book appeared, Papernick did something a tenured-track novelist seldom does. He built a pushcart and sold his own books from it.

He wheeled it through farmers’ markets across New England and New York. Tomatoes on one table, peaches on the next, and a writer beside the radishes handing a stranger a hardcover and saying a few words about it. He called himself Papernick the Book Peddler, an homage to the Yiddish master Sholem Yankev Abramovich, who wrote as Mendele Mocher Sforim (1835–1917), Mendele the Book Peddler. The motto promised market-fresh fiction brought to the people. The performance carried an argument inside it. Literature lives in the meeting of a writer and a reader, not in the conference panel or the prize committee. He would rather sell one book by hand to a man buying corn than wait for a system to anoint him.

His first novel, The Book of Stone, arrived from Fig Tree Books in 2015 and remains his darkest sustained work. He sets it in Brooklyn in 1998, the city he chose as a canvas the way he once used Jerusalem, because Brooklyn produced its own Jewish extremists and he knew their world. Matthew Stone is twenty-five, jobless, self-harming, alone. His grandfather was a gangster. His father was a judge who fixed a trial to free a Jew who killed an Arab shopkeeper, and who then died, leaving the son with a robe, a library, and a wound. Matthew puts on the robe. He reads the underlined passages in his dead father’s books and takes them for a map. A charismatic rabbi who splits his time between a West Bank settlement and Brooklyn draws the boy toward a bank account and a bombing. The FBI wants him as an informant. His mother, who left him at twelve, returns to warn him off.

The novel asks who falls for terror, and it refuses the easy answers our media keep in stock. Papernick stands in the tradition of Robert Stone and Ian McEwan here, writing a man who tries to save himself by redeeming history and confuses the two tasks until the border between justice and slaughter dissolves under his feet. Critics noticed. The book drew starred reviews and the praise of novelists who do not hand out blurbs cheaply. Some readers found Matthew too far gone to love, which may be the point. Papernick has never written a fanatic from the outside. He writes him from within, close enough that the reader feels the pull.

Then he turned, hard, toward home.

I Am My Beloveds came from The Story Plant in 2022, and Papernick said it was his first book without a dead body in it. An Orthodox couple tries to save a marriage by opening it. They face infertility, jealousy, and rival ideas of what love requires of a believer. The title drops the apostrophe from the Song of Songs, from “I am my beloved’s,” and the missing mark carries the theme. A self might form through many loves rather than one possession. He wrote the book out of his own life. He has spoken about loving two women at once in his twenties, about a first marriage he kept traditional, about an anxious attachment style that drove him to the page. The novel reaches for attachment theory and the new vocabularies of consensual non-monogamy without abandoning his old subject, the moral cost of any arrangement a person makes with his own desires.

His third collection, Gallery of the Disappeared Men, followed in 2024. The stories range across decades and continents, from Israel to New England, and turn on disappearance in every register: lost fathers, vanished communities, fading faces, eroding certainty. The voice has aged into restraint. The early work hunts for the punch. This work makes room for reconciliation beside the conflict. He also published XYXX, a limited-edition book of erotic fiction, off to the side of the commercial machine, and he has written his first stage play, Honor Walk, pushing into forms a story writer does not need to attempt.

He names his ancestors when asked. Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), Philip Roth (1933–2018), Nathan Englander (b. 1970). He likes to repeat a line of Kafka’s, that a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea inside us, and he means it as a working rule, not a decoration. His own method blends hard realism with the uncanny. A vision, a ghost, a folk demon rises out of a character’s grief and feels earned because the grief is real first.

The latest turn came on October 7, 2023, and it came at him through his students.

Picture the scene he has described and the one he has now turned into fiction. A professor walks onto his own campus on the first morning of Passover and passes an encampment. Signs call for intifada. Chalk on the sidewalk names the Jews and the Zionists. He had spent years as a man of the liberal arts, at ease among progressive colleagues, and that spring he watched some of them and many of their students cheer the thing that horrified him. Jewish students came to his office near the end of the term and told him how classmates and professors had hounded them. Several left the school. He felt betrayed by the movement he was raised inside, the confident liberalism of Holy Blossom carried into an American faculty lounge. His son finished high school and chose the IDF over an American college. The father feared what waited and said he had never been prouder.

Out of that grief comes The Oppressor Professor: A Novel of the Tentifada, due from The Story Plant in 2026, with excerpts already in print. One of them sets a department meeting in a basement lecture hall in a brutalist building, sunloved enough that someone planted evergreens to hide it and left it in permanent shade. The protagonist, Jake, climbs the walk past the smell of wet leaves and mildew, hoping for a private word with his chair about a colleague whose behavior has slipped its tracks. Inside, the meeting moves toward a statement the department wants to send the administration, and Jake keeps rising to speak, and a colleague with a slogan pinned to her door keeps talking past him, and one man answers his question with a contemptuous noise while another flashes a wink of support. Jake sits in the question that runs under the whole book. If the world divides into oppressor and oppressed, and his colleagues read him as the oppressor, what has happened to the Judaism he thought reason would protect? The novel moves his lifelong subject off the West Bank and out of the Brooklyn warehouse and into the American seminar room, where the fanatic now wears a lanyard and quotes a theory.

Read across the six books, the pattern holds. Papernick writes about the moment an inherited moral system meets the pressure of the present and bends or breaks. He writes settlers and adjuncts, judges and adulterers, the devout and the indifferent, and he grants none of them the comfort of a clean side. He came up inside a Judaism that promised the world could be argued into improvement, and he has spent his working life testing that promise against violence, desire, grief, and the human appetite for certainty. He keeps the test honest by refusing to resolve it. Belief survives or it does not. Love holds or it shatters. The reader decides what he has seen.

Readers can find his fiction, essays, and current projects at jonpapernick.com.

The Ruler and the Book

A first-grade classroom in a Toronto Hebrew day school. The teacher is Israeli. She came up in a country where childhood ends early and the price of softness is a grave, and she runs her room the way she was run. She keeps a ruler. When a boy drifts, she brings it down on the desk, and the crack travels the length of the hall. The children flinch as one. They are soft Canadian children, raised inside a confident liberal Judaism that trusts reason and the slow repair of the world, and she has been sent to make Hebrews of them before the world teaches them the hard way.

One boy likes the bookstore across from the shopping mall better than any room with a ruler in it. He raises his hand and asks to leave for the bathroom. He fails the Hebrew side of the year. He has already learned the lesson the school never meant to teach. The tradition wants him. The ruler comes with it. A man can spend a life on the inch of ground between those two facts, and this boy does.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives us the frame to read what the boy felt in that room. In The Denial of Death he argued that a man knows he will die, cannot live with the knowing, and builds his days as a denial of it. The denial takes the shape of a hero system, a project that promises his life will count and outlast his body, by faith, by works, by blood, by nation, by the made thing. Self-worth is the sense that he stands near the center of something that will not perish. Cruelty arrives when one such project meets another, because another man’s road past death reads as a verdict on yours.

Jon Papernick runs from two deaths at once, and his whole shelf is the running.

The first death is erasure. He titled a collection Gallery of the Disappeared Men, and disappearance is the fear under all of it: the Jew unwritten, the village emptied, the face that no one carries forward. He grew up among people who keep a long ledger of the vanished, and he has spent a career afraid of joining them in the dark.

The second death is the opposite, and worse, because it wears the face of belonging. It is dissolution into the cause. The ruler on the desk, the dead father’s robe a son puts on before he reaches for a bomb, the chant that turns a crowd into one animal. To beat erasure a man wants to belong to something larger than his life. The cause offers exactly that and asks only that he hand over the divided, doubting self that makes him a man and not a weapon.

His hero system answers both at the same stroke. He becomes the witness. He writes the fanatic from the inside, close enough to feel the pull, and he refuses the clean side that the fanatic demands. The witness beats erasure because the book records, and the book outlives him. The witness beats dissolution because the divided self is his subject and his discipline; the moment he resolves the tension and picks the pure team, the work dies and the propagandist is born. He likes a line of Kafka’s, that a book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us. He means it as a job description. He stood at checkpoints in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s, after Rabin’s killing, and listened to calm men explain who deserved to die, and he came home certain that fanaticism grows in ordinary soil. He has been writing that soil ever since.

The word that organizes the shelf is loyalty. It is the most sacred word in his world and the most contested, and Becker explains why. Loyalty is sacred in every hero system and means a different rescue in each. Carry the word out of Papernick’s books and into other men’s lives and watch it change shape under your hand.

The Marine staff sergeant says loyalty and means the man on his left. He will carry a body out through fire, because the unit keeps its dead and a Marine lives forever in that keeping. To leave a man behind is the one death that counts. You hear it in how he talks. We do not leave him. Not the mission, not the medal. Him.

The Trappist takes a vow of stability and says loyalty and means the abbot, the Rule, the few acres he will never leave, and the God he will not outlive but might join. His cheat against the grave is union with the eternal, and disobedience is the single theft that empties the account.

The defense lawyer says loyalty and means the client, guilty or innocent, because a man’s right to a defender who does not flinch holds up the only thing that survives any one trial, the procedure. Ask him how he sleeps and he tells you the question is childish. Everybody gets a defense or nobody does. His salvation is the system, and the system needs him to mean it.

The Calabrian under omertà says loyalty and means blood and silence. The family does not die. The debt does not lapse. A man collects it in the next generation if he cannot collect it in this one, and that long memory is his way of living past his own funeral.

The founder, pitching for money in a glass room, says loyalty and means the mission, and his sin runs the other way, loyalty to a dead idea past the hour it should have been buried. He buys his immortality at scale, a thing that runs in the world long after the man who started it has gone to ground.

The hospice nurse says loyalty and means the bed she will not leave, the hand she holds while the breathing turns ragged and slows. She cannot save the man under the blanket. She can refuse to let him go out alone, and the dignity she lays on a dying stranger is her one mark on a universe that erases everyone.

Each man uses the single word. Each means a different country, and each is sure his country owns the word. Becker’s world is not two camps but a crowded room of immortality projects, every one certain that the others have the word wrong. The Marine’s loyalty might read as cowardice to the whistleblower, whose loyalty to the true mission of his agency drives him to betray the officers who run it. The lawyer’s devotion to a killer might sicken the nurse. The Calabrian’s silence might damn them all. They cannot all be right, and none can stand to be wrong, because to lose the word is to lose the road past death, and a man defends that road harder than he defends his body.

Papernick’s loyalty makes sense only inside his own hero system, and from the others it looks like a vice. Before October 7 his loyalty ran to none of these worlds and to all of them at once, to the divided human soul under every uniform, the settler and the soldier and the Palestinian and the lost American boy, each granted the dignity of his contradictions and none granted the clean side. To the Marine that is a man who will not pick up a rifle. To the Calabrian it is a man with no family. To the activist with a slogan on her door it is complicity, the worst word she owns. Papernick wears their contempt as proof he is doing the work. The writer who refuses to resolve looks like a coward to everyone who has already resolved.

Then the ground moved.

A man walks onto his own campus on the first morning of Passover and finds an encampment across the quad. Signs call for intifada. Chalk on the sidewalk names the Jews and the Zionists. He had spent decades as a man of the liberal arts, easy among progressive colleagues, raised in the same confident faith that reason bends the world toward repair. Now he watches some of those colleagues and many of their students cheer the thing that has hollowed him out. Jewish students come to his office near the end of term and tell him how classmates and professors hunted them. Several are leaving. He feels the floor of his old hero system give way, the universal soul he had served, and beneath it he finds an older floor he did not know he still stood on. He is a Jew, and the Jew is hunted, and the long ledger of the vanished is open again. His son finishes high school and chooses the army of the Jewish state over an American college, and the father, afraid of what waits, says he has never been prouder.

This is the subtraction. October 7 took away the liberal confidence and left the tribe. The man who built a life on refusing the clean side felt, for the first time, the pull of a side, and he has been at war with himself over it since.

The new novel is the war set down on paper. The Oppressor Professor: A Novel of the Tentifada comes from The Story Plant in 2026, and the excerpts already in print put a professor named Jake in a basement department meeting in a brutalist building the campus hid behind a stand of evergreens, banished to permanent shade. The room debates a statement it wants to send the administration. Jake keeps rising to speak. A colleague with a slogan pinned to her door talks past him. One man answers his question with a contemptuous noise; another flashes him a private wink. Jake sits inside the question the whole book turns on. If the world divides into oppressor and oppressed, and the room reads him as the oppressor, what has become of the reasonable Judaism he was promised would hold? The fanatic Papernick once tracked through a Brooklyn warehouse in The Book of Stone now wears a lanyard and quotes a theory, and the man tracking him is no longer sure he stands outside the hunt.

That is the danger and the engine. His sympathy for the extremist has always been self-recognition. He fears the fanatic because the fanatic is the version of himself that took the easy exit, that traded the divided soul for the clean side and called the trade peace. As long as he can hold both terrors at once, erasure on one hand and the cause on the other, the work stays alive and honest. The hour he resolves it, the hour loyalty to the tribe swallows loyalty to the soul or the other way around, the writer becomes a man with a flag, and the axe goes blunt.

So three fixed points locate him. He will keep writing the fanatic from the inside, because the inside is a room he has stood in and walked out of, and he wants to remember the door. His loyalty will keep warring with itself, the hunted Jew against the universal witness, and the refusal to declare a winner is the price of staying a writer rather than a recruiter. And the book will stay his road past both deaths, the pushcart its purest form, one man handing another a true sentence at a folding table between the tomatoes and the peaches, market-fresh, by hand, because that meeting of two souls is the only immortality he trusts and the only loyalty he never has to choose against.

Author Jon Papernick

I call Jon Papernick (JonPapernick.com) in Waltham, Massachusetts Sunday afternoon, July 2, 2006.

Jon: "Last time I was interviewed, I mentioned that Henry Miller was one of my influences and the person wrote 'Henry James.' Maybe you want to run it by me…"

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Jon: "I did want to be a writer but I didn't think I'd be good enough. I took a creative writing class in eleventh grade, and my teacher (Mrs. Gerard) told me I was not a good writer. She died before my book came out.

"As someone who's been a teacher for the past six years, it's been my primary mode of income, I would never say that to anybody. What we write is always a work in progress."

Luke: "You'd never say that to anybody? Even if their work sucked?"

Jon: "Not as a teacher. I'd say they hadn't fulfilled the ambitions of the story.

"When I was 18, I wrote and self-published a novel (Turned Into Earth) that was an absolute piece of junk. I sensed a lot of resentment from my friends. In a sense, everybody wants to be a writer. They all want to publish a book. Here I am calling myself a writer… If they're not doing any writing themselves, in a sense they feel like they're wasting their lives.

"You've got to play being a writer before you are a writer. You've got to convince yourself that you are one before you have the chutzpah to do it."

I tell Jon that I've made my living from blogging for nine years but I've never made more than $50,000 in a year.

Jon: "Wow. I've never made close to that and I've never blogged."

Luke: "Whenever I come out with a book, half the people I mention this to respond, 'How are you going to market it?' I find that annoying."

Jon: "I didn't get that question. When my first book (The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories) came out, I wish I'd gotten that question. I got a great review in The New York Times when the book first came out, and I assumed it'd just go from there. I didn't do any marketing. Nobody said anything. I wish people had. I would've gotten a website way back then, and made phone calls to independent bookstores, made postcards and bookmarks, had friends write reviews on Amazon… Whatever it takes.

"As far as marketing, the best thing is to just get your writing out there. I'm going to write a weekly column for Jewcy.com called 'The Perfect Jew.' That should get some attention. I have to go out and do things to make myself a better Jew."

Luke: "How were you raised Jewishly and where are you today?"

Jon: "I went to synagogue twice a year and hated it. The biggest and oldest Reform temple in Canada – Holy Blossom. It was really Reform. I was the third generation of my family to have gone there. It wasn't for me. My parents didn't practice. They sent me to Hebrew school in first grade and I failed.

"I grew up with any antipathy for Judaism. I had a bar mitzvah. I crammed for it for six months in the rabbi's basement.

"I did it in Hebrew but I didn't know what it meant.

"A lot of your education comes from home, so if you're not getting the support, you don't follow through with it. Through my early twenties, I had a real antipathy towards Judaism. It wasn't until I went to Israel at age 22 (in 1993) that I got a sense of pride about being Jewish. It was the turning point in my life.

"I don't practice at all, that's why I'm doing The Perfect Jew column. It springs out of a quote from Leon Wieseltier. He said that people from my generation don't know what they're rejecting. They're slackers. Eighty percent of my religious education comes from the writing of my stories.

"Writing is a spiritual act. It's a meditative prayer-like act, trying to drag creation out of the darkness of your subconscious. I'm interested intellectually but I don't enjoy going to synagogue. We go a couple of times a year. Part of the reason I don't enjoy it is that I don't know the songs. You go there and they start singing and I have a mental block and can't remember them. For The Perfect Jew, I'm going to try to learn some of these prayers.

"If you sit in a classroom and don't speak, it's boring, but if you're involved in the conversation, it's great.

"We just had a son seven weeks ago. He's my first kid. We want to bring him up with a strong sense of Jewish identity.

"My wife is the daughter of a Reform rabbi."

Jon spent his first 22 years in Canada (getting a B.A. in Creative Writing from York University) and a couple of years after returning from Israel in 1997 while he saved up for graduate school (converting his Canadian dollars at the rate of 62 U.S. cents per, he got an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College).

Luke: "Did you get your money's worth from Sarah Lawrence?"

Jon: "Yeah. It was great. I can't tell you what I learned except that I think I learned everything. It's osmosis. You're reading stories, writing stories, critiquing stories. You're living it 24 hours a day. Almost immediately upon arriving in graduate school, my writing went from good to very good."

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"

Jon: "We were into punk music. We rode skateboards. We drank a lot. We had a lot of fun. But we were nice. We didn't get into fights. We weren't bad kids. We enjoyed hanging out. I'd sit by the convenience store drinking a slurpee, getting drunk, watching TV."

Luke: "At what age did you become interested in girls?"

Jon: "Twelve."

Luke: "At what age did you become a man?"

Jon: "Seventeen."

Luke: "Is there any non-sexual event you'd describe as the demarcation point of when you became a man?"

Jon: "Maybe it was seven weeks ago when I had my baby. There are many times that you think you've reached it but then you have another point… Maybe I won't reach it until I don't have a father."

Luke: "Tell me about you and God."

Jon: "Growing up, I was definitely a nonbeliever. Listening to punk music, I questioned everything. Nothing made any sense. I believe in God the Creator. A God who created the earth and then absented himself. I have a sense that God left an imprint on our DNA which acts as a representative of him or herself, meaning guilt. Guilt is a representation of God. It keeps us from doing things we should not do. There's a certain code we have to live by and that's God."

Luke: "What did you love and hate about the practice of journalism?"

Jon: "I liked doing it in Israel because it was an interesting subject. What I hated is that when I came back to Canada, I was only able to land a job on the financial desk doing gold price and pork futures, which was boring. I liked how dynamic journalism can be, but it can also be crushingly boring. Ultimately, it was disappointing. I thought journalism would be a way for me to make a living while I wrote my fiction but I realized that it exhausts you. It takes all your energy away from you that you could be using for writing. When you're a journalist, you work all year round, and long hours. When you're a teacher, you get Christmas off, March break, and summer. When I worked as a journalist [in Canada], I had six off days in a year and a half.

"I'm doing more personal journalism now. Things I care about. I'm less interested in going out to a fire house and asking, 'Why did city hall burn down?' I'm a little self-centered in my journalistic desires now, but I've earned that right.

"I use my fiction tools when I write my journalism now.

"I like to craft my stories. When you write for a wire service, you have to bang those stories out.

"But I did get to meet Yassir Arafat, which was bizarre."

Luke: "Other things you loved about it?"

Jon: "Not really, otherwise I'd still be doing it."

Luke: "What do you love about writing fiction?"

Jon: "I love the way it makes me feel when I am on the ball, in the zone, when I'm writing something that is working. That is the best feeling in the world. It's totally self-contained. You're not relying on anybody else for this happiness. You don't rely on your wife. You don't rely on your parents. You're all alone in the room and making this incredible act of creation.

"What I don't like is when I'm not writing. I have this terrible feeling that I should be writing. I don't write every day. I haven't written any fiction since my baby was born. There's this terrible feeling that life is passing you by."

Luke: "What kind of sexual wattage has your writing created in women?"

Jon: "Some when I was an undergraduate. When I was 21, I had two girlfriends at the same time. That didn't work out, but for about a year and a half, it seemed to excite people. And I wasn't even any good at the time. My wife will say that when she read my story, The Ascent of Eli Israel, that was when she realized she wanted to marry me. She thought it was the best story she'd ever read.

"Sometimes I think I can count all the people who've ever hit on me with two hands."

Luke: "What do you love and hate about teaching?"

Jon: "I love teaching. You do get to use your writing skills. It takes [away] the solitariness of being a writer. What I don't like is grading. That is why I don't teach composition. At Boston University, I had to grade 60 essays every two weeks."

Luke: "What's the situation with your novel, Who by Fire, Who by Blood?"

Jon: "This is a problem. It's novel that took me four years to finish. It makes my collection of short stories look like Disneyland, and those stories were disturbing. I can't get it published. My agent sent it around and he couldn't sell it. I fired him and sent it around to a bunch of publishers and couldn't sell it. Then I went back to my agent, revised the novel, threw out 65 pages, and he sent it out to various publishers who like it better, but I think they're afraid of it. It has the emotional sensibility of Richard Wright's Native Son and Camus' The Stranger.

"The other Jewish writers who came up at the same time as me are writing things that are friendlier. This is an unfriendly book."

Luke: "Is your book linear [and realistic]?"

Jon: "Yes. These days, publishers seem to want to have novels set in two to three different times or places. Mine is set in one place and goes from point A to point Z. It's a traditionally told story. Publishers today like to see narratives chopped up, which often makes up for writers not knowing how to tell a story. I liked Everything is Illuminated, but there's not a story there. It's a short story that's been expanded to 300 pages."

Luke: "How much research do you do for your fiction?"

Jon: "It depends. I never do research for three months and then write. I write and then research as necessary. As I need things, I read things."

Luke: "At what stage does your wife [of four years] read your work?"

Jon: "Sometimes every page, which drives her crazy. When I have a draft, she'll always read it. She's my built-in bulls— detector. She's not a writer. She's not a major reader. But she's one of the smartest people I know and she'll keep me on track."

Jon Papernick's The Ascent of Eli Israel Makes Me Want To Vomit

The last time I was this upset was when Italy beat Australia 1-0 (or when my ex posed nude or when I got thrown out of a shul).

I got nauseated reading this collection of short stories. My stomach knotted up and I could barely swallow my dinner. Almost every story delivered at least one punch to the stomach. Almost every story made me fear that something horrible was going to happen (and I was usually right).

I call Jon Wednesday morning, July 12.

Luke: "I could barely eat my dinner last night. I was wondering why and then I realized it was because I had just finished your book."

Jon: "That's great. Can I get it in writing?

"There's a great quote from Franz Kafka that literature should serve as a pickax that shatters the frozen sea within. I aspire to that. I think I did my job in your case."

Luke: "My stomach wrenched up from the time the old man molested the boy in the first story."

Jon: "And that's one of the nicer stories."

Luke: "Why do you choose the material you choose?"

Jon: "If you were watching the news today, what's happening in Israel is insane. They have a war on two fronts. Israel is intense. Have you been to Jerusalem?"

Luke: "Yes."

Jon: "There are a lot of disturbed people in that city.

"The first story I wrote was An Unwelcomed Guest about the backgammon game. It puts the conflict into a nutshell and sets it in a kitchen.

"I just turned it into a one-act play.

"I try not to point fingers. I've got my own bias. In my fiction, I try to keep it [pure of ideology]. I've had people say I'm anti-Jewish, that I'm anti-Arab, that I'm pro-Jewish, pro-Arab. Married couples have had those feuds. I tried to paint the picture as clearly as I could and show the complexity of the situation. It's not open to a solution. There's no peace in the Middle East because people wait for the only possible solution — the Messiah.

"I don't why the stories are so dark. I could've written humorous stories. The King of the King of Falafel is a light story."

I groan.

Jon: "I must be a dark person. I close my eyes and I start writing and my subconscious starts to spew things out.

"I try for a blend of darkness and humor. I'm influenced by [William] Faulkner. There's visually dramatic scenes and the mix of race and religion. There's bitter acidic humor.

"You mentioned in your email that you are horrified that my novel is darker than this. That might explain why I've had some difficulty getting it published."

Luke: "I had an invite to see a film [Factotum] about Charles Bukowski this week and I said, 'No! I hate those type of films.' I've never read Bukowski."

Jon: "He's mildly amusing. I heard him speak on poetry. 'Writing a good poem is like taking a good s—. It's painful. It kills you. And then you feel great.'"

I dislike profanity but I hate the s-word (and toilet humor).

Luke: "Isn't a dark belief in life the logical result of no belief in God?"

Jon: "I'd say yes but I don't think that applies to me. While the stories are dark, there's truth to them."

Jon's a deist. "Somebody said, 'Suicidal people don't write novels because hopeless people don't create.'

"The act of writing and creating a world is taking the mantle of God on our shoulders. We all have the urge to create. It's the destroyers who really don't believe in God."

Luke: With what emotion did you write your stories?

Jon: "I came back home after I ran out of opportunities [in Israel]. I remember thinking, 'I have to find a way to get over Israel.' It'd gotten under my skin. I couldn't stay there because I didn't speak Hebrew well enough to get a job. I didn't want to drift around forever.

"I wrote the stories to get Israel out of my system, to work things out, to make sense of what I saw there. I did witness the aftermath of a suicide bombing. I did see charred bodies on the street. In my own mind, I did see a woman [without her upper torso]. I did see an untouched apple on the ground. It may or may not be true, but I do recall seeing that."

Luke: "This book gives reasons for why you don't live in Israel. Nobody would want to live here."

Jon: "That's weird because I do consider myself a Zionist. I do feel strongly about Israel. When I'm there, I feel like a better person. I feel like I'm a part of something vital.

"There are other sides of Israel. I could write a book about Tel Aviv, about hanging out at the cafes and going to the beach. [Ascent] is about my experience of working as a journalist in Jerusalem. It's not exactly an advertisement for living there."

Luke: "I can't imagine any sane person wanting to live in the world of this book."

Jon: "I guess you're right.

"Maybe there's a touch of madness in me?"

Luke: "As a journalist, you have to seek out these aberrant characters?"

Jon: "As a fiction writer, even more so. As a journalist, whoever is there to speak to you, you take.

"I am drawn to madness in my writing, to the clash of religions with a tinge of madness.

"I haven't been able to write fiction [since his baby was born eight weeks ago]. I've got my baby with me. I'm feeding him with my other hand now.

"A lot of Flannery O'Connor's characters are clearly mad."

Luke: "When you write about the religious, you're like a scientist poking at insects in a cage and saying, 'You are all very interesting' but you'd never become one."

Jon: "You're half-right. 'You are all very interesting and there but for the grace of God…' I spent five weeks at Aish HaTorah in 1993. I said I was leaving. The rosh yeshiva (head of the yeshiva) pulled me into his office and said, 'I want you to stay for a year. Give me a year and you'll thank me for it.' I said no. 'I'm a writer. I need to go back to Canada where people speak in my language. I can't be around Hebrew all the time. My craft is suffering.'

"He said, 'We've got a guy at the yeshiva who studied under Bernard Malamud. You want to meet him.' I met him. He said, yeah, if I want to go home, I should.

"I do feel that if I had stayed for a year, who knows? There are aspects of that madness that got under my skin. I can imagine drinking that kool-aid and thinking more extreme thoughts. Every person has mad aspects. Those mad people are unlived parts of myself.

"It was the same yeshiva David Koresh went to."

Luke: "I didn't know David Koresh went to Aish HaTorah."

Jon: "They won't admit it, but it's true. There's a Koresh street in the old city. That's where he took his last name.

"I just like that I did it [Aish]. I came from such an atheistic place. As a teenager, I was so against all religion.

"I did get in a debate [with Aish founder] Noach Weinberg and I pissed him off. He gave a lecture on the five levels of knowledge. He said that Judaism was superior to Christianity because Judaism was based on knowledge. His father told him we were at Sinai, and his father, and his father, and would your father lie to you? Whereas Christianity is based on faith.

"The next day he came in and gave a lecture on the five reasons there is a soul. And all five reasons were based on faith. I called him out on that. He stormed out of the room and slammed the door.

"I like to question and questioning was not really acceptable in that milieu.

"There was a gay Irish Jew there who wanted to be a part of Aish but they were keeping him at arm's length.

"There was another guy who had a Christian girlfriend. They said, 'If you don't get rid of the girlfriend, you'll have to leave.'"

Luke: "I don't think you could've read this book if you had your baby by your side?"

Jon: "Probably true. Four of the seven stories have young people brutally abused.

"I do have a different take on the world with Zev next to me. I finally understand selflessness. I understood how one would give one's own life to save one's child. I imagine my writing will change dramatically."

Luke: "This book seems to be very much the product of a single man."

Jon: "Are you talking about the anger?"

Luke: "I don't picture a happily married man writing this book."

Jon: "I think you're right.

"The novel I'm writing now is a lot lighter — it's about a guy who fell off the Brooklyn bridge. But I've had trouble getting to it over the past year. I've been afraid to look at it. Maybe I'm afraid of my own success.

"I just wrote an article for an online parenting magazine called 'I'm hot, my wife's not.' It was her idea. It was the idea that a father's stock seems to rise in the world and a mother's stock seems to drop. People will come up to my wife and say, 'Are your nipples hurting? Are you still pumping? You look tired. Did you have hemorrhoids?'

"I can walk around like the biggest schlep but with a baby strapped to my chest, women look at me in a different way."

We chat about MFAs.

Jon: "We're seeing a lot more middle-of-the-road competent writing. But is competent what we're looking for in our fiction writers? I'd rather see a little bit of madness than this controlled New Yorker type of short story that don't seem to have a resolution. I don't understand why people would sit down to write one of them. My impulse is the opposite — lots of plot and drama. So many of these books are just veiled autobiographies, which I don't find interesting.

"I remember giving my book to someone's mother in Israel. She's like, 'I'm probably going to hate this. You're probably one of those ironic twenty-something writers.' First, I'm thirty something. Second, I'm not ironic."

We chat about Nathan Englander and his new novel.

Jon: "I do wish him success though every writer's success kills a little bit of me.

"He's a slow writer. It took him about six years to write those eight stories in his first collection.

"I met him at a memorial service in New York last month. He seems shy. You expect him to be larger than life.

"So did you like my stories?"

Luke: "I just found them very upsetting. It was like the movie Pulp Fiction with people getting sodomized and shot and overdosing but you can't tear your eyes away and everything comes full circle.

"It's not what I'd choose to read on Shabbos."

Jon: "I warn people it's not bedtime reading."

Tova Mirvis (b. 1972) does not think of herself as a true-crime reader. Then, in the summer of 2014, a man her ex-husband knows is shot to death outside his home in Tallahassee, and she cannot stop reading about it. The dead man is Dan Markel (1972-2014), a law professor at Florida State. He and his former wife, both lawyers from close Jewish families, had fought over custody of their two boys. A court had barred her from carrying the children five hundred miles south to her parents. Soon after, someone killed him. Over the next eight years the police charge the former wife’s brother and three other men. The former mother-in-law goes to trial years after that.

Mirvis reads each article as it appears. She does this at the hours when she should be working. She has a memoir in progress, the hardest thing she has tried to write, an account of leaving her marriage and the Orthodox Judaism she was raised in, and the murder gives her somewhere to put her attention that is not her own life. She tells one interviewer the case became her form of procrastination. It does not stay procrastination. She finishes the memoir, starts a novel, sets that novel aside, and writes the murder instead.

This is the spot she has stood on for a quarter century. A family looks settled from the street. Inside, the order cracks. She watches the crack open and writes down what comes through.

She is born in Bethesda, Maryland, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, in a Modern Orthodox family whose Memphis roots reach back into the nineteenth century. The Jewish community there is small and close and Southern, a place where the women know each other’s kitchens and each other’s children and each other’s failings. That community gives her both her first material and her ear. She will spend years rendering the texture of it: the casseroles, the gossip traded as care, the hierarchy of the synagogue’s women’s section, the affection that doubles as surveillance.

After high school she goes to Israel for a year, as the daughters of such families do, and immerses herself in the study of sacred texts. She arrives wanting to be remade. She had thought of herself as a little bad, she writes later, and in Jerusalem she set out to become good. She prays to be forgiven her own willfulness. The willful self does not leave. It goes quiet and waits.

She enters Columbia, takes her degree from Columbia College in 1995, and stays for a Master of Fine Arts in fiction at the School of the Arts, finishing in 1998. At Columbia she makes few friends outside the Orthodox world. By the end of her senior year she marries a man from inside it, a man without the hard edges of the boys she had once been drawn to. She means to be a model Orthodox wife. She keeps a kosher home, keeps Shabbat, covers her hair. She also begins writing characters who doubt and stray, and the writing turns out to be the place the waiting self speaks.

Her first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, appears in 1999 and becomes a national bestseller. She sets it among the Orthodox women of Memphis and tells it in a first-person plural, a chorus of “we” that judges and absorbs and finally cannot hold its own line. A young widow and convert arrives in the community, beautiful and ungoverned, and the women’s certainties bend around her. Mirvis does not present Orthodoxy as a prison or as a paradise. She presents it as a place where people live, governed by love and obligation and the fear of being talked about. Critics praise the warmth and the wit.

The Outside World follows in 2004. It moves among Memphis, New York, and Jerusalem and turns on arranged courtship, family expectation, and the gap between two households that both call themselves observant. Some characters reach toward stricter practice. Others quiet their questions and stay. She writes faith as a thing lived rather than a thing argued.

That year a critic comes at her. Wendy Shalit (b. 1975) argues in a widely read essay that novelists raised Orthodox, Mirvis among them, write the community from the outside, as hostile witnesses dressed as insiders. The charge stings because it asks for papers. Mirvis answers it in an interview in Los Angeles on January 30, 2005, and the transcript catches a woman whose doubt is already twelve years ahead of her public account of it.

The interviewer asks whether she believes God gave the Torah. She says she does, then complicates it at once. She does not hold the literalist notion of a text handed down word for word, she says; she holds to an evolving chain of tradition that has shaped her life.

He presses. He asks about the eighth of Maimonides‘s (1138-1204) thirteen principles, the one that calls every word of the Torah divine and puts anyone who denies a single word outside permitted belief.

“Remind me,” she says.

He recites it.

“I don’t know,” she answers. “That’s a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don’t have to know all the answers. I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

He tries another door. Would it be truer, he asks, to call her Orthoprax than Orthodox, correct in practice rather than in belief.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she says, and then she takes the terms apart. The man who drives to an Orthodox synagogue, the man who prays three times a day and eats in non-kosher restaurants, which of them is Orthodox. She does not know. She does not think the words carry the weight he wants them to carry. What does any of it have to do with her right to write fiction, she asks. To live in the Orthodox world is to wrestle with these questions and stay inside the conversation. It is not to have the answers. She does not believe anyone has them.

Hours after the interview she writes to him, still arguing. She asks whether his questions about the principles of faith were meant for thought or meant to test whether she is the insider she claims to be. If the first, she is glad of the conversation. If the second, she resents it, the way she resents the critic. She reaches for Philip Roth (1933-2018) and The Ghost Writer, for Judge Wapter’s demand to know what qualifies a Jew to write about Jews for the national magazines. She feels too much of Wapter in the air.

He asks her later, by email, why she has stayed. Her answer is the most exact thing in the exchange. She has stayed because it is who she is, her childhood and her parents and her children and all her memories. She loves the ritual and the texts and the chain of ideas passed down with one more link added each generation. She loves that the week’s chaos goes still for the hours of Shabbat. A cantorial line catches her off guard and moves her toward something higher. She has stayed even though much of it angers her and feels unresolvable. She stays because the Orthodox world is wider than outsiders think, wide enough to hold one who doubts and wrestles and observes and believes, all at once.

She holds that position for seven more years. Around the time she turns forty it gives way. The doubt grows louder than the faith, and the marriage and the religion come apart together, each making the other impossible. She has said she could not leave Orthodoxy while staying in a marriage built on it. Leaving the marriage opened the room for other ways to be.

Visible City arrives in 2014, written across the years of the break, and the move shows on the page. She leaves the Orthodox setting and crosses Manhattan to the Upper West Side. A young mother watches her neighbors through their lit windows and builds lives for them out of what she can see, and the watching exposes the distance between the surface of a marriage and its floor. The subject holds even when the religion drops away. She still writes the gap between what a home shows and what it contains.

The memoir comes in 2017. She calls it The Book of Separation, after the bill of divorce, the sefer kritut, the book of rending, and she knows the title from the first page, which she rarely does. The book opens on a Rosh Hashanah, the first after she has left, and she sits among the congregation and looks at the faces and wonders how many of them carry the same fire of doubt she does. She writes the loss without pretending it is only freedom. She loses friends, a community, the certainty of belonging, a share of her family. The community mostly turns from her. She keeps raising her three children in Judaism. She marries again, a secular Jewish man. She knows that belonging without believing is a thing many people in the Orthodox world and far past it understand, and she knows what it costs to walk out of the belonging once the believing is gone.

The reviews are strong and the comparisons quick, to Shulem Deen and Leah Vincent and the run of departure memoirs out of the strict communities. Mirvis sits apart from most of them. She did not come out of a sealed ultra-Orthodox world where the outside was forbidden. She came out of a Modern Orthodoxy that had told her the worlds could be one, and her leaving is the long failure of that promise, not a jailbreak. She declines to indict. She lets a reader see why a woman might love a community and still have to go. There is a detail she shares about the writing of the book that holds the whole method: she had a scene of climbing Monument Mountain in the Berkshires, and her editor cut it, telling her enough with the Berkshires, we understand. She works by accumulation, by the small recurring pressure, not by the grand gesture, and she trusts an editor to tell her when the pressure has done its work.

Then the murder she could not stop reading about becomes the book she could not stop writing. We Would Never appears on February 11, 2025. She moves the real Tallahassee case to a secular Jewish family in Florida and changes the names, the jobs, the inner lives. A contentious divorce, a custody fight, a court order against the move, a husband shot, a family that closes ranks around the words everyone offers the police: no one I know would do such a thing. She alternates the wrecked present with the marriage’s slow collapse and works through the mother, the father sidelined by Parkinson’s, the dutiful eldest son, the estranged one. She sets herself the hard task of making the murderers people a reader can feel for, and she runs the whole thing past the Jewish question she has carried since Memphis. At Yom Kippur the matriarch searches the liturgy. Can a good person kill. Can a killer be forgiven, by man or by God. Critics call it a whydunit more than a whodunit and credit her with keeping the suspense from swamping the people. She guards the line between the real victim and her invention, and she keeps it.

She names her models when asked, and they are Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Like them she writes the novel of manners, the unwritten rules and the soft hierarchies of a tight community, the cost of stepping wrong. Her prose holds back. She builds character through observation and dialogue and the ordinary furniture of holiday and synagogue and family table, and she lets those gatherings carry the shifting loyalties. She revises for years, chasing the precision she wants before she lets a book go. She has taught at GrubStreet in Boston and spoken at universities and synagogues and festivals about fiction and memoir and the work of remaking a life. She held a scholar’s post at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 2009 and took a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in 2010. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.

More than twenty-five years past her debut, the arc holds its shape. She began inside the Orthodox community, writing its inner life with affection and a clear eye. She wrote her way out of it. Now she writes secular families who break in the same places the Orthodox ones did, over loyalty and custody and the lengths love reaches when it turns. The community changes across the books. The subject does not. Mirvis writes the moment the ordered life cracks, and she writes it from inside the crack, where the person standing there still loves the order she can no longer keep.

Set Apart: The Hero System of Tova Mirvis

On the first Rosh Hashanah after she leaves, Tova Mirvis comes back to a synagogue she no longer belongs to. She knows the room. She knows the women’s section, the hats and the hairpieces, the machzor open to the right page before the page is called, the small choreography of when to rise and when to sit that a body learns before it learns the words. She stands when they stand. She looks down the row at the faces she has prayed beside for years, and she wonders how many of them carry the fire she carries, the doubt that does not put itself out. Surely, she thinks, inside some of these minds burns this same strange fire. She is a woman attending her own funeral and finding the mourners distracted.

That morning holds both of the terrors her life runs on, and they pull against each other. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built a whole psychology on the claim that a man cannot live with the plain fact of his own death, so he builds a hero system, a scheme of rules by which he earns the sense that his life counts for something that outlasts him. The Denial of Death names the general dread. Mirvis gives it a local shape. Her first terror is not the grave. It is the living death of staying, the years she spent keeping a faith she had stopped holding, until, as she puts it, the soul goes calloused and a hole opens where belief used to sit. Her second terror is the social death of leaving, the shunning, the loss of friends and family and the ready-made belonging, the mapless country on the far side of the door. To escape the first death she has to walk into the second. That is the engine. Every choice she makes turns on it.

Her hero system before the door is the one she was born into, and it denies death by continuity. You do not live forever as yourself. You live forever as a link. The chain of tradition runs from Sinai through your grandparents through you to your children, and your part is to receive the practice intact and hand it on intact, one more link added, the metal sound. To be a good Orthodox woman is to be a faithful conductor of something that does not end. She wanted this. She has said so plainly. She loved the texts and the ritual and the quieting of the week’s chaos into the stillness of Shabbat, loved a cantorial line that caught her off guard and moved her toward something higher. The system gave her a way to count. It asked one price, and for a long time she paid it. To observe was to be accepted, she writes, and to be accepted was to be loved.

The price was subtraction. Becker’s hero is not assembled by addition; he is carved, made by what gets cut away. Mirvis was carved early. At eighteen she went to Israel for the year that the daughters of such families give, and she went to be remade. She had thought of herself as a little bad. In Jerusalem she set out to become good, and becoming good meant removing the willful self, the one that asked the wrong questions, the one that wanted. She prayed to be forgiven her own wanting. The self did not leave. It went under and waited. The rest of the subtraction came later and in the other direction, and this is the strange shape of her life. First she subtracted the self to keep the belonging. Then, at forty, she subtracted the belonging to recover the self. She took off the hairpiece. She took off the hat. She took off the marriage. She took off the community, or the community took itself off her, which from the inside feels the same. A life lived as a long removal, first of one death and then of the other, with no year in the middle when both terrors slept.

Now look at the word she chose for the book that tells it. She called the memoir The Book of Separation, after the sefer kritut, the bill of cutting that a Jewish divorce requires, the document that severs a marriage with a clean legal stroke. She knew the title from the first page, which she says rarely happens. She knew it because separation is the word her whole world is built on, and she had been speaking it her entire life without hearing how much weight it carried.

Holiness, in the tradition that made her, is separation. Kadosh, the word for holy, means set apart. The week is profane and the Sabbath is holy, and the line between them gets drawn each Saturday night by havdalah, the rite of separation, a candle and a cup and a box of spices, a blessing that thanks God for dividing the sacred from the ordinary. Meat is separated from milk. The clean is separated from the unclean. A married woman is separated from other men by the rules of her hair and her body. Even the marriage that began it all is an act of separation: kiddushin, betrothal, from the same root as kadosh, the bride set apart for this man and no other, sanctified by being reserved. To be holy is to be cut out from the common stock and kept. Mirvis learned the grammar of separation in the cradle. She learned that the way you make a thing sacred is to set it apart.

So when she finally saves her own soul, she does it with the community’s own instrument. She separates. The get, the bill of divorce, is the most Orthodox act in her story. She does not smash the system. She conjugates it. She takes the verb the tradition gave her for making things holy and she turns it on her own life, and the community reads the same act as the opposite of holiness, as profanation, as a woman cutting herself off from the source of meaning. One word, one root, and it splits down the middle. To her it is the path back to a self worth keeping. To them it is abandonment.

This is where the word goes strange, because it does not split only two ways. It splits across every hero system that uses it, and each system means something different by it, and each meaning denies a different death.

Stand the mohel at the eighth-day bris. For him separation is entry. The cut is how the boy joins the covenant. A blade removes a small thing and a child becomes a link in the chain, and the family weeps with joy at a wound. Separation here is not loss. It is membership purchased in blood, the oldest dues in the world.

Move to the operating theater where a surgeon parts conjoined twins. For her separation is salvation bought at terrible risk. She has studied the shared vessels for a year. She knows that to leave the two joined is to let one drag the other down, and she knows that the cut might kill them both. Separation is the only road to two whole lives and the road runs past the grave. “We give them a chance to be themselves,” she tells the parents, and she means a chance that could end in a single coffin.

Move to the border station at dawn. For the officer there, separation is procedure. A mother goes through one door and a child through another, and a stamp does the cutting. He does not hate them. He is denying a different death, the death of the orderly nation, the fear that without the line drawn hard the thing he serves dissolves. To him the word means the integrity of the system. To the mother on the far side of the door it means the end of the world.

Move to the launch pad. For the flight engineer separation is the only way up. The first stage burns out and falls into the sea, and the spacecraft cannot reach orbit until it sheds the very thing that lifted it. “Stage separation confirmed,” the voice says, and the room exhales, because the discarded booster is not a tragedy, it is the price of altitude. You cannot rise while you carry what raised you.

Now bring the word home to the case that haunts her, the one she could not stop reading about while she wrote the memoir, the murder of a law professor in Tallahassee whose marriage had ended and whose custody fight had not. There, separation is the thing worth killing over. He won a court order against his former wife’s plan to move the boys five hundred miles south, an order that fixed the geography of the separation, who keeps the children and on whose street they sleep. Someone answered the order with a gun. In We Would Never she moves the story to a secular Florida family and asks the question at Yom Kippur, the day of separation between the inscribed and the blotted out: can a good man kill, and can a killer be forgiven, by man or by God. The novel turns the word inside out. Mirvis separated and survived it. She builds a family that would rather commit murder than let the separation stand, a family for whom the cut is unthinkable and the corpse is not. The woman who walked out of her belonging writes people who would burn down the earth before they would walk out of theirs, and she gives them enough inner life that the reader, against his will, understands.

She did not arrive at this by accident. She had been writing the gap for twenty years before she lived it. In The Ladies Auxiliary the Memphis women narrate as a single voice, a chorus that sets itself apart from the unconventional widow who unsettles them, and the chorus cannot hold its line. In Visible City a woman on the Upper West Side watches her neighbors through lit windows and builds whole lives from what she can see, separated from them by glass and joined to them by longing. The subject was always the membrane between belonging and the self, the thin wall that the holy is supposed to keep standing and that keeps coming down.

What did she trade her old immortality for. This is the part the door opens onto, and it is not free. The chain offered her one kind of forever: you vanish as a person and persist as a link, carried by the people, who outlive any of their members. She gave that up. In its place she took the immortality the novel offers, which runs the other way. You do not vanish into the people. You persist as yourself, your name on a spine, the made thing standing after you. She has said that fiction is freedom, that a character faces no world she must accept and no answer she must reach, while religion has an outcome it wants and the wanting kills the exploration. The novel denies death by the permanence of the true thing said once and kept. That is a hero system too. It has its own dues. She named them when she named the cost of leaving: the belonging does not come ready-made on the far side, you build it by hand, out of a children’s school and a writers’ group, and it is thinner and it takes more work and some nights it does not keep out the cold.

Three fixes, then, on where she stands.

She kept the grammar and changed the God. She still makes things holy the only way her tradition taught her, by setting them apart, and the separations have only grown more total, from the hairpiece to the marriage to the people. The most religious thing about her is the act that put her outside religion.

She swapped a collective forever for a private one, the link in the chain for the name on the book, and she paid the exchange rate in loneliness and in the labor of building belonging from nothing. She knows the price. She does not pretend the new system is free, which is the one move her old community could never make about its own.

And she writes from inside the crack, because it is the last honest place for a woman who loves an order she can no longer keep. Her old congregation could not hold her. The new one is the reader, anyone in any hero system who has stood in a room he no longer believes in and felt the strange fire and looked down the row to see who else was burning. To them she is legible, across every scheme of meaning, for one reason. She no longer belongs to a single one.

Reading in Community: The Social World of Tova Mirvis

Every other month a group gathers at Hummingbird Books in Newton, Massachusetts, and Tova Mirvis runs the room. The club has a name, Nu Reads, and a sponsor, the Jewish Book Council, which made her its writer-in-residence and built the series around her taste. She picks new and new-ish Jewish fiction. People come, buy the book, drink the wine, and talk. She has said she wanted a PJ Library for grown-ups, a way to put a Jewish book in the hands of adults the way the children’s program puts one in a crib. This is the habitat. To map her social world, start in that bookstore and widen the lens.

The innermost ring is Greater Boston, the suburbs west of the city where literary Jews of a certain education settle. Newton, Brookline, Chestnut Hill, Cambridge. She belongs to a writing group there that The Boston Globe once profiled. She has shared a stage with the novelist Elizabeth Graver (b. 1964), whose Kantika mines Sephardic family history, and with Anita Diamant (b. 1951), whose The Red Tent sold by the millions and who founded the Newton mikveh where Mirvis once spoke alongside the feminist rabbi Haviva Ner-David. She taught at GrubStreet, the Boston writing center that trains much of the region’s literary class. She has led discussions for parents at Gann Academy, the pluralist Jewish high school, working through Philip Roth‘s “Eli, the Fanatic” until the talk turned from Roth to what it costs to be visibly Jewish now. The bookstores recur in the record like stations of a route: Newtonville Books, Brookline Booksmith, the JCCs from La Jolla to Beachwood.

The second ring is the national world of American Jewish letters, the writers a reviewer reaches for when placing her. Dani Shapiro (b. 1962), whose own memoirs of family secret and religious searching run parallel to hers, blurbed The Book of Separation, as did Ann Hood, Joanna Rakoff, Jessica Shattuck, and Heidi Pitlor, Boston-adjacent novelists who trade endorsements the way neighbors trade casseroles. Critics file her beside Allegra Goodman (b. 1967), Nicole Krauss (b. 1974), Nathan Englander (b. 1970), and Dara Horn (b. 1977), the cohort that writes Jewishness as literary fiction rather than ethnic memorabilia. She has appeared in conversation with Marjorie Ingall, Alyson Richman, and Lara Vapnyar (b. 1971). The reviewer Adam Rovner places her in the Jewish Book Council’s pages. The institutions that host and consecrate her are a circuit unto themselves: Hadassah and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Jewish Women’s Archive under Judith Rosenbaum, the Boston Book Festival, Hebrew College, the Sisterhood pages of The Forward, the desks at Tablet, Lilith, Moment, and Hadassah Magazine, and above them the New York Times Book Review, whose notice still ranks as the coin of the realm.

A third ring stands at an angle to the others, the writers who left strict Jewish worlds and wrote the leaving: Shulem Deen (b. 1974), Deborah Feldman (b. 1986), Leah Vincent, Angela Himsel, who came out of an apocalyptic Christian sect into Modern Orthodoxy and shared a platform with Mirvis. The reviewers shelve her with them, and she resists the shelving. She did not flee a sealed world that forbade the outside. She left a Modern Orthodoxy that promised the outside and the inside could be one. She keeps a foot in the Jewish world her children still inhabit. The departure writers interest her and do not contain her, and the distance she keeps from them is one of the truest things about her position.

What does this world value. It values the well-made sentence and the refusal of the easy answer. It prizes complexity, doubt, and restraint, and it distrusts the writer who arrives at the page already certain. Mirvis says she does not think writing from certainty makes for good fiction, and the room nods, because the room agrees. It values empathy raised nearly to a creed, the capacity to inhabit a character you might despise and make a reader feel for him. The praise her last novel drew named this directly, the feat of building murderers a reader pities. It values story as the way into hard things. She tells people that if she had begun a discussion by asking them to share their feelings, they would have closed up, and that the Roth story gave them a door. The book is the door. Reading together is the room behind it. The whole set holds that fiction does work that argument cannot, that it carries truth past the guard that argument trips.

Their hero system, the scheme by which a member earns the sense that her life counts and leaves a mark that outlasts her, runs on the made book and the honest self. You matter here by writing something true and durable, and by living in accordance with the voice inside even when the cost is high. The departure is not a fall in this world. It is a credential. To leave a marriage and a religion and to write the loss without flinching is the heroic act the set was built to honor, the proof that you chose the real over the comfortable. Where her old world offered immortality through the chain, the people carried forward by their children and their observance, this world offers immortality through the spine on the shelf and the reader who feels less alone. Both are ways of not vanishing. She traded one for the other and her set applauds the trade, because making that trade is the form of heroism they recognize.

The status games follow from this. The highest rank goes to literary seriousness, and the deepest anxiety is the suspicion of being merely commercial. When her publisher framed her last novel as a thriller, with the hope of a streaming deal in the air, the reviewers in her own world worried at the label, insisting the book was a steady-pulse novel wearing a thriller’s coat. The bestseller list is prized and never quite admitted as a prize. A second game runs along the line between particular and universal. To be called a Jewish writer can shelve you in a smaller room, and the move up is to be read as a writer who happens to be Jewish, the way the culture reads the canonical men. Mirvis played this when she wrote Visible City and told an interviewer she had not set out to leave Jewish subjects behind, the questions she was chasing simply did not arrive in a Jewish form. The credentialing tokens are the familiar ones: the Columbia degree, the residencies, the fellowship from the state arts council, the festival invitation, the blurb from the right name, the review in the right paper. The currency moves in endorsements, and the endorsements bind the set together.

This world had a heretic once, and the episode shows the boundary. In 2005 Wendy Shalit charged in the New York Times Book Review that novelists raised Orthodox, Mirvis among them, wrote the community as hostile outsiders dressed in insider clothes. Mirvis answered that the charge was a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check, a demand to see a writer’s credentials of belief before granting her the right to write. She refused the audit. The set closed around her, because the principle she defended, that no test of faith may gate the freedom to imagine, is the article on which the whole guild stands. Shalit asked for orthodoxy. Mirvis answered with autonomy, and autonomy won, because in this world it always does.

Now the claims they treat as simply true. The normative ones, the oughts, sit close to the surface. One ought to tell the truth about one’s own life. One ought to render the other person’s humanity even when it is inconvenient. One ought to respect difference, and Mirvis is praised for modeling respect across intra-Jewish lines, for treating her ex-husband’s continuing Orthodoxy with care in front of their children. One ought not to coerce belief, and one ought not to shun. The cardinal virtue is empathy and the cardinal sin is judgment, and here the grammar strains, because the set judges hard. It judges the community that shuns. It judges the enforcer who demands the credential. The non-judgment is real toward the doubter and the leaver and thins toward the gatekeeper. The truth worth stating plainly is that this is a morality of non-judgment that keeps one strong judgment in reserve, against those who judge.

The essentialist claims, the things treated as fixed in the nature of a person, cluster around two ideas. The first is the authentic self. This world holds that a true self lives inside a man or a woman, that it can be silenced but not erased, and that a life lived against it becomes a lie that calluses the soul. Mirvis’s whole account turns on a voice she could not quiet, a self that went under in Jerusalem and waited and rose at forty. The set does not argue for this self. It assumes it, the way the Orthodox world assumes the soul. The second fixed thing is Jewishness as a substrate that survives the loss of belief and practice. You can stop keeping Shabbat and stop believing God gave the Torah and remain, without strain, a Jewish writer at a Jewish book club sponsored by a Jewish council. Mirvis raises her children in the faith she left. The identity persists under the lapsed observance like a watermark, and the set treats this persistence as a fact of nature rather than a choice remade each morning.

Their moral grammar, the deep structure under the particular judgments, keeps the old religious forms and pours new content into them. The vocabulary is covenantal. Separation, the bill of divorce, atonement, return, forgiveness, the Day of Judgment. The authority has moved. In the tradition that raised them, the court sits with God and the community. In this world it has shifted inward, toward conscience, with the community demoted to a thing one builds by hand and may outgrow. Sin becomes self-betrayal. Atonement becomes honesty. Teshuva, return, stops meaning return to observance and starts meaning return to the self. When Mirvis sets the climax of her last novel at Yom Kippur and asks whether a killer can be forgiven by man or by God, she keeps the ancient question whole and leaves the bench half empty, because in her world the human heart now shares the seat that once held only the divine. The forms are Sinai. The content is the examined life. The set lives in the space between, fluent in a liturgy it no longer takes on the old terms, and it has made that fluency, the love of the texts without the submission to them, into a way of staying Jewish that the texts never named and the community cannot quite forgive.

Covered and Exposed: The Voice and Rhetoric of Tova Mirvis

The memoir opens on a sentence with no fat on it. “I stood before a panel of rabbis.” Then she dresses the scene before she dresses the argument: a navy skirt below the knee, a cardigan buttoned over a short-sleeved shirt that without the sweater the community counts as immodest. The clothing is the whole case. “But no matter how covered I was, I felt exposed.” Tova Mirvis builds her voice on that antithesis and works it for three hundred pages. The more she follows the rules, the more naked she feels. She states the contradiction and declines to solve it, and the refusal to solve it is the engine of her prose.

Her manner begins there, in a comfort with contradiction that other writers reach for and rarely hold. Asked in 2005 whether a Jew can be at once modern and Orthodox, she says yes, then spends the next minutes taking apart the words the question used. The terms do not mean what the questioner wants them to mean. She lives with the complication every day and says so without strain. This is the temperament under the technique. She distrusts the clean answer in the pew and on the page, and she has trained a voice to keep two opposed things alive at once. The gift that let her stay in a marriage and a faith past her own belief is the same gift that makes the leaving honest, because she grants the world she left its beauty in the act of walking out of it.

The voice is first person and close, a woman watching herself from a half step back, and the watching is her oldest habit. At her own wedding she stands inside the ceremony and outside it at the same time, naming the younger self both bridled and bridal, the pun carrying the trap, and she borrows a Sharon Olds poem about a doomed marriage to plead with that girl across twenty years. Please, she says to her, you know so little of yourself. She narrates a life the way her novels watch their people, through glass. Visible City made the watching its subject, a woman at the window assembling the lives of her neighbors out of what she can see, and Mirvis has said the novelist and the voyeur work the same nerve. The eye that judges her own past is the eye she trained on her characters first.

Her diction runs plain and short at the floor, Anglo-Saxon and unshowy, and then three habits sit on top of it. She borrows the language of contracts and institutions for the things of the soul, so that belief shrinks to a line of fine print on a membership form, and faith becomes a clause one signs without reading. She takes the words that belong to God, all-seeing and all-knowing, and hands them to the neighbors, so the community becomes the deity that watches, and the prayer in her head reduces to a single refrain, what will they think. And she trusts the body to carry what the mind will not say. The conflict arrives as a headache that gathers along the line where the hat meets the head, a pain that lifts the moment she steps outside and lifts the hat. It arrives at the ritual bath as a comb, an attendant who sends her back to comb again, and something inside her that breaks open over a demand that small. The theology never announces itself. It hides in a hemline and a hairbrush, which is the close attention to status detail that a reporter brings to a room, turned inward on a life.

The syntax favors the short declarative that turns on a hinge, and it favors the linked chain where each clause hands the next its final word. To observe was to be good, and to be good was to be loved. The shape is a syllogism and the content is a snare, and she lets the tidy logic convict the world it describes. She runs the same figure to map the closed loop she grew up inside, where the text could not be wrong and the rabbis could not be wrong, so a reader who found sexism in the verse was reading it wrong or feeling it wrong, and the fault came home to her every time. Restraint governs the rest. She withholds. The reviewers keep reaching for the same three words, elegant, wry, unflinching, and they note what is absent, the self-pity and the saccharine she refuses. She trusts a detail to land the blow and declines to announce the bruise. When she wants a hard word she takes one and stops. The house empties of children and goes desiccated, and she leaves the adjective standing alone.

She has a gift for the cold irony that needs no comment. The rabbis who married her wish her mazel tov, and the rabbis who grant her the bill of divorce wish her mazel tov again, the same blessing at the building up and the tearing down, and she sets the two scenes side by side and says nothing. In her first novel she found the form for this watching before she had lived its full cost. The Ladies Auxiliary speaks in a first-person plural, a chorus of Memphis women who narrate as one body and cannot hold their own line against the stranger who unsettles them. The communal we that judges the outsider is the same we whose eyes she later calls all-seeing. She wrote the surveillance from inside the watchers before she wrote it from inside the watched.

Her rhetoric persuades by scene and not by argument, and she has explained the method out loud. Open a room by asking people to talk about their feelings and they shut. Hand them a story and they open. So she leads the book with the panel of rabbis and the navy skirt, withholds the thesis about women and authority, and lets the reader arrive at it alone and believe he found it himself. The body stands as her evidence, the headache and the held breath doing the work a polemic might botch. When she defends her right to write the Orthodox world, she refuses the terms of the attack rather than meeting them. The demand that a novelist prove her belief before she may imagine is a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check, and she will not sit for the audit. She reaches for Philip Roth and Judge Wapter and moves the fight onto literary ground, where she holds the higher cards. The persuasion runs quiet and sideways. A reviewer for the Jewish Book Council wanted freedom for her and then turned and wanted it for herself, which is the exact effect the prose is built to produce.

The concessive clause is the tell, the even though that lets her hold the love and the anger in one breath. In the letter where she once explained why she stayed, before she left, the reasons climb by repetition, because she loves the ritual, because she loves the texts, because she loves the chain of ideas with one link added each generation, and then a cantorial line catches her off guard and moves her toward something higher, and then the turn arrives, the even though, and the anger enters without canceling a word of the love. She can write the both-and as well as anyone in her cohort. The capacity is older than any craft she learned at Columbia.

What binds the voice is negative capability, the willingness to sit inside doubt without snatching at a fact to end it. She kept the cadence of the liturgy after she dropped its claims, the rhythm of a people who argue with God for sport, and the manner became the message. Here is a woman fluent in a faith she no longer holds, telling the truth in its own music. The risk in the voice is the risk in the life. Restraint can slide into a reluctance to render the verdict, and non-judgment can harden into its own evasion, a way of declining to say the community was wrong when she means that it was. Her strongest pages keep the tension taut and let the reader feel both the love and the indictment at full strength. Her weaker ones let it dissolve into a warm haze where everyone did his best and no one is to blame. She is at her height in the cold scenes, the rabbis and the comb and the doubled blessing, where she trusts the facts to speak and keeps her own thumb off the scale.

1/30/05

Wendy Shalit Says Authors Tova Mirvis, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Rosen Don't Get Orthodox Judaism

Wendy Shalit writes in The New York Times Book Review:

Authors who have renounced Orthodox Judaism — or those who were never really exposed to it to begin with — have often portrayed deeply observant Jews in an unflattering or ridiculous light. Admittedly, some of this has produced first-rate literature or, at the least, great entertainment, but it has left many people thinking traditional Jews actually live like Tevye in the musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'' or, at the opposite extreme, like the violent, vicious rabbi in Henry Roth's novel ''Call It Sleep.'' Not long ago, I did too.

Wendy implicitly says she understands Orthodox Judaism better than such authors as Tova Mirvis, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Rosen and that she sees Orthodox Judaism as something wonderful.
This is an interesting claim, one common with converts to a cause (I felt similarly during my early years in Judaism). I suspect that Englander and Mirvis have spent more years in Orthodox Judaism and have deeper learning in Jewish text than Wendy as they were raised in Orthodox Judaism and given a day-school education in that faith (and consequently must be literate in Hebrew). Mirvis still belongs to an Orthodox Judaism. I think she has been Orthodox all her life. Who is Wendy to say, on the basis of six years of observance and study of Orthodox Judaism, that she knows better than someone who has spent a lifetime in the faith?
Three generations ago, most Jews in the world were Orthodox. Now they are not. As soon as Jews had a choice to leave Orthodox Judaism, most of them did. They did so for rational reasons. They may have been wrong. They may have betrayed their God and their heritage. But they acted, in part, out of the reasons Shalit ridicules in her essay.
Forward literary editor Alana Newhouse replies to my email:

Ruchama King and Risa Miller are good writers, but, based on artistic merit alone, they are not in the same league as Englander, Rosen, Mirvis and Reich. So what Shalit is essentially asking us to do is to lower our artistic standards in order to accomodate a better message, which feels rather Soviet to me; as someone who values art, I simply can't countenance that. Moreover, Shalit criticizes those writers for not giving Orthodoxy its due but it is she who underestimates it, by presenting it as so fragile that it cannot withstand criticism. Those of us who truly know Orthodoxy — yes, even those of us who may have at one time or another strayed from it — understand that it is held up by a much stronger foundation than she allows, one based on intellectual, emotional and social legitimacy. What I think may be at work here is a bit of misplaced jeaolusy: Shalit, who came to Orthodoxy later in life and probably had to undergo a good deal of personal change and intellectual work to join it, is envious of those of us who had it all along. She cannot fathom how anyone could take for granted what she labored so hard to acquire; then, on top of "abandoning" it, these writers went and criticized it, which must feel like just too much ingratitude for her to tolerate. But, like your friend with the fabulous family that you would have given anything to trade for your own, these authors have the right to their experiences as well. That they could make from them art that is, by the highest standards, both good and important, is a blessing to readers and, dare I say, a gift from God.

Miriam comments.

From the Forward:
Judging a Book By Its Head Covering
By Tova Mirvis
February 4, 2005

But the fact that we are insiders to the Orthodox world is irrelevant. Since when must a fiction writer actually have lived the life he or she writes about? Since when must one be a murderer to write "Crime and Punishment," a pedophile to write "Lolita," a hermaphrodite to write "Middlesex," a boy on a boat with a tiger to write "Life of Pi"? Yes, it seems, Shalit has outed the whole tawdry lot of us. She's revealed to the public the terrible truth: Fiction writers make up things.

What is true is that these portrayals apparently don't capture Shalit's experience of being a baal teshuvah, or to use her definition, "a deeply observant Jew who did not grow up as one," they aren't consistent with the personal fulfillment she's found recently. And this, I suspect, is what bothers Shalit most. But instead of being able to allow for that difference of experience, she labels these other portrayals as false. If someone doesn't see Orthodoxy as she does, then he or she must not really understand it. Englander has said that he experienced his upbringing as "anti-intellectual." But she doesn't think it was, so what right does he have to say this, least of all publicly? It's this discounting and de-legitimizing of any individual experience other than her own that is so troubling.

It's bad enough she does this to people. What's worse is that she does it to fictional characters. She attacks books for depicting characters who deviate from communal norms. Englander besmirches Judaism by depicting a fight in a synagogue. Rosen creates a character, an unmarried Orthodox man who sleeps with a female Reform rabbi. Reich imagines an overweight dietician who gorges on Yom Kippur. People like Shalit attack a story by saying, "But not everyone is like this." Of course not. But the fiction writer is saying, "Let's imagine one person who is."

I call Tova Mirvis Tuesday morning, February 1, 2005: "Could you tell me about your background in Orthodox Judaism?"

Tova: "Contrary to what Wendy Shalit might believe, I am an Orthodox Jew. I've been part of a Modern Orthodox community my entire life. I went to [Jewish] day school, yeshiva high school [Orthodox], spent a year studying in a yeshiva in Israel. I've davened every week in an Orthodox shul and I send my kids to an Orthodox day school."

Luke: "Do you read Hebrew?"

Tova: "I read Hebrew. I can read Jewish texts. I have studied Talmud. Credentials? I keep kosher. I don't turn the light switch on [on Shabbat and festivals]."

Luke: "Where did you go to college?"

Tova: "Columbia [with a degree in English literature]. Then I went to the Columbia MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) program."

Tova studied seven years at Columbia.

Luke: "You spent your entire life in Orthodox Judaism."

Tova: "Right. It's funny to find out from The Times that apparently I didn't. I thought I did."

Luke: "Have you ever spoken to Wendy Shalit?"

Tova: "No. I must confess to firing off a pissed-off email in the middle of the night."

Luke: "Did you have any inkling that this article was coming down mentioning you?"

Tova: "No, not at all. It was surprising, to say the least. I was home in a crazy Boston blizzard [Tova lived in New York for 13 years until moving to Newton, Massachusetts in the summer of 2004] with my children and some neighborhood children and my agent called me…"

Luke: "Were you a rebel vis-à-vis Orthodox Judaism in your childhood or college?"

Tova: "I wish I was. No. I was the quintessential good girl. My big rebellion was to go to Columbia.

"My relationship to Orthodox Judaism is not uncomplicated. I struggle with issues of feminism and egalitarianism in the Orthodox world. I observe but I question. Questioning is part of what it means to belong to the community. The notion that one is either in or out of a community is not true. Insiders of this world know it's not true. A little hug on a back porch is not outside the experience of day-to-day lived [Orthodox Judaism]."

Wendy Shalit writes in The NYT:

Another character, Bryan, is a 19-year-old who returns home from Israel as a deeply religious radical, renamed Baruch. Yet at his engagement party, he's suddenly starring in a Harlequin romance: out on the porch, Baruch embraces his fiancee and she leans ''in close, their bodies gently pressing against each other.'' It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse. Yet Baruch's younger sister isn't surprised: ''They who pretended to be so holy in public were just like everyone else in private. It confirmed what she had suspected: that it was all pretense.''

Here is the scene in question by Tova Mirvis. The young couple are alone, "as alone as they'd ever been," out back on a dark porch. They're engaged and have never touched each other before.

They sat next to each other, on chairs whose legs were touching. Tzippy's and Baruch's arms almost touched as well. She was scared of what she would feel and scared of how he would react, scared that he would pull away in horror and scared that he wouldn't. But she couldn't stop herself. She leaned toward him and grazed his hand with two of his fingers. It was so ligght, so soft, that it could have been imagined or wished. she did it again, to be sure it had really happened. She ran her fingers across his hand, and her body tingled with the shock and pleasure of actually touching. Too thrileld and scared to move her hand, she waited to see what would happen next.

He held her hand. He gently stroked her fingers. he wantged to touch her face which he had stared at these past few months. He wanted to kiss her mouth, which had distracted him when he learned, when he davened, when he slept. He put his arms around her and she leaned in clsoe, their bodies gently pressing against each other.

Just as his lips were about to find hers, a looming figure appeared in Baruch's head. It was the face of his rabbi who whispered in his ear, "So you haven't changed at all." If he leaned any closer to Tzippy, these words would come true. One kiss and he would disappear. Guilt outpaced desire and he pulled away. He was surpised at her and surprised at himself. His married friends had warned him of the pitfalls of engagement. The knowledge of what you would one day be able to do threatened to overepower even the strongest self-control. It was dangerous to walk the edges. That was where people got lost. Baruch stood up and turned around. They both tried to pretend that it hadn't happened.

As they went inside though, the initial touch replayed itself in their heads, mirrored back from every angle. A hundred hands reached for each other. A thousand fingers intertwined.

Luke: "What about the hug being at a party and in front of people and that that is unlikely?"

Tova: "That is not uncommon. I went back and looked at that section [and asked herself], did they hug? It's a debatable point. It was a slight hug. It was not in front of people. [Wendy] doesn't mention that the hug was immediately ended because Baruch feels intense guilt about it. He has Wendy Shalit's mindset."

Tova repeatedly pronounces Wendy's last name as "SHALL-it," though I believe she knows the correct pronunciation is "Shuh-LEET."

Tova: "The scene is about the struggle between [divine ideals] and physical desire. To say that no unmarried people [of the opposite sex not related to each other] in the Orthodox world touch each other is a stretch, to put it mildly. Her comment afterwards: "It's bad enough that a yeshiva student would embrace a woman not related or married to him, but to do so in public is even worse." That misses the experience of being in that moment, which fiction does. Fiction is not shaking your finger at someone and saying, 'Naughty!' It's about what does it feel like to want this hug, to touch somebody you want to touch."

Luke: "Have you spent a significant period of your life completely outside of Orthodox Judaism?"

Tova: "No. Maybe according to Wendy Shalit, I have, if mild transgressions put one outside."

Luke: "You haven't gone six months without going to shul?"

Tova: "No."

Luke: "Do you know anything about Haredi [fervent Orthodoxy] Judaism?"

Tova: "One of the weird things about the piece is the notion that Modern Orthodoxy is somehow invalid. She says that to be Modern Orthodox is to be familiar with 'some traditional customs.' That's an odd thing to say about Modern Orthodoxy. There are numerous differences between Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodoxy but they share a lot more than what separates them, certainly in the experience of day-to-day life, particularly in how human emotions reconcile with religious law.

"I do have a lot of experience with ultra-Orthodox Judaism with close family members who are part of the ultra-Orthodox world. I have family members who are part of the Haredi world."

Luke: "Do you hate the ultra-Orthodox world?"

Tova: "No."

She laughs. "I don't even think in those terms. How do you hate worlds? I'm so closely interwoven into it. I'm not sure my characters are ultra-Orthodox, maybe yeshivish or right-wing. I think my books are more about Modern Orthodoxy.

"That hug, which seems to have drawn her greatest irritation… Because a character succumbs to a moment of desire and therefore I hate the ultra-Orthodox world? It's outrageous. I disagree with her characterization of my novels as portraying the Orthodox world as 'contemptible.' I've heard a lot about my novels. I've never heard that before. I think it is not true."

Luke: "That charge has not appeared in reviews of your work?"

Tova: "Not once. I've been faulted for portraying it [Orthodox Judaism] with too much love…for not pushing my characters hard enough, for not having any of the characters leave Orthodoxy. At readings for The Ladies Auxiliary, I was asked if community was good or bad. Fiction doesn't deal with those terms. I don't even think in those terms."

Luke: "Are your novels good or bad for the Jews?"

Tova: "I don't even think about it."

We laugh.

Tova: "I've been on a Philip Roth reading binge. It brings to mind the questions Judge Leopold Wapter asks [of the Philip Roth character in the book The Ghost Writer]. I've just finished my piece for the Forward where I say that Wendy Shalit is a modern-day Leopold Wapter.

"I'll disagree with the premise of your question and answer it anyway. I don't know what we gain by presenting hagiography: 'We don't struggle. We don't question. Maybe we have a small moment of pettiness, but we are happy here. You might have issues in your life, but not here.' I'm not sure that benefits the Orthodox world."

Luke: "How accurate a reading of you and the things you struggle with and the things you observe are your novels?"

Tova: "They are not autobiographical but I'm in there all over the pages. The Ladies Auxiliary, ironically, is very much about what it means to be an insider or outsider. I am a sixth generation Memphian. I grew up as an insider in that world but at the same time feeling outside for not always agreeing with the community. There was the sense that if you deviated in the smallest way you would find yourself on the outside. I am certainly not Batsheva [the convert to Judaism in the novel]. I am not even any of the high school girls.

"I grew up with such a strong sense of being from somewhere, and I think about how you hold on to that desire without it becoming suffocating and requiring conformity. The Outside World is about how people wrestle with this question of tradition and modernity, how people make those tabulations in their life."

Wendy Shalit writes: "Mirvis hones in on hypocrisy…"

Tova: "I have no problem with hypocrisy [as Wendy defines it]. If Baruch believes in this strict interpretation of Orthodoxy yet he hugs his fiancee on the back porch, is he a hypocrite? Is that the best word we have for that? I think it's about human failings and the tension between divine ideals and human needs. The whole notion of hypocrisy is so baffling to me. I almost want to write against the idea that you are either this or that.

"I was interested in what happens to the dreams and desires that are not kosher. What happens when people belong to communities and their private feelings do not always match that. What is that individual's experience? In the Modern Orthodox family [in Tova's novel The Outside World], I wanted to write about the father Joel who describes himself as an observant agnostic. It's not about whether it is good to be that or bad to be that, but what does it feel like to be that. That's what fiction does. Her piece has nothing to do with fiction."

Luke: "I find it hard to believe that the things your characters saw and did are foreign to you. This all comes from a world of possibilities you are familiar with."

Tova: "Very much so. Their struggles are very much my own struggles. To hear that those are not authentic is, what polite word can I use, surprising."

Luke: "Do you known anyone in Orthodoxy who keeps shrimp in the freezer?"

Tova: "I had a friend in college who told me this story. I've always had this uncomfortable feeling that someone in Memphis thinks I am on to them, but I have no idea who it is.

"I think Shalit's piece loses any notion of humor. There's no possibility for humor in Wendy's worldview.

"Whether someone actually keeps shrimp salad in her fridge isn't important [in determining the veracity of a novel]… It's the metaphorical shrimp salad, the things that people do that don't fit in. Everyone has them. I suspect Wendy Shalit has her own metaphorical shrimp salads in her freezer and it doesn't make her hypocritical or an outsider. It just makes her a normal person."

Wendy criticizes you for writing that a group of neighbors smuggled televisions into their homes in airconditioner boxes.

Tova: "I'm guilty of the crime as a fiction writer of making something up."

Luke: "But this isn't unknown in the Orthodox world?"

Tova: "It's an urban legend in the Orthodox world. The air conditioner box has become a catch phrase. It signifies for insiders about what one is doing in private. If you go from door-to-door in Borough Park, will you find that all of them have done that? Of course not."

Luke: "Do you think your novels inform your reader why people would want to be part of Orthodox Judaism?"

Tova: "They might. It's certainly not what they set out to be. I've heard from a few people that they've had to read my novels in their conversion classes. That's nice and funny but not my goal. I hope that what they [Tova's novels] do is ask questions about what it means to live inside a world. What is the experience of living with rules?"

Wendy Shalit writes: "The novel's jacket copy announces that ''The Outside World'' is meant to explain ''the retreat into traditionalism that has become a worldwide phenomenon among young people,'' but the uninformed reader might wonder why any young person would want to be part of such a contemptible community."

Tova: "Her use of the word 'contemptible' is outrageous. Do shrimp salad, a hug and bride magazines add up to a contemptible portrayal, so that one would think, 'I could never live in that contemptible world.' I'm not sure what she is referring to.

"She used to think that Hasidim were all bad, all mean."

Wendy writes:

At 21, I was on the outside looking in, on my first trip to Israel with a friend who was, like me, a Reform Jew. One day, we wandered into a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, and suddenly there were black hats and side curls everywhere. My friend pointed out a group of men wearing odd fur hats. ''Those,'' he explained, ''are the really mean ones.'' I never questioned our snap judgment of these people until, a few years later, I returned to study at an all-girls seminary and was surprised to discover that my teachers, whom I adored, were men and women from this same community.

Tova: "Now they're all good. It's a black-and-white way of looking at the world on both counts.

"I don't feel that it is portrayed as contemptible. It's my world. I live in it every single day. Often there's this notion that Orthodoxy is swallowed whole. People will say, 'Oh, but she's Orthodox." As though I am not a thinking wrestling person. That, to me, is the biggest problem with her interpretation of Orthodoxy. There's no room to question. I hope that my books portray that tension.

"I remember from my book tour with The Ladies Auxiliary, one lady would raise her hand and say, I could just kill that Mrs. Levy. Those women were the most narrow petty bitches I've ever seen in my life. And another person would say, 'I love that book because it has such a warm sense of community. They care about one another.'

"Ultimately, that difference of opinion is not about the book. It's about the reader. It has to do with where they are coming from and what they want to see represented. Someone who wants to kill Mrs. Levy has her own experience of being inside or outside.

"I want to write books that press buttons. I'm not interested in writing parve [a kashrut term that refers to food that is neither meat nor dairy] fiction.

"I found with The Ladies Auxiliary, the farther someone was from Orthodoxy, the warmer they felt the portrayal was.

"I go home to Memphis all the time. I live in that world. I'm the one who wrote that book. I understand the feeling that I've aired the dirty laundry… 'Will people want to move to Memphis still?'"

Luke: "What have you had to deal with in the Memphis community?"

Tova: "It's a mixed reception. It divided along the lines of insiders versus outsiders. People who felt themselves deeply inside that world were very upset about the book. Either it was nothing like Memphis or it was exactly like Memphis. People told me that they didn't read the book but a copy of all the negative passages had been passed around. People were busy trying to play who's who. They wanted to crack my code.

"At the beginning, it was upsetting. It became funny. Apparently there were five candidates for Mrs. Levy including one man. People who did not feel like insiders loved the book. One person said that it felt like I had explained her life to her. She always wondered why she hadn't felt accepted here.

"When I go back there, I watch my back."

Luke: "But it's not so bad you can't go back."

Tova: "It's also the Southern thing. People will never say anything to your face. People will give me this smile and say, 'I read your book.' That's it."

Luke: "How did your parents feel about the book?"

Tova: "They were great despite that my mom heard a comment about it every day, every time she left her house. They loved the book and felt like it spoke to a truth for them and their experiences. When I was writing the book, my mom would say, 'You're not really going to do this, are you?' I had to promise that not only would I not use any Memphis names, they couldn't even sound anything like Memphis names."

Wendy Shalit writes: "But before there can be hypocrisy, there must be real idealism; in fiction that lacks idealistic characters, even the hypocrite's place can't be properly understood."

Tova: "My idea of idealistic characters is characters who hold ideals and struggle to realize them. I think Baruch is idealistic. He aspires to something higher than himself. He doesn't always reach it.

"What Shalit is really asking for is idealized characters. She praises books, not on whether the characters are fully realized, but do they promote ideals."

Luke: "Did you write or approve the jacket copy for The Outside World?"

Tova: "I approved it. Writers get very little say over book jackets. It's the publisher's job. But it was not my favorite line in the jacket copy."

Luke: "Yes. I would not think that The Outside World was primarily a way to explain a retreat into traditionalism."

Tova: "I agree."

Luke: "Do your novels indulge the baser instincts, such as the desire to eavesdrop on a closed world?"

Tova: "I don't know that eavesdropping is so base. All of our lives are closed to some degree. The act of reading is a form of eavesdropping on other people's lives."

Luke: "Did you consider when you were writing that you would be feeding a wanted belief among many of your readers that the ultra-Orthodox are crooked and hypocritical and lacking any competing claim to the truth?"

Tova: "No. I might be feeding the notion that they are also human."

Luke: "Have you read Ruchama King?"

Tova: "I blurbed her novel [Seven Blessings]. I think it has many nice things about it. I would praise her for the intimacy of her moments, her details, and the delicacy of her language."

Luke: "Eve Grubin?"

Tova: "I'm friendly with Eve Grubin as is Wendy Shalit. I haven't read Eve's book but will once it is published. I think she's a nice person. I think it's odd to have someone in The Times Book Review when their book hasn't been published. I think Eve was praised for becoming Orthodoxy, not for her poetry."

Luke: "Allegra Goodman?"

Tova: "I love her work. I love Kaaterskill Falls. Paradise Park is a riot. I would contest [Wendy's] characterization of Allegra as a 'sympathetic outsider.' It doesn't do her work justice. And it isn't so sympathetic. If you talked to people from the community that Kaaterskill Falls is based on, I don't think they would agree with Shalit that it was so sympathetic. And I don't mean that as a charge against Allegra. I mean it as a compliment. I think her work is funny, sharp, and pointed."

Luke: "I find it hard to believe that Allegra is an outsider to Orthodox Judaism."

Tova: "It depends on your definitions."

Luke: "I am sure Allegra has spent time in Orthodox Judaism."

Tova: "The whole notion of a classification system [of outsider/insider] is highly offensive. Who's deciding which of us is in or out? I would argue that Nathan Englander is an insider too. Wendy doesn't take into account that there are many ways to be insiders. When you grow up in a world, you know a world. Nathan knows this world deeply and fully. Just because he doesn't believe in it now doesn't remove that. It's a matter of knowing his stuff whether he practices it or not."

Luke: "Is it unbelievable to think that an Orthodox rabbi would write a dispensation for a man to see a prostitute?"

That is the key story in Englander's collection of short stories and also occurs at the beginning of the Israeli film The Holy Land.

Tova: "It's a Talmudic story. I bet that Wendy, with all her claims to be an insider, did not know that it's a Talmudic story. That's what is so disturbing about the way his work is treated [by Wendy].

"I think the single most outrageous line in the piece was: 'Englander's sketches were fictional, but did most people realize this?' Well, they're called fiction. It's not about whether it does happen in life. It's a story."

Luke: "Tova Reich?"

Tova: "I haven't read her. I know her brother is an Orthodox rabbi."

Luke: "If so, then it is hard to believe she's an outsider to Orthodox Judaism."

Tova: "Apparently one becomes an insider by feeling the way Wendy does about the world. By her logic, if you know the world, you must love it. And if you don't love it, you don't know it.

"Pearl Abraham is not mentioned in the piece because she disproves the thesis. Pearl Abraham grew up in the ultra-Orthodox community. The Romance Reader is about her rejection of that world. She certainly knows the world."

Luke: "Did you read Chaim Potok's novels?"

Tova: "I did growing up. I saw the movie The Chosen and read it. My Name is Asher Lev. Davita's Harp."

Luke: "I read all of Chaim Potok's novels when I was a kid and reread them during my conversion to Judaism. Now I gorge on Jewish fiction. I'm struck the difference in the intellectual caliber of the characters between Potok's characters who are obsessed with intellectual questions such as Biblical Criticism and other questions about texts, and the lack of that contemporary Jewish fiction."

Tova: "I disagree with that. For Baruch, it's a text-based struggle. In Orthodox Judaism, sociological details are not separate from theological ones. Halacha [Jewish law] is so minute. That characterizes that world. In the discussion of domestic details, there are large theological questions. It's the way ideology is lived through sociology. In a world where clothing and every gesture matter so much, The difference between seamed stockings and unseamed stockings can speak volumes about who a person is as an Orthodox woman."

Luke: "To me the primary question one would ask in determining whether or not to lead an Orthodox life is does one truly believe that God gave the Torah. That question does not seem to be present."

Tova: "Because it is taken for granted. It is taken as a given. If they are arguing about putting dish racks in a sink to make it kosher, God is implicit in that conversation."

Luke: "Do you believe in God?"

Tova: "Yes."

Luke: "Do you believe God gave the Torah?"

Tova: "I do. I think it's more complicated… I don't believe in the fundamentalist notion that he wrote it down and handed it off but I believe in an evolving dynamic chain of tradition. It has formed my life. It is complicated. I would guess that I don't believe in it in the same terms that Wendy Shalit does."

Luke: "How about in the terms that Maimonidies formulates in his eighth of thirteen required beliefs [the Jewish prayer Yigdal, which translated into English reads: 'I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.']"

Tova: "Remind me."

Luke: "That the Torah is divine. That every word of it is divine. And if a person was to say that a single word in the Torah is not divine, that that is outside permitted belief."

Tova: "I don't know. That's a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don't have to know all the answers. I don't know. It's a good question."

Luke: "This was a question that obsessed the characters of Chaim Potok novels and it obsesses me."

Tova: "What's interesting about Orthodoxy is does the term mean sameness of belief? There's little sameness of belief in Orthodoxy. There are basic tenets. I don't think one could articulate an Orthodox theology that would apply across the board. It's complicated and I live with that complication every day."

Luke: "Orthoprax means correct practice. Orthodox means correct belief. Sorry to hone in on this, but would it be more accurate to call you Orthoprax than Orthodox?"

Tova pauses: "I don't even know where to begin. No, I have no idea. I don't know what those words mean. Is someone who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue and drives there [on Shabbat and festivals], is he Orthodox? I don't know. Is one who davens three times a day but eats out [in non-kosher restaurants], is he Orthodox? I don't do that, before that gets tagged on to me, but I don't know. I don't know what these terms mean. I don't really think about them. I don't know that there's a need to define in that way.

"I am Modern Orthodox. I am liberal Orthodox. I am feminist Orthodox. But what does that have to do with my right to write fiction? The whole question of where writers are coming from is problematic and the least interesting way of looking at novels. I don't know what my own personal beliefs have to do with it. Is it a credential test?

"People ask [a prominent Jewish author] if he believes in God. They want a yes or no answer. He thinks it's not a yes-or-no answer but a discussion. To live in the Orthodox world is to be engaged in these questions and discussions and to wrestle with them and to be part of a conversation. It's not to have all the answers. I just don't believe that anyone does."

Luke: "Are you familiar with Louis Jacobs?"

Tova: "Vaguely."

Luke: "He was on the way to becoming Chief Rabbi of England in the early 1960s. They found a book he wrote in 1957 called We Have Reason To Believe where he accepted what is the universally held view in academic study of sacred text that the Torah is composed of different strands composed in different centuries and woven together over centuries. Because of that, he was thrown out of Orthodox Judaism.

"I bring that up because with your vast secular education, I am sure you are familiar with literary criticism and the asking of three basic questions: When was something written? Who wrote it? For what purpose was it written? If you apply those three basic questions to sacred text, you would come up with an answer completely different from that of traditional Judaism to its sacred texts. Do you wrestle with this?"

Tova, pauses: "Sometimes, but not to where I need to have the answer, to resolve it in my head. I think the same applies to issues of Orthodoxy and science."

Luke: "Is Jewish Orthodoxy compatible with Modernity?"

Tova: "Yes."

Luke: "So one can be authentically Orthodox and authentically Modern?"

Tova: "That's what the Modern Orthodox movement is about. Modern Orthodoxy was founded on the principle that one doesn't live in separate worlds where we do our Orthodox thing and then we do our Modern thing. We integrate them."

Luke: "Do you think it is true?"

Tova: "Do I think that it is true?"

Luke: "Ontologically, ultimately? That you can be authentically Modern and authentically Orthodox and integrated?"

Tova: "I do."

Luke: "I'm sure that much of what you learned at Columbia ran completely counter to your Orthodox Judaism?"

Tova: "I don't know. It didn't."

Luke: "Did you ever take a class in Bible?"

Tova: "I didn't. I regret that.

"I think these are interesting questions but they don't have to do with fiction, with my fiction.

"I think of Wendy Shalit's piece as a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check. What are your credentials for writing. As a writer, I don't pretend to have all the answers to the theological questions of Orthodoxy. I don't pretend it in my life and I don't pretend it in my fiction.

"I don't think that writing from a place of certainty makes for the best fiction.

"I can discuss with you my own doubts though I don't think that I need to. Orthodoxy is not always an easy package to hold together.

"I take issue with her argument that because characters struggle with communal norms and divine truths they are outsiders. I think she wants to do this to writers and to our characters. It is the second one that pisses me off more."

After the interview, I exchanged some emails with Tova.

Eighty minutes after the conclusion of our interview, Tova wrote me:

I must tell you as well, in hindsight, that I have an isssue with many of your questions. Upon thinking about it, I wondered whether questions such as whether I believe in the one of maimonides 13 principles of faith are intended for discussion and thought, or to determine whether I'm really the insider I claim to be. if the former, then I truly am interested in the conversation and the ongoing exploration. But if its the latter, then I'd make the same objection as I make to her piece. Must we believe in the 3rd principle of faith, for example, to write legitimately about the ortjodox world. What if someone only believed in numbers 1-11? Does that disqualify them? And since its so on point, I'd love to quote The Ghost Writer, which I mentioned: "Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what qualifies you to write about Judaism for national magazines?" I'm feeling a little too much of Judge Wapter in the air.

I replied:

That was my favorite section of the Ghostwriter. I do not believe that you need to believe in anything to write on Orthodox Judaism or any topic. My questions on your beliefs were to find out where you are coming from. I realize this is a very sensitive area for many people… I had a fascinating discussion along a similar line with Alana Newhouse…in my book on Jewish journalism.

Later, I emailed Tova: "Why have you stayed Orthodox?"

Tova wrote back: "I've stayed Orthodox because it's who I am, it's my childhood and its my family, my parents and my children, and it's part of all my memories. I'm Orthodox because I love ritual, because I love the texts, love the idea of a chain of ideas passed down from generation to generation, each one adding one more link. Because I love Shabbos, love that the chaos of my everyday life quiets down for those hours. Because sometimes when I least expect it, a cantorial tune, a word of a prayer will catch me off guard and move me, make me feel a longing for something deeper, fuller, higher. I've stayed Orthodox even though so many things about it anger me, so many things feel problematic and troubling and unresolvable. And I stay because the Orthodox world is so much wider than some people believe, because one can doubt and wrestle and observe and believe and that is all part of this tradition."

Orthodox Jews In Fiction

Letters to The New York Times Book Review take up a page of the Sunday 2/27/05 section:

In her essay ''The Observant Reader'' (Jan. 30), Wendy Shalit chastises several writers — myself included — for misrepresenting Orthodox Judaism and purporting to be insiders. But apparently the only true experience of Orthodoxy is her own — and any portrayal that doesn't confirm her newfound personal fulfillment is inauthentic. Shalit misrepresents my depiction of Orthodox Judaism, a world I know and live in every day. Evidently, in her divine scale of justice, one character's unhealthy obsession with bridal magazines and another character's forbidden hug add up to ''contemptible.''

The true sin seems to be portraying Orthodox Jews with any human failings, with having moments when they do not conform to the dictates of Jewish law. Shalit is not an observant reader but an ideological one. She's looking for public relations documents, kosher books by ''insiders' insiders'' that will ''convert'' even us ''outsider insiders.'' I didn't realize that despite spending my life as an Orthodox Jew, I'm in need of conversion. But then, I also didn't realize that novels were in the business of proselytizing.

TOVA MIRVIS
Newton, Mass.

• To the Editor:

I do not know if Wendy Shalit's inability to read my novel as a work of fiction stems from her anxiety about Orthodox stereotypes or from a simple failure of imagination, but it is necessary to point out an inaccuracy in her representation of my views in my novel ''Joy Comes in the Morning.'' Shalit writes that ''Rosen dismisses modern Orthodox men as 'macho sissies' and depicts 'pencilnecked' Orthodox boys.'' I do not dismiss Orthodox men as anything. Deborah, a character in my novel who has had an affair with an Orthodox man about whom she is still conflicted, entertains the ''macho sissies'' thought (along with many other, often contradictory thoughts). Lev, a young man awkwardly entering into a relationship with Deborah, who is a Reform rabbi, has an anxious association with thin yeshiva boys as he himself is about to embark on a session of Talmud study. The boundaries of Judaism are fluid for these characters, as they are in real life. Judaism, to its glory, has so far managed to avoid breaking down into ''denominations,'' but Shalit writes as if no complex web exists linking secular and observant, ancient and modern.

In her treatment of other Jewish writers, Shalit gathers up a few biographical scraps to determine whether these writers are ''outsiders'' or ''insiders'' — as if the authority of a literary work were a matter of birthright and not imaginative power. This is a sad diversion from all the truly interesting questions there are to be raised about religion and the imagination, about traditional Judaism and works of new creation, about honest exploration and communal anxiety. One wonders what Shalit would make of the story about the cunning ancestor who robs his brother and cheats his father — but then the Bible doesn't specify whether Jacob is Reform, Conservative, Orthodox or haredi.

Shalit's attack on the way contemporary Jewish novelists do — or do not — write about the haredi community put me in mind of Oscar Wilde's observation that the 19th-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. Shalit's dislike seems to be for imaginative fiction itself — her prerogative, of course, but a strange attribute for someone writing seriously about it.

JONATHAN ROSEN
New York

The girl will not sleep.

It is past ten in Berkeley, and Adam Mansbach (b. 1976) has read the books, sung the songs, refilled the cup of water, and lain down on the floor beside the small bed, and risen, and lain down again. His daughter Vivien is two. She watches him from the pillow with the calm of someone who has all night and knows it. He backs out of the room. He sits at his desk in the dark of the next room and listens. Nothing yet. He opens his laptop and types a joke to his friends, a title for a book no house will print, the book every tired parent wants and no store can stock: Go the Fuck to Sleep.

The friends write back. They want the book. They have the same child in the same bed across the country, and the joke lands on all of them at once. So he writes it, a lullaby in the old cadence, the soft animal images of the nursery, the cats and the lambs and the wind in the trees, and then the line that breaks each verse like a man at the end of his patience. He sends it to Johnny Temple at Akashic Books in Brooklyn, a small house that prints crime novels and political tracts and has never sold a children’s book to anyone. Temple takes it.

Months before the print run, a galley leaks. Someone scans the pages, or forwards the file, and the book moves the way a joke moves, by email, parent to parent, the subject line a confession. By spring of 2011 the thing that does not yet exist as an object sits at number one on Amazon. When the hardcover arrives on June 14, 2011, it goes to the top of The New York Times list and stays. It sells more than three million copies and travels into more than forty languages. Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948) reads the audiobook in a low and weary growl, a man addressing a child and a cosmos at the same time, and the recording becomes its own event, played at parties, quoted in offices, a small national release valve.

Mansbach is thirty-four that night at the desk. He has already lived a full writing life that almost no one in the bookstore lines knows about.

He grows up in Newton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, in a secular Jewish home that runs on words. His father edits. His mother reports. The house holds the assumption that language is work a person does for a living and also the medium in which a family argues, jokes, and remembers. He goes to Columbia and graduates from the college in 1998, then takes a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Arts in 2000. In New York he walks into two cultures at once, the literary world uptown and the hip-hop world all around it, and he refuses to choose. He founds and edits Elementary, a journal of hip-hop criticism, at a moment when the academy has not yet decided the music deserves footnotes. He writes for The Source during the magazine’s years of reach, and he treats rappers as he treats novelists, as makers of form.

His first novel, Shackling Water (2003), follows a young jazz saxophonist through addiction and ambition and the long argument between jazz and the music that has come to replace it. The book finds a small readership. It sets the terms he keeps for twenty years. Music stands in his work for identity, for the thing a man inherits and then has to make his own or lose.

The breakthrough comes with Angry Black White Boy (2005). He takes the bones of George Schuyler’s (1895–1977) satire Black No More (1931) and builds a comedy of American racial bad faith. A White suburban kid wants so much to be Black that he becomes a public figure, an apostle of racial guilt, and the wanting exposes everyone it touches, the kid most of all. Universities put the novel on syllabi. A stage adaptation wins prizes in 2008. The book earns the cult status that follows work people feel they discovered.

He turns to his own inheritance in The End of the Jews (2008). The novel moves across generations of one gifted and wounded American Jewish family and asks what passes down and what breaks. Assimilation, grief, memory, the burden of talent, the comedy of intellect under pressure. He wins the California Book Award for fiction. He draws Jewish identity not from the synagogue but from history and family and humor and a restlessness of mind, the version of Jewishness a secular Boston childhood produces, carried in argument and joke rather than law.

He teaches while he writes. From 2009 to 2011 he holds the New Voices chair in fiction at Rutgers. He teaches later in the low-residency program at San Francisco State. He takes a fellowship at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2012 and another at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2013. In lectures he keeps returning to the seam between the high literary tradition and the music of the street, and he keeps insisting there is no seam, that the division is a failure of attention.

Then the lullaby. The success of Go the Fuck to Sleep might have ended a serious writer, or freed him to stop. It does neither. He writes the sequels, You Have to Fucking Eat, Fuck, Now There Are Two of You, and Go the Fuck to College (2026), the last read on audio by Ted Danson (b. 1947). He keeps the franchise alive across a decade with anniversary editions and child-safe versions. He also goes back to the novel.

Rage Is Back (2013) gives New York’s graffiti writers an epic, a legendary artist and the son who inherits the spray can and the grudge. The comedy runs hot and the city changes underneath the family, and NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle name the book among the year’s best. The same year he publishes The Dead Run, a thriller that pulls Mexican folklore and border politics through horror and crime, and follows it with The Devil’s Bag Man (2015). He writes for children too. With the comedian Craig Robinson (b. 1971) he builds the Jake the Fake series, a Scholastic main selection that takes the 2021 Grand Canyon Readers Award. With Alan Zweibel (b. 1950) he writes Benjamin Franklin: Huge Pain in My Ass. With Zweibel and Dave Barry (b. 1947) he writes A Field Guide to the Jewish People and For This We Left Egypt?, a Thurber Prize finalist, both of them affectionate raids on Jewish custom that mock the Jews and the gentiles who watch them in equal measure.

He writes for the screen. In 2016 he co-writes Barry, a portrait of Barack Obama (b. 1961) as a young man at Columbia, navigating a campus and a country that cannot decide what to make of him. Netflix releases it. The Independent Spirit Awards and the NAACP Image Awards nominate the script. He writes political satire on demand. In the 2012 election he writes “Wake the Fuck Up,” again in Jackson’s voice, and in the pandemic spring of 2020 he writes “Stay the Fuck at Home,” and the videos move the way the first book moved, fast and far, and they bring him Reed and Webby and Gold Pollie awards.

Look at the shape of it from outside and a critic might call it scattered. A man cannot be the bestselling humorist in America and a serious novelist and a screenwriter and a hip-hop scholar and a children’s author and keep his name attached to any one thing. The market wants a brand. Mansbach gives it a refusal. He treats the comic and the literary as one practice, and he treats success as a tool rather than a destination, and the through-line holds across every form. He writes about people who build a self out of borrowed culture, and he uses laughter to walk up to the things that frighten him.

Then the thing he cannot laugh at.

His younger brother David takes his own life. For years Mansbach circles the loss and finds no form for it. The comedy will not hold it. The novel will not hold it. He has spent a writing life moving between registers at will, and now the subject sits in front of him and refuses every register he owns. He sits with it. He waits. The form that comes is verse.

I Had a Brother Once (2021) is a book-length poem about David’s death and the years after, about survivor’s guilt and the family’s silence and the way memory keeps a dead man present and unreachable at once. He has called it the most personal writing he has done. The book breaks from everything the public knows him for. There is no joke in it. The critics praise the honesty and the form, and readers who came for the lullaby find a man counting the cost of being the brother left alive.

He returns to the comic key, changed, with The Golem of Brooklyn (2023). He takes the old Prague legend, the clay man a rabbi builds to defend the Jews, and sets it loose in contemporary America. The golem becomes a screen for modern Jewish fear and modern Jewish nerve, a figure for trauma carried forward and for the responsibility a community owes itself. The Yiddish folklore is not a museum piece in his hands. It works. It speaks to the present, which is what he has wanted his whole writing life, for the inheritance to remain alive enough to argue with.

Across more than two decades he resists the category every gatekeeper offers him. His fiction draws on hip-hop, on Jewish thought, on the history of cities, on satire, on the plain machinery of realism, and he sees no contradiction in the mix. He writes about graffiti writers and golems and race hustlers and exhausted parents and a dead brother, and the comic energy and the moral weight ride together in the same sentence. He moves between the prize jury and the bestseller list and gives up neither audience. He builds identities for his characters out of the cultures they are handed, and he uses comedy to face grief and prejudice and the contradictions of the country, which is the work he set himself at the desk in Berkeley, on the night the girl would not sleep, when he wrote a joke and found a vocation hiding inside it.

Adam Mansbach: What the Joke Is For

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) holds that a man builds a hero system to outrun two terrors at once. The first is the body that ends. The second is the life that does not count, the years that close over without a wake. The hero system hands a man a short list of sacred values and promises that if he earns them he joins something the grave cannot reach. Watch what a man treats as sacred and you read the shape of his fear.

Adam Mansbach builds his out of the joke.

A booth in 2011. The engineer rides the levels behind glass. Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948) stands at the mic with a paperback in one hand, reading a lullaby. The cadence is the old nursery cadence, the cats and the lambs, the wind soft in the trees, and then at the close of each verse the line drops like a man at the end of his rope and tells the child to go the fuck to sleep. Jackson reads it low. He does not push. He gives the profanity the same tenderness he gives the lambs, and the room behind the glass loses its composure, the engineer’s shoulders going, the publicist with a hand over her mouth. Somewhere in the room Mansbach watches the thing he wrote at a desk in Berkeley travel out past anything he planned for it. The book reaches number one before it exists as an object. It sells past three million. It crosses forty languages. A joke he posted to friends becomes a rite that exhausted parents perform on each other, the file forwarded at midnight, the confession that the love and the rage live in the same body.

Under the laugh sits the first terror, and the joke is how Mansbach walks up to it. He has said the comedy lets him approach what he cannot face head on. The lullaby is about a father at the limit of his patience, and patience at the limit is a small rehearsal of the larger thing, the night that will not end, the child who outlives the parent or does not. The joke gets him to the edge and lets him look.

Then the second terror, which for this man takes a private shape. He does not fear obscurity. He fears the file. He fears being named once and shelved, the bestselling humorist, the serious novelist, the hip-hop guy, the screenwriter, each label a small coffin sized to one body. A man whose whole self is movement reads fixity as death. So he keeps moving. He writes the franchise and the literary novel and the children’s series and the political video and the verse memoir, and he treats every category that reaches for him as a thing to slip. The refusal looks like ambition from outside. From inside it is the second terror handled the only way he knows, by never holding still long enough to be buried alive.

The hero system works until it meets the death it cannot joke about.

His younger brother David takes his own life. Mansbach has spent a writing life moving between registers at will, and now the subject sits in front of him and turns every register he owns to ash. The joke walks him to many edges and not to this one. He tries the novel. The novel will not hold it. He tries the comic key that has carried everything else and the key does not fit the lock. He sits with the silence for years. This is the subtraction the hero system exacts. The fluency that frees him from every category also leaves him without a native register for grief, because grief does not move and he has built a self out of movement. The man who can say anything cannot say this.

The form arrives late and from outside his repertoire. I Had a Brother Once (2021) is a book-length poem, and there is no joke in it. He has called it the most personal work of his life. He has said poetry was the only form that would carry the weight. Read through Becker, the memoir is the hero system breaking and setting the bone wrong on purpose, admitting the one death the joke could not approach and finding a register that does not flee. He keeps the comic key after this. He keeps it changed.

Now the sacred values themselves, and the trouble Becker leaves us with. The same word sits at the center of many hero systems and means a different thing in each. A man’s sacred terms are not shared property. They are local currency, and they spend only inside the system that mints them.

Take the joke, which Mansbach treats as the vehicle that gets him near the unbearable. The word does not hold still across hero systems either.

The trauma surgeon uses the joke at two in the morning over an open chest. “You crack wise so your hands don’t crack,” she says. For her the joke is ballast, the thing that keeps the instrument steady. It is function, not approach. She does not want it to bring her closer to the thing. She wants it to hold the thing far enough away that the work continues.

The Hasidic rebbe tells a story that lands as a laugh and turns, on the second beat, into law. “The laugh is the spoonful of honey,” he says. “The child swallows the medicine because of the honey.” For him the joke is a vessel that carries transmission past a man’s defenses. The honey serves the medicine. Strip the medicine and the honey is waste.

The touring comic in the black tee under the brick wall has no medicine and wants none. “The laugh is the whole religion,” he says. “You get the laugh, you exist. You don’t, you’re dead up there.” For him the joke is not a road to anything. It is the cathedral and the altar and the proof of the soul, the immortality itself, and a man who points past the laugh to some deeper purpose has misunderstood the only purpose there is.

Four men, four sacred jokes, and no two of them mean the same word. Mansbach approaches the grave with his. The surgeon holds the grave off with hers. The rebbe smuggles the law in his. The comic worships at his. The joke is local currency.

Take movement, which Mansbach holds sacred above the rest, the freedom to cross from the lullaby to the literary novel to the verse memoir without asking permission at the border.

The career Marine officer hears this as the name of the enemy. “You hold the line,” he says. “The man who moves is the man who breaks.” His hero is the one who does not shift under fire, whose fixity is the whole virtue, who dies in his position rather than yield it. What Mansbach calls freedom the officer calls collapse.

The Benedictine takes a vow against it. Stability is his word, stabilitas, the promise to enter one house and die in it, to stay when staying is hard. His Rule names the wandering monk a gyrovague and counts him the lowest sort, a man who drifts house to house and serves his own appetite. Mansbach is the gyrovague raised to a virtue. The monk would pray for him.

The museum conservator holds movement sacred only as its opposite. “You leave no trace of yourself on the work,” she says. Her heroism is invisibility. She cleans the varnish and matches the loss and signs nothing, and the highest praise is that no one can find her hand. Mansbach signs everything and the signature is the point. To the conservator that is vandalism with a byline.

Take inheritance, the living past Mansbach argues with, the golem he wakes up in Brooklyn and walks through the present.

The Torah scribe copies letter for letter. “One wrong letter and the scroll is dead,” he says, and he means it without metaphor, the scroll is pasul, unfit, buried. For him inheritance is exactitude and zero invention. The hero changes nothing. Mansbach’s golem, reimagined and made to argue with the news, is to the scribe a beautiful corpse.

The startup founder calls inheritance technical debt. “The old code is a tax you pay until you kill it,” he says. The past exists to be deprecated. You inherit a system to disrupt it, and the man who reveres what came before has confused sentiment with strategy. Mansbach reveres the old forms and reanimates them. The founder buries them and ships.

The griot carries inheritance in his body, the genealogy of the line, the names of the dead kings in order. “I change nothing and I keep everyone alive by saying them,” he says. The voice is the archive. To improvise the lineage is to lose the dead. Mansbach treats inheritance as raw material to remake. The griot treats it as a charge he holds in trust, and the trust forbids the very freedom Mansbach calls sacred.

So Becker leaves us here. Mansbach’s sacred values are real and they organize a life, and they buy nothing outside the system that issues them. To the surgeon his joke is a luxury. To the monk his movement is a sin. To the scribe his inheritance is a desecration. The man is a hero inside his own walls and a cautionary tale in the next house over, and so is every one of us, which is the part Becker meant to leave under the skin.

Three coordinates fix him.

The first is where the joke points. Most comedy points at the audience and asks to be loved. Mansbach’s points at the grave and asks to be let near it. The lullaby is a father’s love and a father’s terror in one breath, and the franchise that made him rich is, read close, a long rehearsal for the night that does not end. The laugh is the honey on a darker spoon.

The second is the vow he never took. The monk swears stability and the soldier holds the line and the conservator erases her hand, and each buys a kind of peace by standing still. Mansbach buys his freedom by refusing the vow, and the price comes due once, at the desk, in the years when grief would not move and he had no register that could sit with a thing that stays. The man who can go anywhere found the one room he could not enter, and he had to build a new door to reach it.

The third is the place the joke cannot reach and what he made when he arrived. The hero system met its limit at his brother’s grave and did not pretend otherwise. He set down the honey. He wrote the poem. A lesser version of this man keeps cracking wise to the end and calls it courage. Mansbach let the system break, and the breaking is the most heroic thing in the record, because it is the one time he stopped moving long enough to be buried alive in the feeling, and lived, and wrote it down.

Adam Mansbach’s Social Set: The High Thing and the Low Thing

Adam Mansbach (b. 1976) sits at a table that does not usually set itself. On one side are the comedy professionals who descend from the writers’ room and the Borscht Belt, Alan Zweibel (b. 1950), the original Saturday Night Live writer who gave him the parody Haggadah, Dave Barry (b. 1947), the syndicated humorist who co-wrote it, and the voices who read his work aloud, Samuel L. Jackson (b. 1948), Larry David (b. 1947), Bryan Cranston (b. 1956), Ted Danson (b. 1947). On a second side are the people of nineteen-nineties hip-hop who took the music as an art worth a footnote, the scholar Tricia Rose (b. 1962), whose NYU seminar he audited, the graffiti writer Alan Ket, the Antibalas founder Martín Perna, the record diggers Eugene Cho and Eli Epstein and Chiwale Shannon, the rapper Common (b. 1972), the rapper and organizer Killer Mike (b. 1975), the actor and rapper Daveed Diggs (b. 1982). On a third side are the Bay Area progressives of comment and comedy, W. Kamau Bell (b. 1973), Sarah Silverman (b. 1970), Sarah Cooper (b. 1977), Lewis Black (b. 1948), Andy Samberg (b. 1978). On a fourth are the collaborators of the page, the comedian Craig Robinson (b. 1971) and the cartoonist Keith Knight (b. 1966) on the children’s books, the illustrator Ricardo Cortés on the lullaby, the playwright Danny Hoch (b. 1970) and the comedian DL Hughley (b. 1963) on the screen. Behind them stand the gatekeepers and the houses, Johnny Temple at Akashic Books who took the joke no one else would print, the editors at The New Yorker and The Believer, the producers at This American Life and The Moth, and the political shop Colehouse Walker, where Mansbach writes ads for the Biden-Harris campaign and the New Georgia Project. He roadied as a kid for the drummer Elvin Jones (1927–2004). The whole set runs coastal, educated, left of center, secular or culturally Jewish, and bicoastal between New York and the Bay and Los Angeles.

What holds people this different at one table is a single conviction. They believe the wall between high culture and low culture is a fraud, and they treat the crossing of it as the proof of a serious person. The novelist who tops the bestseller list, the rapper who reads the academy, the comic who writes the campaign ad, the scholar who loves the mixtape, each one earns standing by refusing the border the gatekeepers drew. They value craft and they value reach, and the rare thing they prize above either is the man who has both at once. They value wit as the table’s hard currency, the fast line, the turned phrase, the joke that lands and then turns serious on the second beat. They hold a baseline politics, anti-racist, progressive, suspicious of propriety as a cover for power, and they treat profanity as a kind of honesty and decorum as a kind of lie. They love the cosign across a line, the White Jewish novelist with standing in a Black art form, the comedian trusted by the literary jury. They fear two things above the rest, irrelevance and phoniness, and a long career in this set is a long effort to stay loved by the crowd without losing the respect of the room.

Their hero system follows from that. The life that counts here is the life that reaches millions and keeps its craft, that does good with its platform and never goes precious. Jackson reading the lullaby in his weary growl is the set’s idea of heaven, the high gift and the mass audience folded into one performance. Mansbach writes a get-out-the-vote video and it moves voters, writes a pandemic public-service parody and Jackson reads it on Jimmy Kimmel, and the set counts this as the artist using his gift for the side of the good. The immortality they chase is cultural, the work taught in a hundred schools and quoted at a thousand midnight bedsides, the joke that outlives the joker. To matter to the culture and to the cause at the same time, that is the project. The man who reaches no one has wasted his gift. The man who reaches everyone and stands for nothing has sold it. The hero threads both.

The status games are where the set shows its real shape. Standing comes first from the double credential, the bestseller list and the prize together, and the harder trick of turning one into the other, which is the trick Mansbach has run for twenty years. It comes from the cosign, and the cosign is policed. Samuel L. Jackson reading your book, Killer Mike in your campaign video, Common in your film, these are not favors, they are transfers of standing from a figure the set reads as more authentic or more arrived. It comes from the room, from being the funniest man at the table, because wit here is the price of a seat and the slow man loses caste no matter his sales. It comes from the venue, the New Yorker byline, the Believer essay, the Moth stage, the Sundance fellowship, each a stamp the set recognizes. It comes from political use, the ad that worked, the Reed Award, the Gold Pollie. And it comes, more than the set likes to say aloud, from the race line and the right to stand on the far side of it. A White man who has earned a hearing in hip-hop holds a particular and fragile standing, and the set watches who claims that standing and how. Mansbach built his first novel, Angry Black White Boy (2005), out of that exact anxiety, the White kid who wants to be Black and exposes everyone by wanting it, and the set rewarded the book because it named the game the set itself plays.

Their normative claims come fast and firm. The artist should use his platform for justice. Profanity and irreverence tell the truth, and the institutions that frown on them deserve the mockery. Racism is the central American sin and fighting it is not optional. Humor that punches up is good and humor that punches down is bad, and the set enforces that rule with care. The personal should be told straight, grief and family and failure brought into the light rather than hidden, and the set holds Mansbach’s verse memoir about his brother’s suicide, I Had a Brother Once (2021), as a high moral act for that reason, the man saying the worst true thing instead of joking past it.

Their essentialist claims sit underneath the normative ones and argue with them. The set’s stated creed is that race is a performance and identity a construction, the lesson of Mansbach’s own first novel. The set’s working practice rewards the opposite. Authenticity here is treated as a real property a man has or lacks, a thing in his blood and his ear and his block, and the cosign exists because the set believes some people carry the real connection and some only borrow it. They hold that talent is real and that the in-group can tell good art from hack on sight. They hold that the comic sensibility is a form of intelligence, not a knack. They hold, when pressed, that certain people have a truer claim on certain art forms, which is the claim their official anti-essentialism denies. The set preaches that race is made and lives as if authenticity is born, and Mansbach’s whole position, the Newton Jew with a hearing in the culture, sits on that fault line and pays rent to both sides.

The moral grammar runs on solidarity and complicity. Good means standing with the marginalized, spending your power on them, telling the truth, staying funny, refusing to take yourself too seriously. Bad means punching down, selling out, going silent when you might speak, hoarding the credit, or turning precious. The cardinal sins are phoniness, hypocrisy, and racism, and the set can forgive a weak book faster than it forgives a phony one. Grace arrives as the laugh and the cosign and the shared byline, the writers’-room habit of crediting the collaborator, Zweibel and Barry on the cover, Robinson and Knight on the cover, the refusal to claim the whole win alone. Confession arrives as the personal essay and the memoir, the painful true thing told in public, which the set reads as the highest proof of seriousness. A man redeems himself by being good, being real, and being funny, and he falls by being exposed as fake or caught punching down.

The contradiction. The anti-elitism gets performed from the Columbia MFA and the New Yorker and the Netflix deal. The irreverence stops at the edge of the set’s own politics, where you may mock anyone except your own side. The rule against punching down gets written and enforced by people standing at the top of the cultural ladder. And the celebration of crossing the race line runs alongside an anxious watch over who may cross it. None of this makes the set cynical. It makes the set human, a group of gifted people who believe their taste is a conscience and who have built a world where being loved by the crowd and respected by the room and useful to the cause feel like the same virtue. Mansbach is the set’s representative man because he has spent a career proving the three can be one, and his brother’s grave is the place where that proof ran out and he had to tell the truth without the joke.

Adam Mansbach’s Voice: The Sampler’s Ear

Adam Mansbach came up as an MC and a DJ before he came up as a novelist, and the order shows in every sentence. He builds prose the way a producer builds a track. He takes a high phrase and a low phrase, a line of Columbia diction and a line off the corner, and he lays them over the same beat until they sound like one thing. He has named the method himself. He calls his writing a kind of sampling, a borrowing of many styles to make his own beat. The voice is the crossing.

Hear the diction first, because the diction is where the crossing happens fastest. Open Angry Black White Boy (2005) and the hero “fisted the wheel and swung his new yellow cab downtown,” and within a breath the prose names the venerable voice on the radio and the huge nonexistent things the boy loves, truth and revolution and the rest. The sentence holds a literary register and a street register at once and refuses to rank them. Mansbach reaches for the elevated word and the obscene word in the same clause, and the profanity is not there for shock. It is there for percussion. He sets it on the downbeat. The lullaby that made him famous works on the same principle, the soft nursery cadence built verse after verse and then the hard word dropped at the turn, the way a producer drops the bass after eight bars. He spends proper nouns like a man proving membership, the radio host, the station, the station’s tagline, each name a small credential laid down for readers who can read it, and a texture for the ones who cannot.

The syntax runs long and then snaps. He favors the roving sentence that gathers clauses and detours and cultural asides and then lands a joke or a reversal at the end, and critics have heard the hip-hop in it without always naming the source. One called the prose jazzy and penetrating and provocative. One said he writes like firecrackers. One heard buoyant rhythm under dark material. The rhythm is the engine. Internal rhyme surfaces in the heated passages, the break and the return, a jittery forward push that a reader feels before he parses it. The architecture borrows on purpose too. The race novel divides into sections that answer Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the homage worn on the sleeve, the sample cleared and credited. Mansbach treats the American canon the way he treats a crate of records, as material to flip.

The range is the real signature, and the memoir is the proof. A man can write hot and call it a voice when hot is all he has. Mansbach writes hot in the novels and clean in the essays and mock-solemn in the parodies and then, once, he writes cold. I Had a Brother Once (2021) sets down every device. The maximalism goes. The wordplay goes. He recounts his brother David’s suicide in long plain stanzas of free verse, anger and sorrow and confusion carried in flat declarative lines, and the flatness is the point. Listen to how he speaks about David and you hear the same instinct, the brother three years younger, the scientist in a family of word people, the man who wore shorts through the Boston winter and answered a feeling with a list of facts. Mansbach reports it. He does not perform it. The man whose gift is flash discovers that flash cannot carry the one thing, and he strips to the studs. The voice has a floor, and he found it once, and the finding is the most disciplined writing in the body of work.

The rhetoric serves a single conviction, that the joke can do moral work. He has said the conversation about race had stalled, that White people had stopped coming to the table, and that he built his satire to jumpstart the talk by force of humor and absurdity. Satire is his main instrument, and a reviewer caught the rule of it, that he is an equal-opportunity mocker, the blade swung at every side including his own. The comedy is a door. He gets a reader laughing so the reader walks in, and then he shuts the door and shows him the room. Direct address carries the load. The lullaby speaks to the child while the parent listens in. The campaign videos speak to the voter. The address presumes a shared exhaustion or a shared anger and folds the audience into it before the argument starts, so that agreement feels like recognition rather than persuasion. Under the laughter sits a plain moral claim, the one he states without a joke, that anger is a form of attention and that the man who feels none has stopped paying it.

His manner, the self he puts on the page and the stage, is fast and profane and learned and unwilling to be caught taking itself too seriously. He will name a genre and wave it off in the same sentence, a postmodern race novel if you will, the term offered and then undercut. He wears the reading lightly. The record-collector’s precision is in him, the exact years, the good labels, the bad sign of a string section, the connoisseur’s fluency carried as ordinary talk. He shares credit by habit, the co-authors on the cover, the collaborators named, the producer’s ethic that a track is a room full of people. He teaches with the same clarity, the instinct to meet a writer at the theory of his own project and improve that rather than replace it. The bearing is generous and quick and a little armored by wit, a man who has learned that the joke gets him through the door of every room, the literary jury and the hip-hop cipher and the synagogue and the campaign, and who treats the moving between those rooms as the natural condition rather than a trick.

The cost is the showiness, and the better critics named it early, the youthful flash, the rhyming runs that call attention to the hand that made them. The flash can tip into performance. The voice that crosses every line can sound, in its weaker passages, like a man crossing lines to be seen crossing them. He knows it. The clean expository Mansbach exists alongside the pyrotechnic one, the essayist who can lay out the birth of hip-hop in the Bronx in flat historical prose when the subject asks for it, which tells you the flash is a setting and not the only gear. And the cold Mansbach of the memoir is the answer to the charge, the writer who proved he could put the toys down when the subject would not survive them. The career reads as a long argument with his own facility, a man born with too much range learning, book by book, when to use all of it and when to use none.

December 1, 2008

I was sucked right in by Adam Mansbach‘s provocative new novel, "The End of the Jews."

The beginning of the book is good ol’ fashioned storytelling. It has the making of an epic, an up from poverty all-American novel about individual triumph through hard work.

Then the book takes a disconcerting turn. It’s no Triumph of the Will. It’s something much more true to life. It’s literature, not genre fiction. It’s an independent production, not a studio film.

I call Adam in San Francisco Monday morning. We talk for 90 minutes.

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Adam, the eldest of two kids: "I wanted to be a writer."

"It was always pretty clear to me. I was always making up stories, making people take dictation for me before I could write. I have writers in my family. Nobody seemed to think it was that strange. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I was surrounded by people who were like having phone calls every day with their parents, ‘Why don’t you go to law school?’ ‘What’s this bulls— you’re going to do?’"

"My grandmother (Felicia Lamport) was a poet. My grandfather (Ben Kaplan) was a judge but he seemed always to be writing. He was a law professor first. He was known as a pretty great legal writer. My father (Charles Mansbach) is a journalist. He works at the Boston Globe. My mother (Nancy Mansbach), when they met, was a reporter. Her brother is a sportswriter."

"My earliest trajectory as a writer was poetry and lyrics. I was pretty serious about hip hop. I was an MC. Probably the first thing my parents saw me doing circa junior high was writing a lot of rhymes and performing them and recording them. They were perplexed by that because hip hop was not something they were too familiar with. Nobody was in 1987 aside from those committed to it. They appreciated that I was doing something artistic… Hip hop was very political at the time and they were able to make those connections. My father, being a journalist, had a collection of sixties paperbacks on his shelf. I’d be listening to Public Enemy and they’d mention Bobby Seal or Eldridge Cleaver and those were books that were in my house. I was able to make those connections and my parents saw it happening.

"My grandmother’s poetry was analogous. Her s— was satirical and pointed and political and it rhymed. Her wordplay was fantastic. She had a weekly column that was syndicated in a number of newspapers called, ‘The Muse of the Week in Review.’ She’d take classical forms, rewrite them, remix them, about current events. She did a famous piece called ‘The Love Song of R. Millhouse Nixon.’ She took [T.S.] Elliott and turned it on its head. ‘Do I dare them to impeach?’

"In a funny way, my grandmother’s writing was very similar to hip hop. It was rhythmic, it was rhyming. My family was able to see what I was doing without freaking out too much."

"I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. It’s a close suburb to Boston. It’s pretty white, about 40% Jewish. The schools that I went to were fairly diverse, public schools that were part of the bussing program, which was Boston’s unilateral form of school integration. Boston’s a pretty segregated and racist city and it took about 20 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education to desegregate their schools and the way they did it was by bussing black kids from the inner city to suburban schools."

Luke: "Do you have a black accent?"

Adam: "You mean like Barack Obama or Colin Powell?"

Luke: "Umm, I don’t know how to say it. I’m sure there are right and wrong ways how to say it. Has anyone ever? I guess the polite term is urban. Has anyone ever said that to you? Maybe I’m totally out in left field."

Adam: "Yeah, every time I do any kind of public event, to a mostly white or Jewish audience, somebody asks me some kinda questions about the way I speak. I always try to get them to think a little bit critically about what it might mean to sound black or to sound Jewish or to sound urban because we tend to think monolithically about these things. Like anyone else, the way I speak is the some of various experiences and travels. So people always want to ask me that and sometimes they don’t know how to say it. They talk around it. Sometimes they come right out and say, ‘You sound black.’ My impulse is always to f— with people when they ask me that. I don’t know exactly what sounding black means. Who sounds quintessentially black? Jay Zee or Bill Cosby? It’s not a question I have a particularly good answer for except to wonder what it means."

Chaim Amalek emails: "Now who would you rather sound like, James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader), or Woody Allen?"

Josh:  he stresses certain consonants like the blacks do
Josh:  the hyPOCrisy

Luke: "Barack Obama sometimes speaks differently to a black audience than a white audience. The intonation and accent he uses will change."

Adam: "Yeah, that’s very true. I think there are occasions with all of us, there are infinite variations with the way we present ourselves and speak. The funny thing is I try to sound… I’ve been doing these Jewish book fairs the past couple of months, and I’m certainly trying to come off, I’d really like to avoid that question because I’d like to talk about other s— at these festivals. I try to come off as straight forward. I try to sound as vocally uninteresting and undifferent as possible. I still get this question so maybe there are limits to the amount of control I have over this."

Luke: "At what age did you fall in love with blacks? Or did you?"

Adam: "I don’t fall in love with blacks. I don’t think that ever happened. I got into hip hop when I was about eleven, largely because it was articulating realities that I wasn’t seeing personally but that I knew were out there. It was talking about subjects that were taboo such as racism, police brutality, the inequality in the school systems. These were things I had seen a little bit but nobody I knew was talking honestly about. I was moved by the world-expanding nature of the music. That led me to explore other black cultural forms. When I was 14, I became friends with Delfeayo Marsalis, Branford and Wynton’s younger brother and a trombone player, he was friends with a teacher at my school who was a mentor of mine. He would come to town and I would hang out with him for the week and he would put me on all kinds of jazz which led me to writers like [Ralph] Ellison, Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones), [James] Baldwin.

"I don’t think per se that I ever fell in love with black people. I found inspiration in the art produced under such duress, art made by people who were profoundly marginalized, whose humanity was called into question, and who in some cases responded with works of astounding beauty, honesty and humanism, particularly somebody like Baldwin who was doubly marginalized by being gay and black.

"I started to notice a certain kind of hypocrisy, complacency on the part of a lot of the white kids and families that I was around. That pissed me off and it was more a desire to distance myself or to be critical in some way of white privilege than  a desire to be black or falling in love with black people or black culture."

Luke: "Have you seen white people or Jews fall in love with blacks or black culture?"

Adam: "I don’t know. I don’t spend too much time ascribing motives to people for what they do. In the world of hip hop, there’s plenty of white people and there’s a predominant portion of them who are Jewish. Partly because hip hop is a New York-based form and partly because there are certain historical resonances between blacks and Jews that I try to explore in this book.

"The people I’m personally friends with who are white and are involved in some way with hip hop or black culture tend to have traveled a somewhat similar path where some form of black music and in this generation it’s generally going to be hip hop made them aware and critical of what it meant to be white in this country. It’s more of a critical response to whiteness than a falling in love with blackness.

"In this country there’s an enormous sense of voyeurism particularly around hip hop and the fetishization of black bodies, so on a larger level, there’s been a real split in this country where privilege is located. Traditional forms of privilege, economic privilege, has resided where it always has, but cultural privilege and cultural capital has increasingly been associated with blackness. There’s been a lot of confusion for young white kids in particular because they don’t understand that they’re still at the center. They turn on the TV and all of the most glamorous flashy conspicuous wealth they see is in rap videos. So they end up feeling like they don’t have a cultural identity and they’ve been marginalized and that black people are at the center of the universe. There’s a combination of desire and resentment that I’ve seen a lot when I’ve talked to some of these kids."

Adam graduated high school in 1994.

Luke: "What do Jews and blacks have in common in America?"

Adam: "Both groups are dealing with the after-effects of diaspora, whether in the case of blacks the legacy and horrors of slavery and in the case of Jews they kind of repeated banishments from the different countries in Europe. Both groups come to America under a kind of duress that I think is unique. In both groups there is a sense that identity is a multi-faceted and complicated thing. There are wide margins in both communities. For Jews it’s this conflation of ethnicity, religion, culture, history. There are many ways to feel Jewish and also many ways to feel marginal and push away from the core of the Jewish community. You’ve got Jews who say s— like, ‘I’m Jewish but I’m well Buddhist.’ Or people who connect ethnically but not religiously. There is a sense of double consciousness, a sense of being part of a community but also being distant or alienated.

"The same is true for blacks. There’s an essentialization of what it means to be black. An identity that doesn’t fit for a lot of people. There is also the double consciousness inherent to black life in America where you are aware of both yourself and the other, where you’re unseen in the white world and able to gain a certain perspective on it."

"There’s been a progressive alliance, a civil rights alliance, a lot of history of artistic interplay, whether it is jazz in the twenties where Fletcher Henderson is writing all of the arrangements for Benny Goodman’s band. In the 1930s, the Duke Ellington Band got pulled off a train in Germany and harassed by all these Nazi soldiers and they kept calling jazz ‘nigger Jew music.’

"There are great letters between [Ralph] Ellison and [Saul] Bellow. Some of this stuff Bernard Malamud said about wanting to be seen as a writer and not a Jewish writer, wanting to be allowed to speak universally instead of for his marginalized group. It was identical almost to the stuff Frederick Douglass was saying 90 years earlier. And then all the way up to the breakdown of that civil rights alliance in the 1980s. It’s been a subject of conversation even in this presidential race with Obama talking about how he wants to repair relationships in the black and Jewish communities. He was asked to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan. It’s a rich and interesting history, really collaborative at points and tense and fraught at others, particularly in the eighties. These comments that people like Farrakhan, Jackson, Sharpton made have been frozen in amber by the older Jewish generation as a reason for a pullback emotionally and practically from the civil rights alliance of the sixties.

"I think it has to do with Jewish assimilation, a desire to change bedfellows… If you ask a room full of Jewish people over 50 about Jesse Jackson, they’ll all go, ‘He called New York Hymietown in 1983.’ Well, what has he done since then, anything? I’m more disturbed that Jesse Jackson called New York ‘hymietown’ in 1983 is so fixed and central to Jewish memory than the fact that he said it. It implies a lot of things that I’m not too happy about."

"I’d like to be able to say that Jews have more progressive attitudes [than regular white folk] but I don’t know that that is the case. Certainly that was an issue in this election. The New York Times did a good job of going to Florida and finding Jews who were horrifyingly racist and saying ridiculous things. I’d like to think that that is out of the mainstream but it is hard for me to tell. It’s more of a generational thing than anything else."

I ask Adam if he thinks Barack Obama would’ve been elected president if he were white.

Adam: "I have no way of answering that question."

Luke: "How have blacks reacted to your interest in their culture?"

Adam: "Pretty well. I’ve never really had any problems doing what I do. The only people who seem to have a problem with it are white people."

"Anybody who navigates black culture with a sense of respect, a sense of the history, awareness of the tremendous legacies of exploitation and cooption, is usually welcomed. Expectations of white people in black culture are so low, there’s such an expectation that they will act like assholes, that anyone who doesn’t is welcomed probably more than they should be."

Luke emails: Pendergast seems to play for Tristan what Jews have done for blacks — blaze the trail, fund the NAACP, etc…and blacks resent Jews for this for the same reason Tristan resents Pendergast — not for doing too little but for doing too much.

It’s human nature to resent those who help us.

What do you think?

Adam replies:

Interesting. I think there’s some truth to the notion, in the abstract, that we resent those who help us – if the help is condescending, comes from self-interest, etc.  Not categorically.  In terms of blacks and Jews, it doesn’t ring particularly true to me. First of all, I question the assumption that blacks (who, of course, cannot be spoken of monolithically) resent Jews. What is the evidence of this as a tendency prevalent enough to dwell on?  In my personal life, in which I interact with blacks and Jews more than any other groups of people, I hardly ever see it; if anything, being Jewish gives you an alternate identity to being white, creates a point of connection: you know, bigots hate you both, that kind of thing.

Secondly, even if we do accept the notion, I don’t think the facts support it: what is the "too much" Jews have done?  How can anyone have done "too much" when structural racism remains a fact of American life, from judicial bias to the recent Princeton study indicating that a black job applicant has the same chances of being granted an interview as a white felon?  No, I think any resentment stems from the more obvious reasons: a Jewish pullback from the progressive alliance, and old resentments of the kinds created by proximity and changing group fortunes (like the notion of Jews as slumlords, in the first chapter of my book, when Tristan goes to Harlem).  I think that when you see conspiracy theories about the influence and power of Jews (in government, in the media) from segments of the black community, this is in large part code for "you assimilated into the mainstream and turned your backs on us – and your assimilation relied on your "otherness" playing off of ours, being more mutable than ours."  And I see some truth in that.  To connect to something I was saying earlier: 25 years after the "Hymietown" remark, for which he’s apologized repeatedly, after which he’s done major outreach to the Jewish community, Jesse Jackson remains a pariah to many Jews. Meanwhile, the ADL accepts Mel Gibson’s half-assed, incoherent apology, and rabbis line up to meet with him.  To me, the deeper story is that keeping Jesse or Sharpton or Farrakhan’s old comments alive well past their expiration date helps to creating excuses for a practical, financial, emotional connection to black people, through the whipped-up specter of black anti-Semitism.

As far as Pendergast, Tristan’s resentment is complicated, but he’s actually happy to accept the benefits of Pendergast’s meddling; it’s the reasons behind them, and the implicit acceptance of Pendergast as an artistic equal, that rankle him.  He’s pissed off, on some level, that this guy is even in a position to help him, is venerated as a writer, etc.  And he suspects impure, selfish motives for the help, suspects that Pendergast is really reinforcing the differences between them… which, again, I think is usually at the heart of resentments toward those who help us.

Luke: "How did your white peers react to your interest in black culture?"

Adam: "They were the ones who gave me s— about it. They were the ones who wanted to make fun of me and let me know that they thought this was strange. A lot of kids in junior high called me "Mansblack." When some of the black kids I was hanging out with, some of the black mentors I had in high school, heard that they called me that, they thought it was hilarious and they started calling me that. What started out as a derisive nickname became a symbol of acceptance by this other community.

"This abuse was pretty minor. I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered greatly from my junior high classmates. I was somebody who didn’t care much what they thought and I realized quickly that I’d be somebody who’d navigate different worlds. More often than anything else, I was asked to play the role of a cultural translator. There are a lot of white people who are intrigued by other cultures but don’t want to approach somebody from that culture and ask them but will approach this crossover white boy. I’ve become used to fielding questions from white people about black culture. Sometimes it would be ridiculous. ‘Adam, why is the black community so angry?’"

Luke: "What has been your attitude towards the Jewish tradition?"

Adam: "I was raised by very secular parents who were the children of very secular parents. We didn’t go to synagogue. Out of a vague feeling that I should know something about Judaism, they sent me to a Jewish Sunday school at a junior college. I got kicked out of that school because I had this overtly racist old teacher who I got into big confrontations with. It came to a head when I sang ‘Living on a Prayer’ into a microphone at a school assembly instead of the prayer I was supposed to read.

"Because the community I was growing up in was pretty Jewish, I conflated Jewish with white as a kid. I was very critical about what whiteness meant, the historic economic social and judicial privilege of whiteness. I didn’t want much to do with either one of those traditions. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started thinking more deeply about what it meant to be Jewish, what the unique strains of that tradition looked like in terms of religion and culture and also a tradition of progressiveness and social justice.

"It was in the course of writing ‘The End of the Jews’, I worked on the book for about seven years, that I started thinking more deeply and in a sustained way about Jewishness… How was I to understand my grandfather? Part of understanding him was understanding that religion. I set out to write a book about his generation and mine."

Luke: "One thing that struck me with your book. There’s the title ‘The End of the Jews.’ Then I read the book and none of the characters have much of an interest in the Jewish tradition."

Adam: "Yeah. That’s true. Everybody in the book is relatively secular… One of the things I tried to deal with in the book is how identity for all of these characters is constantly in flux. At times the characters wield Jewish identity as a weapon and at times they try to distance themselves from it. For Tristan, being Jewish is central to his life and writing, but in a way that is particular to him and doesn’t have much to do with religion. As he goes through various stages of being accepted and rejected by the Jewish community and is asked in various ways to adopt the mantle of a Jewish writer, it emerges as something important to him…"

Luke: "I was struck by how all the protagonists in the book work hard at their heart yet they expend no serious effort to grapple with their tradition. They don’t try to learn Hebrew or study Talmud or live in Israel. They don’t work at it one tenth as much as their art."

Adam: "Yeah… The people who live on the margins and who don’t want to come into the fold, those are the ones who become artists. The position engenders a lot of perspective and a lot of pain and it gets channeled into art. You look at the pantheon of 20th Century Jewish-American writers (Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce), you see people who occupy those margins. It’s the tortured relationship to the religion and to everything else…that allows people the space and the energy to create art. It might be to work against the tradition, to define the tradition for themselves, but it’s probably not going to come from these traditional forms of identification."

Luke: "Do you feel obligations to the Jewish tradition?"

Adam: "What do you mean?"

Luke: "You may not eat shrimp because you feel obliged, you may have an instinctive protective reaction towards Israel, you may feel obliged to know some Yiddish or Hebrew, do you feel commanded in any way by any part of the Jewish tradition?"

Adam: "The way you phrase it is interesting and is making me unsure of how to answer it. I wouldn’t say that I feel commanded. I’m having trouble working out the idea of being commanded by a tradition as opposed to being commanded by something in yourself that seeks knowledge or inclusion or something. There are things I react to in a certain way because I’m Jewish, because my entire family is Jewish, because most of them got wiped out in the Holocaust, but the thing I connect to most strongly is not a prohibition against eating shrimp and certainly not a desire to protect Israel uncritically, to me the crux of the tradition, or the crux of what connect with, is the notion of questioning. The notion that the Jewish tradition is one of constantly discussing, arguing, trying to resolve the unresolvable."

Luke: "Challenging the status quo."

"What have you loved and hated dealing with the Jews once this book came out?"

Adam: "I feel most frustrated by the way most events are a smokescreen for getting young Jews together to marry each other and have Jewish babies…

"If you are convening a panel to talk about community service or Jewish books, those topics…shouldn’t be an excuse to get this population in a room to meet each other. It’s been frustrating for me to be invited to some of these events…

"Some of my frustrations mirror some of the characters frustrations in the book. The idea that one is always supposed to lead with religion and is reducible to it and should only be concerned with, ‘What’s good for the Jews?’

"I’ve been struck by the conservatism and defensiveness and skepticism of the older Jewish generation when the topic turns to things like black-Jewish relations. It’s probably stupid of me to go to a JCC and speak to a bunch of people in their seventies and eighties about Jewish disinvestment from the civil rights movement and how it is time to get over being mad at Farrakhan… Someone will raise their hand and say, ‘What about Jeremiah Wright?’ I will say, ‘What about Jeremiah Wright?’

"’Well, he said some anti-semitic things.’ I’ll be like, ‘What did he say?’ And no one would be able to answer. And I’d start to realize that in the imagination of this audience any black leader who said anything controversial and was in hot water must automatically be anti-semitic. You can feel frustrated when you put together a talk and people are only interested in finding out why you talk the way you do."

Luke: "How much of a driving force in your life is the desire to affect social change?"

Adam: "It’s a big desire. One of the struggles of writers is to justify what we do. Writing books take a lot of time, time spent in a room alone, and in a way it’s one of the most self-indulgent things you can do. If you care about social change, and you want to be a writer, you have to think that your books can play a role. It’s something I struggle with — should I be in this room writing this book or should I be knocking on doors and handing out flyers and organizing marches. The writing always wins out."

I read Adam these excerpts of an essay on blacks and Jews by an academic historian and Orthodox Jew, Edward S. Shapiro:

…If support for blacks is an ineluctable result of Jewish values, then one would expect that the most Jewish of American Jews — the Orthodox of Brooklyn — would be the most sympathetic towards blacks. The exact opposite, however, is true. Secure in their Jewish identity, they do not require close relations with blacks to define it. Their Jewishness rests on more substantial grounds.

…If the most Jewish of Jews are the least receptive to blacks, the Jews most supportive of blacks have often been alienated from Jewish culture and religion. (pg. 240)

…Jews needed blacks to authenticate their image of themselves as liberals, but blacks did not need Jews to authenticate their image of themselves as blacks. (Pg. 243)

Blacks have resented Jews not because they did not do enough for them but because they did too much. (Pg. 244)

In academia there is not one black scholar, apart from Julius Lester, a convert to Judaism, whose major field of interest is Jewish studies.

Adam: "I think it’s interesting. There are a couple of logical fallacies.The first is cause and effect. If the least Jewish of Jews are the most likely to be receptive to blacks, what is the cause and what is the effect?"

"The writer is defining Judaism as a matter of adherence to religion and to traditional ritual. It would not be a definition accepted by the people he’s talking about. He’s bringing a set of assumptions that the people he’s trying to analyze would object strongly to."

"What makes one group of Jews more Jewish than another group?"

Luke: "Do you think the Orthodox are more Jewish than you?"

Adam: "They’re certainly more religious than me. I couldn’t be less interested in deciding who’s more religious or claiming any level of Jewishness and asserting my right to be as Jewish as somebody else… Everybody in my family is Jewish and my blood is as Jewish as their’s. I’m not religious in the ways they would define it. They would probably view me as not Jewish.

"I can’t walk through an Orthodox neighborhood without thinking about whether I am being viewed as Jewish or not. Rather than think about the people I’m looking at, I’m thinking about what they would think of me. That’s the case for most secular Jews. Our judgments of the Orthodox end up getting deflected by our assumptions of their opinions of us."

Adam mentions his secular writer-friends such as Peter Orner, Sam Lipsyte, T Cooper, Keith Gessen, Darrin Strauss, Lauren Grodstein, Danny Hoch, Elisa Albert). "They are also publishing works considered Jewish literature. ‘The End of the Jews’ is my third novel but it is the first time somebody put me in the category of Jewish writer. I doubt that Sam Lipsyte does a lot of Jewish writer gigs."

"This time out of the box I’m doing these talks at synagogues. The Jewish community didn’t ask me to come talk about ‘Angry Black White Boy,’ my previous novel. Even though I’ve written a book on topics related to Judaism, I’m pretty sure they won’t invite me when my next book is published.

"A.J. Jacobs did a lot of Jewish-related stuff with The Year of Living Biblically, but I doubt he was doing it before that.

"Peter Orner did a bunch of [Jewish] stuff with his first book, but when his novel came out, his phone stopped ringing with Jewish programmers on the other end. T. Cooper did some Jewish book fairs for his last novel, but for his first one, nothing. T. and I co-edited a book of short stories, A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic, 2006). That’s two Jewish writers co-editing a book of short stories with a decent number of Jewish writers in it but it wasn’t directed at or made visible to Jewish communities, so there was nothing.

"It seems to be on a book-by-book basis that the Jewish community on a formal level, the Jewish book circuit, the synagogues, the JCCs, there doesn’t seem to be a sustained interest in the careers of young Jewish writers except when those writers are talking about Jewish subjects."

Luke: "When you encounter somebody who says, ‘I’m a proud Jew,’ what do you think?"

Adam: "I don’t think I’ve encountered people who say that… I’m frustrated with the way that Judaism has been marketed. You go to these festivals marketed at young people and there’s all this ‘rah-rah, It’s cool to be Jewish’ stuff going on. ‘You should be proud to be Jewish. Jewish is cool.’ Why should it be cool? Cool shouldn’t enter into it. It’s a flimsy reason for wanting to do anything. If it’s cool this year, then almost by definition that means it is not cool next year. You’re talking about a fashion statement or an album. For me it would depend on what that pride is based on. If it is based on somebody telling you it is cool to be Jewish, then it is meaningless. If it is based on something more deeply felt, deeply understood, deeply studied connection with the religion or culture, then great. I’d also ask, is this the only thing you are proud of? Is it the only element of your identity?

"How does that pride translate? How does being Jewish inform the way you see yourself in the world?"

We talk about the absence of black scholar in Jewish Studies departments.

Adam: "The scholars I know who are black and do stuff that is totally unconnected to blackness are constantly having to answer for it. A good friend of mine is at Yale Divinity School. His work is on Kant and Erasmus. He constantly has to explain why a 38-year old black man studies those things."

Luke: "There seems to be much more of an eager need on the part of some Jews to be embraced by blacks than blacks feel to be embraced by Jews."

Adam: "Not necessarily."

"Jews are a sub-set of white people. They are seen in the world predominantly as white and have the privileges endemic to that. That has to do with validation that semantically divorces you from privilege so you don’t have to feel guilty. If black people accept you, then you don’t have to grapple with what it means to have all these unearned inherited privileges granted to you by society. That’s been the dynamic of my generation, the hip hop generation, that constant affirmation from black people…is a way to divorce yourself from privilege instead of confronting it and seeing how it might be dismantled."

"I can’t even tell you how many black Jew-aphiles I know, how many black friends I have who said, ‘I wanted to be Jewish when I grew up.’"

Luke: "Is there anything about your new book that I should’ve asked you and haven’t asked you?"

Adam: "Probably. It’s always interesting to me that any time I get talking to somebody ostensibly about my book, particularly someone smart and interesting like yourself, we always end up totally far afield. Sometimes I yearn to talk about craft and sentence structure and the book itself in some sustained way instead of using it as a point of departure for a whole other conversation."