A man sits in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The decade is the early 1980s. He has come to France after college and stayed, working as a translator and an English teacher, and he reads the way some men walk a city with no destination, moving from one book to the next, following nothing in particular. He pulls down a volume the size of a pamphlet. Inside runs a list. Every sailor on Columbus’s first voyage, 1492, each name trailed by a line or two of biography. One name stops him. Luis de Torres. Beside it, set down four centuries earlier and copied forward ever since, a single tag. The Jew.
De Torres sailed as Columbus’s interpreter. He had converted before the crossing, days before the expulsion that emptied Spain of its Jews. Now his name lay in a French archive, and a young American read it and felt the floor shift. Four events of the late fifteenth century stood braided together in front of him: the Inquisition, the reconquest of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, the crossing to a new world. Kaplan understood that he had found his first real novel, a story with the weight he had been waiting for. If he did the research, he reasoned, readers would believe it.
That conviction, that belief precedes everything, organizes the work of Mitchell James Kaplan, an American novelist born in Los Angeles. Across three books written over more than a decade he returns to the hinge points of history, the moments when a civilization turns and ordinary men must decide what they will keep and what they will betray. He has called himself a novelist, not a historical novelist, and he means the distinction. The present, he says, belongs to history too.
His childhood ran through books before it ran through anything else. His mother, working toward a doctorate in comparative literature, read him William Blake (1757-1827) and Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) at bedtime, and the lambs of Blake’s England and the woman of Stevens taking her coffee and oranges on a Sunday morning settled into him early. When his birth family fell apart he went to a boarding school in Carpinteria, California, where he gave himself over to Hawthorne, Hesse, and Melville. He admired the way Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) used fiction to think about the past, and he came to a position he has held since. All novels are historical. The past and the present belong to history alike.
The school was the Cate School, near Santa Barbara, and he left it with its Scholarship Prize and its Music Prize. At Yale he read English literature with intent, working his way from Beowulf forward, and he graduated cum laude with honors. He took the Paine Memorial Prize for the best long-form senior essay submitted to the English department. There he met the man who turned an ambition into a decision.
William Styron (1925-2006) drifted in and out of Yale in those years. He read two early attempts at novels, both set in the present, both more experiment than achievement, and in the second he saw something. He told Kaplan he had the stuff of a writer and carried the pages to his own editor at Random House, who then sat down with the young man to talk. Styron also handed him one line that outlasted the rest. The most important thing, he said, is that your readers believe your story. Kaplan kept it. Years later, in a French library, holding a pamphlet of dead sailors, he would feel the line snap into place.
After Yale he spent seven years in Paris. He worked as a translator and an English teacher and read his way through the French canon, Molière and Baudelaire and Balzac and Proust. His clients ran to film producers chasing English-language money, and he worked alongside screenwriters and novelists whose books were headed to the screen, among them Jean-Pierre Ronssin and the critic and director Pascal Kané, as well as Claude Bessy, the danseuse étoile of the Paris Opéra Ballet, and the Lebanese director Maroun Bagdadi. His first published story appeared in the Franco-American review Frank. The years in France gave him a second language, a working life in narrative, and the chance encounter that became his subject.
He returned to Los Angeles in 1986. He worked in the film industry for the director Michael Ritchie (1938-2001) and the actor and producer Kirk Douglas (1916-2020), among others, doctoring scripts with his wife and writing screenplays of their own. The trade taught him economy. A screenplay carries its meaning in motion and in talk, and it cannot stop to explain. The pacing of his novels owes something to those years. He and his family moved to a country house at Big Bear Lake, and there he wrote the first draft of his first novel. He bought a Piper Archer II, earned his pilot’s license, and helped found the Big Bear Lake International Film Festival, where he served as a judge.
The novel took six years. By Fire, By Water came out from Other Press in 2010. Its hero is Luis de Santángel, royal chancellor of Aragon and grandson of a converso, a Jew forced to the font. Santángel keeps a private interest in the faith his family left, a dangerous thing under the New Inquisition, and when the violence reaches a friend he joins a plot to kill the inquisitor Pedro de Arbués, only to face Tomás de Torquemada (1420-1498) when the Inquisitor General arrives to hunt the conspirators. The financier helps secure the backing for Columbus and his 1492 voyage, and the book sets that crossing against the persecution closing in at home. Kaplan wrote King Fernando and Queen Isabella and Torquemada as men and women with reasons of their own, and he gave the Inquisition’s cellars their full chill. The opening finds Santángel walking the cobbles of Zaragoza by a thin moon in 1487, then stepping through a heavy door into a building of cold, rancid fumes. The scene tells the reader at once that this world will not be safe.
The book traveled. It won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for historical fiction, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Bronze Medal in the same category, and an Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention, and the Italian translation took the Adelina Della Pergola Prize, a prize judged by high school students across Italy, which says something about the reach of the story past its scholarly furniture. The Jewish Book Council made it a selection, and it drew a nomination for the Goodreads Choice Award in historical fiction. Reviewers reached for the same words. Learned. Heartbreaking. Cinematic.
The research for the first book opened the second. Reading toward 1492, Kaplan kept circling an older fracture, the parting of Judaism and Christianity, and he started reading everything he could find about the years when the new faith was raw. The questions multiplied. Why did Rome think it had to destroy the Second Temple. What set Jerusalem against the empire. How did sin move to the center of Christian life. Into the Unbounded Night, its title lifted from Blake’s Jerusalem, reconstructs the world of 70 CE and the fall of the Temple. Titus (39-81) and the historian Josephus (c. 37-c. 100) move through it beside invented men and women whose private struggles carry the history. Kaplan traveled to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Ephesus, to Roman sites in Britain, not to improve the novel, he says, but because he could not stay away. Regal House Publishing brought the book out in 2020.
His method holds across both. A novel starts for him as an abstract question, and the research answers it with more questions, and the characters rise out of the reading. Then the work changes. When the people come alive, he says, the novelist’s job is to stand aside and let them talk, because the logic of a story and the psychology of a character run too fine for the conscious mind to plot in advance. He takes no notes. The important thing lodges. The rest is noise.
The third novel did not arrive as a plan. Here the tidy account, three settings chosen in sequence, misses the truth. Kaplan’s father was a cardiologist at UCLA and a serious amateur clarinetist who filled the living room with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and with Gershwin. After his father died, the book came out of Kaplan in roughly eight months. One morning a couple of months after the death, his work on the Roman novel finished, he took his coffee while the CD player ran on shuffle through some three hundred discs, and Rhapsody in Blue came on. His eyes filled. His father stood in the room, playing along. He knew then that this was his next book, though he knew nothing yet of Kay Swift or James Warburg.
He found them in the research. Rhapsody sets down in Jazz Age New York and turns on Katharine Swift (1897-1993), a banker’s wife and a trained pianist hungry for her own name, and her long affair with George Gershwin (1898-1937). Her husband, James Warburg (1896-1969), advised Franklin Roosevelt and stood at the corner of the triangle. The affair ran ten years and ended only with Gershwin’s death from a brain tumor at thirty-eight. The circle around them held Ira Gershwin, Jascha Heifetz, the whole loud bright machinery of the age. Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster published it in 2021. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling the world Kaplan built enchanting and the tale luminous. The Library of Virginia named it a People’s Choice finalist.
Three books, three worlds, one preoccupation. Kaplan goes to the moment a civilization redefines itself, and he plants his story not with the king or the general but with the financier, the composer, the scholar, the convert. The armies and edicts move in the background. In the foreground a man decides whether to lie about who he is. Identity, loyalty, belief, and memory carry the weight that battles carry in other books.
Research holds the whole thing up. For Kaplan research begets inspiration; he reads dozens of books, watches the patterns surface, then reads again toward the patterns and begins to sketch. He works to recover how people of an earlier century understood their own lives rather than press modern assumptions onto them, and that discipline gives the fiction its grain of the real while the human problems stay legible to a reader now. He has also written reviews and literary commentary for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, including pieces on Columbus and on the Inquisition, work that runs along the same channels as the novels.
He has lived in Los Angeles, in Paris, in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and in the Blue Ridge, and he and his family settled at last in Roanoke, Virginia. He flies. He plays classical and jazz flute, the son’s instrument set beside the memory of the father’s clarinet. In 2021 he reported a finished first draft of a fourth novel. As of mid-2026 no fourth book has appeared, and so the three stand as the achievement.
They make one argument across fifteenth-century Spain, first-century Judea, and Jazz Age New York. History turns on the private act. A chancellor’s refusal, a composer’s reach, a convert’s secret prayer. The man in the Paris library found his life’s subject in a list of the dead, in a single name marked the Jew, and he has spent his work since insisting that the men in the margins of the record were the ones who moved it.
Believe the Story
A man in a black shirt works a small room above a bar on a Tuesday night. Forty seats, most of them full. He borrows a twenty from a dentist in the second row, folds it small, and a minute later the bill sits inside a lemon that has sat on the table since before the dentist arrived. The room makes the sound a room makes when it cannot account for what it saw. At the bar afterward a young woman asks him how. He drinks his soda water and watches the door. “They all know it’s a trick,” he says. “Every last one. They believe anyway. That’s the only thing I sell.”
Four centuries back and a few thousand miles east, another man stands in a stone room while a churchman asks him what he believes. There is no lemon. The wrong answer is fire.
Between those two rooms lies the work of Mitchell James Kaplan. He has spent three novels and more than twenty years on a single question that wears the same five-letter coat in every century and means something different each time a new man puts it on. The question is belief. The novelist William Styron handed him the word at Yale and made it a vocation. The most important thing, Styron told him, is that your readers believe your story. Kaplan took the instruction whole and turned it into a method. Do the research, he reasoned, and the reader believes. Belief became the test his life had to pass.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame to see why a word can carry that much weight. Man is the animal that knows it dies. He cannot live inside the knowledge, so he attaches himself to something that outlasts the body, a cause, a faith, a people, a body of work, and he calls the attachment by other names and rarely sees it for what it is. Becker called it the hero system. The terror it answers runs double. There is death, and behind death the smaller, meaner terror, the suspicion that the life leaves no mark, that a man passes through and the water closes over him and the record forgets his name. Every hero system is a denial of both.
Kaplan’s two terrors stand in plain view once you look. His family came apart when he was a boy, and he was sent to a boarding school by the sea, where he built a self out of Hawthorne and Melville because the first self had not held. Decades later his father died, a cardiologist who played the clarinet in the living room, and the loss produced a book. Death and erasure are the air his novels breathe. The Inquisition’s cellars. The Temple burning. Gershwin gone at thirty-eight with the best of the century still in him. Kaplan does not look away from any of it. He looks at it the way a man looks at the thing he has decided to defeat.
His immortality project is the historical novel, and the historical novel, in his hands, is an engine for raising the dead. He reads for years until the dead breathe, then he writes until a stranger believes they breathe. That last step is the whole of it. The proof that Kaplan has beaten death is not in his own chest. It sits in the mind of a reader he will never meet. When that reader believes a dead man lived, the dead man is no longer dead and no longer forgotten, and both terrors fall in a single stroke. This is a strange and exposed place to build a defense against oblivion, and it makes Kaplan a member of a guild he never names, the makers and refusers of belief, men and women who spend their lives producing the thing in others or guarding against it. Walk through their rooms and the word changes shape in your hands.
The preacher will not let you earn it. He keeps a small Reformed congregation, and after the service he folds the bulletins and talks about grace with the patience of a man who has said the same true thing ten thousand times. To him Kaplan’s method is a quiet blasphemy. “You cannot work it up,” he says. “A man can build a cathedral of evidence and stand inside it an unbeliever. It comes, or it does not, and the coming is not your doing.” His hero system rests on election. The terror of death is answered by a gift he did not choose and cannot lose, and the answer would be cheapened if a man could research his way into it. Kaplan, the craftsman who labors for belief and delivers it on a schedule, is the figure his theology exists to rebuke.
The physicist distrusts the word so much she tries not to use it. Her office at eleven at night, a preprint open, a whiteboard half erased, the coffee gone cold in a department mug. “I try not to believe things,” she says. “Belief is what’s left over after you stop measuring.” Her hero system is the slow correction, the paper that outlives her because better people falsify part of it and keep the structure standing. She wants the reader who checks, who finds the error, who writes the rebuttal. She lives forever by being shown wrong. Kaplan wants the opposite reader, the one who never checks, who closes the book convinced, and the two of them sit at opposite poles of the same trade, one selling certainty and one selling doubt, both reaching past their own deaths for the same prize.
The case officer treats belief as a thing that gets men killed. He runs people who betray their countries for him, and he meets them in rented apartments with bad light and instant coffee. He is courteous and he trusts no one. “I don’t need my agent to believe in me,” he says. “Belief is how you bury people. I need him to make the meeting.” His immortality is a file no one will open for fifty years, a service performed and never recorded, the purest denial of the erasure terror because he chooses the erasure himself and finds his significance in the choosing. He manufactures belief in other men and grants it to none. And the man he most resembles is not a modern spy at all. It is the converso.
Here the word stops moving and turns lethal. The converso has done nothing he can name. His grandfather was dragged to the font, and he himself keeps the old faith the way a man keeps a coal in his fist, half in love with it and half in terror of it, and one day a courteous churchman asks him what he believes. He cannot make belief, the way the magician makes it. He cannot refuse it, the way the case officer refuses it. He cannot treat it as provisional and update it, and he cannot drop it the way a Zen teacher across the world that same century might tell a student to drop the last idea blocking his sight. The fire does not allow any of that. The converso owns his belief the way a man owns the most expensive thing he will ever buy, and he keeps it hidden, and he says the Credo aloud while meaning a private thing beneath it, and the price of being seen to mean it is his life. This is the man Kaplan returns to across all three books, the figure whose belief is interior, illegal, and his alone. He gives one such character the thought that a man can bear any suffering if he knows what he believes, and that the suffering becomes unbearable, and solitary, only when he does not.
That is the converso. The novelist who made him answers to a gentler version of the same law, and once, on one morning, the law broke in his favor past anything a book had ever given him. His father had been dead a couple of months. The Roman novel was finished. He took his coffee while the CD player ran on shuffle through three hundred discs, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue came on, and his eyes filled, and his father stood in the room playing along. The man who had spent his working life persuading strangers that the dead still breathed, for the length of one piece of music believed it himself, and the belief brought his father back into the room. Rhapsody is the book that came out of that morning. The engine he had built to raise other men’s dead turned at last toward his own, and the son raised the father.
Three things hold this hero system in place, and each carries its own cost.
The first is that Kaplan’s significance lives outside his body in a way the preacher’s and the physicist’s and the case officer’s do not. The preacher has his grace, the physicist her record, the officer his file, and each keeps the deed in his own hands. Kaplan keeps his in the minds of people he will never meet. His victory over death is leased from the reader, paid in the single coin of belief, and the lease comes due with every new pair of eyes.
The second is that he fights the terror of erasure even harder than he fights death. His people die, all of them, and he lets them. What he will not allow is the margin. He found his first novel in a French library, in a list of dead sailors, beside one name reduced to a single contemptuous tag, the Jew. His whole body of work is restitution to the man in the margin, the name flattened to a label, the conscience the record could not be bothered to keep. He raises the forgotten more than he raises the dead, because being forgotten is the death Becker says we fear most and name least.
The third is the precariousness of it. A hero system built on belief in other minds can be revoked by other minds. Belief is the most portable of sacred things and the easiest to withdraw. The magician’s room can go cold on a slow night. The reader can set the book down at page forty and never return. The father might not come the next morning, and most mornings he does not. Kaplan has staked his defeat of death on the assent of strangers, which means he is always one unbelieving reader away from the undoing of the whole edifice. He knows this. He builds anyway. That is the courage in it.
So the two rooms close the circuit. In the first, forty people watch a bill climb inside a sealed lemon, and they know it is false, and they believe, and the belief costs them nothing and saves no one. In the second, a man is asked what he holds, and he believes, and the belief costs him his life. Kaplan stands between the rooms and does the harder thing than either. He asks strangers to believe what he invented as though it were true, and he asks it for the oldest reason there is, so that the truly dead might stand in the room again and play along.
Legal Tender
The social hall of a synagogue in a comfortable suburb. Folding chairs in rows, an urn of coffee at the back, a platter of rugelach going dry under plastic wrap. A hundred people, most past sixty, most of them the kind of readers who finish the book before the author arrives and bring their copy with the receipt tucked inside as a bookmark. The woman who runs the series calls him a major American novelist. She means it. To this room he is one.
He talks about the Alhambra and the archives and the years of reading, and the room leans toward him, because this room keeps faith with seriousness, with the long sentence and the foreign name and the homework done. Afterward they line up with their copies. A retired orthodontist tells him the book made him weep on a plane. A woman asks whether the love story is true. He signs, and signs, and the line holds.
Two hundred miles east, above a Manhattan avenue, a man whose work is to decide what counts as literature has never heard the name. Not as a slight. The name has not crossed his desk. The magazines he reads do not review historical fiction unless a writer from the center stoops to it for one book and is praised for slumming. The prizes he tracks have no category for it. In his country the novelist holds no currency at all.
Both rooms are real. The distance between them is the subject here, and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) built the instrument to measure it.
Bourdieu read the literary world as a field, a structured space of positions arranged between two poles. At one end sits the autonomous pole, art made for other artists and for the few, rich in prestige and poor in cash, where a man wins by refusing the market and loses standing the moment he sells well. At the other end sits the heteronomous pole, writing made for the largest audience, rich in cash and poor in prestige, where sales are the only verdict. A writer carries three kinds of capital through this space. Economic capital, money. Cultural capital, the training and taste and references a man absorbs young and cannot fake. Symbolic capital, the recognition of the people whose recognition the field has agreed to honor. The whole game runs on converting one kind into another, and a career is the track a man cuts across the field as he trades. The Rules of Art lays out the map. Distinction explains why the orthodontist weeps and the editor has never heard the name.
Kaplan’s early life is a study in the inheritance of cultural capital. His mother read William Blake and Wallace Stevens to him at bedtime while she worked toward a doctorate in comparative literature, which is to say the household currency was the autonomous pole before the boy could spell it. The boarding school by the sea, where he gave himself to Hawthorne and Melville. Yale, Intensive English Literature, cum laude, honors. The Paine Memorial Prize for the best long-form senior essay in the department. Then the benediction that mattered most, the novelist William Styron reading his pages and telling him he had the makings of a writer and carrying the work to a Random House editor. None of this can be bought. All of it points one direction, toward the pole where a man writes prose poems and does not count the house.
The seven years in Paris extend the same line. He read the French canon in French, Molière and Balzac and Proust, and published his first story in a small Franco-American review. A young man with that passport could have walked the slow autonomous road, the little magazines, the thin first collection, the long climb on no money. He did something else.
In 1986 he came back to Los Angeles and went to work in the film business, doctoring scripts for the director Michael Ritchie (1938-2001) and the actor and producer Kirk Douglas (1916-2020), among others. This is the heteronomous pole in its purest form. The script doctor is paid well and paid to vanish. His name does not appear. His craft serves another man’s picture and a mass audience that will never learn he was there. Bourdieu’s law holds with iron consistency. The reward in money runs inverse to the reward in prestige, and the script doctor takes the money and surrenders the name. Kaplan spent two decades there, and the trade taught him the screenwriter’s tools, economy, pacing, dialogue carrying its own weight, the scene that cannot stop to explain itself. He was banking two things at once, cash and craft, both of them earned in the field’s basement.
Then he converted. He took the invisible money and the visible craft and re-entered the field as a novelist under his own name. Here a man with his cultural capital had a clean shot at the autonomous center. He did not take it. He entered through a dominated genre.
Historical fiction sits low in the literary field. The center treats it as middlebrow, costume, research wearing a plot, a genre for readers who want to be improved while entertained. A writer can win every honor the genre offers and remain invisible to the men above the Manhattan avenue. Kaplan walked in carrying Yale and Styron and Proust, the full autonomous kit, and set it down in a room the center does not enter.
The publishers chart the trajectory, and the chart runs the wrong way for a prestige career. By Fire, By Water came from Other Press in 2010, a small literary house near the autonomous pole. Into the Unbounded Night came from Regal House Publishing in 2020, a tiny independent, nearer still to the pole of pure restricted production, the place where almost no money changes hands and the work is its own argument. Then Rhapsody, the Gershwin love story, came from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster in 2021, a large commercial house, and the house sold it to readers of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, the women’s historical romance market, the heart of large-scale production. Most careers move the other way. A writer breaks out commercially and then launders the money into prestige, takes the small literary house for the next book, courts the center, climbs. Kaplan ran the arc in reverse. He started at the indies and ended at the big house with the most marketable book of the three. His line bends toward the market.
The awards tell the same story in a second language. The first novel took the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for historical fiction, the ForeWord Bronze in the same category, an Eric Hoffer honorable mention, and the Adelina Della Pergola Prize for the Italian edition, a prize judged by high school students. The Jewish Book Council made it a selection. Read the list as Bourdieu reads it and the diagnosis is exact. These are the consecrating bodies of the historical-fiction subfield and the Jewish-communal reading world. They are not the consecrating bodies of the center. No Booker, no National Book Award, no review in the places the man above the avenue reads. Kaplan’s symbolic capital is regional. It is legal tender in some countries and refused at the border of others. He is a king in the synagogue social hall and a stranger in the Manhattan office, and the two facts do not contradict each other, because they belong to different markets.
The Jewish Book Council circuit deserves its own line, because it is a field in its own right, with its own capital and its own gatekeepers. The author tours, the synagogue book clubs, the communal prizes, the readers who treat a serious novel on a Jewish theme as an act of cultural maintenance. A writer can hold real standing there that the secular center cannot see and would not value. Kaplan’s subjects, the converso, the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish woman behind the American songbook, give him a strong position in that field. He banks capital there that does not spend anywhere else, and a man rich in one field and poor in the next is the ordinary condition Bourdieu spent his life describing.
So when Kaplan says he is a novelist and not a historical novelist, he is not making a remark about taste. He is making a move. Bourdieu calls it position-taking, the public claim a writer stakes about where he stands. The refusal of the genre label is an attempt to relocate, to carry himself out of the dominated subfield and into the autonomous center, to be read as a writer of literature who happens to set his work in the past rather than a genre writer doing his genre. The claim runs against his own trajectory, against the indie-to-commercial arc and the regional awards, which is what gives it force. A man asserts most loudly the membership his position leaves in doubt.
And here the frame turns on the work, because the structure of Kaplan’s position in his field reappears, exact, in the men he writes. Luis de Santángel is chancellor of Aragon, royal financier, a man at court with the king’s ear, and a converso, grandson of Jews dragged to the font, carrying a despised identity under a powerful office. He holds high standing and a hidden membership that do not match. He survives by performing his belonging to the dominant group while keeping the dominated self concealed, saying the words the center requires and meaning a private thing beneath them. Kaplan returns to this figure across all three books, the man whose social position and whose true identity pull against each other, the man who must pass.
Bourdieu would name this a homology, the same structure printed at two levels of the social world. The writer holds the credentials of the center and works a genre the center looks down on, claims membership above while his position sits below, performs belonging to the consecrated world while his real capital is good only in the dominated markets. The converso is that condition raised to the pitch of life and death. Kaplan did not draw the parallel on purpose. He did not have to. A man writes from the place he occupies, and the place leaves its print on the page whether he wills it or not. The chancellor who is also the secret Jew is the author’s social position rendered as a character, his trajectory through the field translated into a man at a Spanish court who knows that the wrong answer about who he is will cost him the office and then the life.
Return to the two rooms. In the social hall a hundred readers treat him as a major novelist, and they are right, inside the field where they read. In the office above the avenue the name has never landed, and that man is right too, inside the field where he judges. The novelist moves between the countries carrying capital that spends in one and not the other, claiming the citizenship of the center while banking the wealth of the margin, and he writes, again and again, the man who lives exactly that way, who holds the office and hides the blood, who passes at court and prays in secret, and who learns that the recognition a man receives depends on which border he is standing at when he is asked to show his papers.
July 15, 2010. I just finished reading this terrific new novel by Mitchell James Kaplan.
We talk by phone today.
Luke: “Mitchell, when you were a child, did you want to be a novelist when you grew up?”
Mitchell: “Yes. Certainly from the age of 15 at the latest. Books were my refuge.”
Luke: “Refuge from what?”
Mitchell: “I grew up in the late ’60s, early ’70s. They were my refuge from a dysfunctional world. I think of fiction as a way of approximating truth, a way to try to find something beyond the dysfunction of the world that makes sense.”
Luke: “I heard someone say that art [well, pornography] is a solace from the frustrations of real life.”
“Where did you grow up?”
Mitchell: “My father lived in Beverly Hills. He was a cardiologist at UCLA. My mother lived in Munich, Germany. I went to high school at a boarding school near Santa Barbara called the Cate school. Then I went away to college at Yale. Then I lived in Paris for seven years.”
“Southern California never felt like home to me.”
Luke: “What has felt like home?”
Mitchell: “Hmm. I’ve had many places that have been homes…but I can’t say that any place in the world is really my home.”
Luke: “Except perhaps literature?”
Mitchell: “Yes. I must say, Luke, I wasn’t expecting this kind of question. Fine with me but I feel like I am revealing a lot about myself here. The interviews that I’ve had so far have not gone this direction but I know that you’re a special kind of guy.”
Luke: “Where were you in the social pecking order in high school?”
Mitchell: “I was outside of it completely. I got very good grades. I earned some respect from some people for that. I was very socially awkward. That’s another reason I could find comfort with books.”
Luke: “When you graduated Yale, what did you most want to accomplish with your life?”
Mitchell: “I wanted to be a writer.
“I went to France after college. I was living with a very powerful family, very much at the top of French industry and government. I lived in their slave’s quarters at the top of the building. It was a five-floor typical French apartment building. I lived at the top in the garret. My sinecure consisted of having breakfast with the kids and speaking English with them. They spoke English fluently. They had a chauffeur and a maid and everything else. They just wanted them to stay in practice. Each year they hired a Yale graduate and a Harvard graduate, not snobs or anything, and one of them had breakfast with the kids and one of them had lunch.
“I spent most of my time reading and trying to write a novel.
“There was a man I knew in college, I guess I’d call him a mentor, his name was William Styron. An author. He had been very kind to me and very interested in my ambitions when I was in college.
“One day I saw that William Styron was going to be on a book discussion program on French TV. I went to the studio and pretended that I belonged there. I walked right into the television studio with my briefcase and in it I had the manuscript of this book I had been typing. I sat through the show and watched him discuss Sophie’s Choice.
“Afterward, I went up to him and he greeted me and he agreed to read my first attempt at a novel. And he loved it. He sent me this beautiful letter, saying he didn’t know if this book would be published or not but that I write beautifully and I have the stuff of a novelist and he’s going to show it to his editor just in case. The editor did reject it. I was devastated. I still have that letter [from William Styron]. I needed it to continue with this dream though I did take a long detour working in the film industry.
“I think William Styron was responding to that I take immense pleasure in the manipulation of words.”
Luke: “Why did you spend so much time in the film industry?”
Mitchell: “I came back to America with my wife. We came to Los Angeles for my sister’s wedding. I didn’t have enough money to get back to France, which I considered my home.
“I just happened to know someone who knew someone who was just starting to make a movie called The Couch Trip. They hired me as a PA. The director, Michael Ritchie, and I hit it off and I ended up working for him for several years. I ended up working on screenplays. I sold several of my own. None were produced but we made some decent money. I learned a lot about dramaturgy and how to develop characters. The other stuff I thought I had learned earlier in my life about style stayed in the background.”
Luke: “There’s nothing like a screenplay to learn discipline and structure.”
“What’s the story behind your new novel?”
Mitchell: “I came up with the idea while living in Paris. I was working as a translator and struggling to get by. I had a pass to the largest library in the world. I had to go to some trouble to get the card so I felt so privileged that I spent a lot of time there reading whenever I could. I came across a list of the those who sailed with Columbus in 1492. Every name had where the person came from and what he did on board but there was one man who served no purpose at all on a sailing ship in the 15th Century — Luis De Torres. He was dead weight, which was a very uncommon thing in a crowded vessel. I asked why did Columbus bring this guy along? He was his translator. I did some more research. I looked at Columbus’s journals.
“I found out this guy spoke Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish. So I asked myself, where did Columbus think he was going? He needed someone who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew? Two dead languages at the time. Then I eventually came to the realization that Columbus was going to paradise and leaving a world that was the opposite of paradise.
“No one had developed his voyage in this context in a work of fiction that I was aware of.”
“After 18 years in the film industry, my wife and I and our two kids lived in Big Bear Lake. We had a little private plane and I was flying down the hill when I needed to. I finally said to my wife, this career is not satisfying. It’s not really going anywhere. Who knows if I’ll sell another screenplay.
“I’d always wanted to be a novelist. I’d never wanted to work in the film industry. With my wife’s blessing, I set about to write this.
“The first draft was written from the point of view of Luis de Torres. Only after I completed that draft did I realize that he wasn’t the central character. His point of view was limited. The stage was much bigger than anything he could’ve experienced.
“Then I wrote a second draft with Luis de Santangel [chancellor of Aragon] as the main character. After that, it was just a process of refinement.”
Luke: “Was there any dramatic difference in being a Jew in any of the places you’ve lived?”
Mitchell: “Very much. I don’t relate well to the culture of Los Angeles. The people I knew placed so much importance on the type of car you drive, and whether you lived north of Sunset Blvd or south of Sunset Blvd, or north of Wilshire and south of Wilshire. A preoccupation with money and status. Maybe you’ve found a niche outside of that, but growing up as the son of a physician in Beverly Hills, I didn’t find that niche.”
Luke: “What was high school like?”
Mitchell: “It was an Episcopalian high school and we had to go to chapel three times a week. It was very uncomfortable. Not in terms of faith because at that point in my life, faith didn’t mean much to me at all but definitely in terms of not being in the club.”
Mitchell says he has mainly experienced anti-Semitism from Jews. “I didn’t have to define myself as Jewish in France because everyone else was busy doing it for me. France is a Catholic country as much as Israel is a Jewish country. Everyone [in France] wants to know what group you belong to.
“In the top echelon of French society, there’s a feeling that Jews can be visitors but they can never be members. I felt like I was an American in the 1930s where the Protestant establishment might have Jewish friends and advisers [but no members]. The Jews are there as guests.
“The French media has very biased reporting on the Middle East. One of the terms they use for Jews in France is Israelite. They consider it to be a euphemism. They think that calling someone a Jew is an insult. You’re an appointed ambassador of Israel whether you like it or not.
“The guy who invented the concept of denying the Holocaust was a French professor Robert Faurisson. I had very close friends in France who talked about him as though he were credible…and isn’t it true that we don’t really know the truth about the Holocaust. I didn’t come to blows with anybody… I learned to appreciate what was good in them and not just dismiss them even though I thought some of their ideas were crazy.”
Luke: “Do the French have a weakness for conspiracy theories? I remember a book in France that denied 9/11 was very popular in France.”
Mitchell: “The first book that came out saying that it was a Jewish conspiracy was a number one bestseller.”
Luke: “Did you think about a happy ending for your book?”
Mitchell: “I showed it to a friend of mine who’s a big shot Hollywood screenwriter and he just hated the ending. I didn’t even take that comment seriously. I was guided by history.”