{"id":196360,"date":"2026-06-28T15:17:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T23:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196360"},"modified":"2026-06-28T16:04:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T00:04:41","slug":"jon-papernick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196360","title":{"rendered":"Jon Papernick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Papernick<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

His family belonged to Holy Blossom Temple<\/a>, the flagship congregation of Canadian Reform Judaism. His childhood rabbi, W. Gunther Plaut<\/a> (1912\u20132012), 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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<\/a> (1922\u20131995), shot by a young religious Jew who believed the prime minister had betrayed the land. The Oslo peace process<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

That conviction shapes The Ascent of Eli Israel, his 2002 debut from Arcade<\/a>. 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<\/a> gave the book a full-page review and described a muscular certainty in his best work. Publishers Weekly<\/a> starred it. A first collection rarely lands that way. His did.<\/p>\n

He kept teaching while he wrote. He held workshops at Pratt Institute<\/a>, Brandeis University<\/a>, Bar-Ilan University<\/a> in Israel, and GrubStreet<\/a> in Boston, and he joined the low-residency MFA faculty at Albertus Magnus College<\/a>. In 2007 he came to Emerson College<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

His second collection, There Is No Other, came from Exile Editions<\/a> 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<\/a> veterans, Holocaust<\/a> 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<\/a> (b. 1977) wrote that each story lands a punch that leaves the reader revising what he thought love and life meant.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, who wrote as Mendele Mocher Sforim (1835\u20131917), 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> wants him as an informant. His mother, who left him at twelve, returns to warn him off.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Ian McEwan<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Then he turned, hard, toward home.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He names his ancestors when asked. Franz Kafka<\/a> (1883\u20131924), Bernard Malamud<\/a> (1914\u20131986), Philip Roth (1933\u20132018), Nathan Englander<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

The latest turn came on October 7, 2023, and it came at him through his students.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> over an American college. The father feared what waited and said he had never been prouder.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Readers can find his fiction, essays, and current projects at jonpapernick.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Ruler and the Book<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker (1924\u20131974) 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.<\/p>\n

Jon Papernick runs from two deaths at once, and his whole shelf is the running.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Calabrian under omert\u00e0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Then the ground moved.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Author Jon Papernick<\/a><\/font><\/p>\n

I call Jon Papernick (JonPapernick.com<\/a>) in Waltham, Massachusetts Sunday afternoon, July 2, 2006.<\/p>\n

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…"<\/p>\n

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "You'd never say that to anybody? Even if their work sucked?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "Not as a teacher. I'd say they hadn't fulfilled the ambitions of the story.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Jon: "Wow. I've never made close to that and I've never blogged."<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Jon: "I didn't get that question. When my first book (The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories<\/a>) came out, I wish I'd gotten that question. I got a great review<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "How were you raised Jewishly and where are you today?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "I went to synagogue twice a year and hated it. The biggest and oldest Reform temple in Canada – Holy Blossom<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"I did it in Hebrew but I didn't know what it meant.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

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

"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.<\/p>\n

"My wife is the daughter of a Reform rabbi."<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did you get your money's worth from Sarah Lawrence?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "At what age did you become interested in girls?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "Twelve."<\/p>\n

Luke: "At what age did you become a man?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "Seventeen."<\/p>\n

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

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Tell me about you and God."<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What did you love and hate about the practice of journalism?"<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"I use my fiction tools when I write my journalism now.<\/p>\n

"I like to craft my stories. When you write for a wire service, you have to bang those stories out.<\/p>\n

"But I did get to meet Yassir Arafat, which was bizarre."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Other things you loved about it?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "Not really, otherwise I'd still be doing it."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What do you love about writing fiction?"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What kind of sexual wattage has your writing created in women?"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"Sometimes I think I can count all the people who've ever hit on me with two hands."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What do you love and hate about teaching?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What's the situation with your novel, Who by Fire, Who by Blood?"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

Luke: "Is your book linear [and realistic]?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "How much research do you do for your fiction?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "At what stage does your wife [of four years] read your work?"<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Jon Papernick<\/a>'s The Ascent of Eli Israel<\/a> Makes Me Want To Vomit<\/font><\/p>\n

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

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).<\/p>\n

I call Jon Wednesday morning, July 12.<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Jon: "That's great. Can I get it in writing?<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "My stomach wrenched up from the time the old man molested the boy in the first story."<\/p>\n

Jon: "And that's one of the nicer stories."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Why do you choose the material you choose?"<\/p>\n

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?"<\/p>\n

Luke: "Yes."<\/p>\n

Jon: "There are a lot of disturbed people in that city.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"I just turned it into a one-act play.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

I groan.<\/p>\n

Jon: "I must be a dark person. I close my eyes and I start writing and my subconscious starts to spew things out.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

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

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.'"<\/p>\n

I dislike profanity but I hate the s-word (and toilet humor).<\/p>\n

Luke: "Isn't a dark belief in life the logical result of no belief in God?"<\/p>\n

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

Jon's a deist. "Somebody said, 'Suicidal people don't write novels because hopeless people don't create.'<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: With what emotion did you write your stories?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "This book gives reasons for why you don't live in Israel. Nobody would want to live here."<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "I can't imagine any sane person wanting to live in the world of this book."<\/p>\n

Jon: "I guess you're right.<\/p>\n

"Maybe there's a touch of madness in me?"<\/p>\n

Luke: "As a journalist, you have to seek out these aberrant characters?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "As a fiction writer, even more so. As a journalist, whoever is there to speak to you, you take.<\/p>\n

"I am drawn to madness in my writing, to the clash of religions with a tinge of madness.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"A lot of Flannery O'Connor's characters are clearly mad."<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

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.'<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"It was the same yeshiva David Koresh went to."<\/p>\n

Luke: "I didn't know David Koresh went to Aish HaTorah."<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

"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.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"I like to question and questioning was not really acceptable in that milieu.<\/p>\n

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

"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.'"<\/p>\n

Luke: "I don't think you could've read this book if you had your baby by your side?"<\/p>\n

Jon: "Probably true. Four of the seven stories have young people brutally abused.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Luke: "This book seems to be very much the product of a single man."<\/p>\n

Jon: "Are you talking about the anger?"<\/p>\n

Luke: "I don't picture a happily married man writing this book."<\/p>\n

Jon: "I think you're right.<\/p>\n

"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.<\/p>\n

"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?'<\/p>\n

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

We chat about MFAs.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

We chat about Nathan Englander and his new novel.<\/p>\n

Jon: "I do wish him success though every writer's success kills a little bit of me.<\/p>\n

"He's a slow writer. It took him about six years to write those eight stories in his first collection.<\/p>\n

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

"So did you like my stories?"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"It's not what I'd choose to read on Shabbos."<\/p>\n

Jon: "I warn people it's not bedtime reading."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jewish-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t