{"id":196418,"date":"2026-06-28T17:49:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T01:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196418"},"modified":"2026-06-28T18:11:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T02:11:39","slug":"leora-skolkin-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196418","title":{"rendered":"Leora Skolkin-Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

The father comes into the bedroom at night to talk about Samuel Beckett<\/a> (1906-1989).<\/p>\n

Leora Skolkin-Smith<\/a> (b. 1952) is eleven and lives between an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Pound Ridge, New York. Her father is an entertainment lawyer. He represents Beckett and Marlon Brando<\/a> (1924-2004) and Federico Fellini<\/a> (1920-1993) and Carol Channing<\/a> (1921-2019), and he counts himself among the first Americans to back Waiting for Godot. He sits at the edge of his daughter’s bed. He tells her how a writer reaches the depths of existence and still lands the work on a Broadway stage and on a shelf in a bookstore. He keeps coming back, night after night, to say it again. The girl is hooked before she understands what she has agreed to.<\/p>\n

She grows up on the stories that travel home with him. Fellini, the wild man he meets in Italy, the director who loves women. Brando, who once throws the father’s briefcase across a street and calls after him, “Fetch, lawyer-boy.” The daughter listens. The men her father serves are the largest figures in American culture, and they treat her father as a fixer, and the girl files all of it away. She learns young that art and status sit in the same room and that the room is not always kind.<\/p>\n

Every three years the family flies the other direction, to Jerusalem, where the mother was born before there was a State of Israel.<\/p>\n

Jerusalem is the second world, and it does not match the first. The mother’s family carries the war inside the house. They speak of survival as the only subject. To them the personal questions of an American girl mean little against the question of whether the family, the people, the country, will exist next year. Skolkin-Smith later calls their vision an absolutism, a chauvinism, a pressure too large for a child to digest. She loves them and cannot breathe around them. She moves between Pound Ridge and Jerusalem and belongs to neither. The split becomes the wound, and the wound becomes the work.<\/p>\n

She does not go straight to the page. She acts first. She spends years in the theater, and the theater teaches her what the bedroom lectures promised: rhythm, silence, the weight a line carries when an actor holds it one beat too long. The training never leaves her prose.<\/p>\n

Then comes the breakdown.<\/p>\n

As a young woman she suffers a serious hospitalization. She lives on the locked ward. She wears the seclusion-room dress that runs from neck to thigh. She sleeps in a common dorm among other patients and listens to them at night. She comes out of the hospital with the one thing she cannot yet shape into a book: a self that has been to the edge and back. She tries. She writes two novels in these years and finishes neither into anything she can use. She calls herself a boxer with words in this period, punchy and defensive, swinging at the page to prove she is a writer at all.<\/p>\n

She enters Sarah Lawrence College<\/a> as a transfer into her own life. She is a sophomore, insecure, full of longings that ordinary Americans around her do not seem to share. She takes a writing class. The teacher is Grace Paley<\/a> (1922-2007).<\/p>\n

Paley runs the room the way Paley runs everything, as a combative pacifist with a heart too large for the space. She reads the girl’s mess and does not flinch from it. She does the opposite. She tells the girl the mess has a shape, that the political horror of the Middle East can enter fiction through a single confused family, that Jerusalem can live on the page in the girl’s own words and not in her mother’s. The instruction lands like a key turning. For the first time Skolkin-Smith sits at the center of her own world instead of the edge of someone else’s.<\/p>\n

Paley’s apartment in the West Village becomes a destination. Skolkin-Smith and her friends call it headquarters. They go there to be mothered. Paley feeds them and argues with them and sends them back out with a dictum the younger writer repeats for the rest of her life: if you do not like something in the world, go change it. Skolkin-Smith earns her bachelor’s degree and her Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence and stays on with a graduate teaching fellowship. She studies with Susan Sontag<\/a> (1933-2004) as well, and Sontag hardens her sense of the ambition fiction can hold. But Paley is the one who saved her, and she says so for fifty years.<\/p>\n

The world that taught her about Broadway and the bookstore now teaches her about rejection.<\/p>\n

She is twenty-five, out of graduate school, and an editor named Karen Braziller options her at Persea Books<\/a>. Braziller wants the entertaining version, the recognizable arc of mental illness, the story a reader can follow without strain. Skolkin-Smith hands her the mess instead. They have a contract. They part anyway, because the writer will not take the editorial cure. She files the parting under Paley training and moves on.<\/p>\n

She admires Elisabeth Sifton<\/a>, a distinguished editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/a>, and Sifton almost takes her first book. Then Sifton turns it down for want of narrative drive. The rejection cuts deep because the writer respects the source. So she goes back to the bare frame of the thing and teaches herself what narrative drive is, not for that book alone but for every book after. The lesson holds. She decides, in the Paley spirit, that she alone judges what fails and what survives, not an outside gatekeeper, and that the only standards she answers to are whether the work is true and whether it is her own.<\/p>\n

The first novel arrives in 2005. Edges: O Israel, O Palestine sets two runaway teenage lovers loose in the Israel of the early 1960s, before the Six-Day War<\/a>, and sends them across into Jordanian territory. Paley selects it for her own imprint at Glad Day Books, edits it line by line, and then nominates it for the PEN\/Faulkner Award<\/a> and the PEN\/Ernest Hemingway Award<\/a>. The novel does not argue a politics. It puts ordinary people inside a history that is breaking around them and watches what the history does to a body and a family. The Jewish Book Council<\/a> selects it. The National Women’s Studies Association lists it. Tovah Feldshuh<\/a> (b. 1952) records the audiobook and earns an AudioFile Earphones Award for the reading. The Bloomsbury Review later names Edges among its favorite books of twenty-five years. Producers option the film, retitle it The Fragile Mistress, and plan a shoot in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, though the picture has not reached the screen.<\/p>\n

She is not finished with those characters. In 2011 she publishes The Fragile Mistress, which begins as a sequel and turns into a rebuilding of Edges from the studs. She pushes deeper into the daughter’s fractured mind, the mother who will not let go, the sex, the residue that political violence leaves in a private life. The Israeli and the Palestinian appear as people with interiors rather than as positions in an argument. Princeton University<\/a> later places Edges, The Fragile Mistress, and her next novel inside its Fertile Crescent Moon series on women writers and the conflict, setting her among Israeli and Palestinian voices.<\/p>\n

The next novel turns the camera inward. Hystera (2012) leaves the geopolitics and walks onto the ward. Its narrator, Lillian Weill, blames herself for the accident that kills her father, drifts through failed affairs and ruined friendships, and retreats into delusion inside a New York psychiatric hospital in the 1970s, the decade when Patty Hearst<\/a> (b. 1954) becomes Tanya the revolutionary on the front pages. Skolkin-Smith builds the book from the inside of the illness rather than from the chart at the foot of the bed. She wants the reader to live in the patient’s mind, not to diagnose it. Hystera wins the 2012 USA Book Award for Fiction and the 2012 Global E-Book Award and reaches the finals for the International Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards. Kirkus Reviews<\/a> calls the prose sharp and surprising.<\/p>\n

Then she goes quiet for more than a decade as a novelist, and returns on March 6, 2024, with Stealing Faith, published by Story Plant Gold. The novel follows a young writer and the older, famous writer who remakes her life, and it draws without disguise on the years under Paley. It opens at dawn in August 1988 on a Vermont farm, the older woman down to bones and baldness after seventy-nine years in New York, and it reaches back through the narrator’s own months on a locked ward, the FDR Drive at her shoulder, her psychiatrist husband holding her through it. The book is about apprenticeship and creative inheritance and the sexism a woman writer met inside a prestigious American university in the late 1960s, when the literary establishment ran on men. A 2026 interview in Vol. 1 Brooklyn returns once more to Paley, and the writer says the same thing she has said for decades. She wishes everyone had a Grace Paley.<\/p>\n

The Paley dictum stays operational. Skolkin-Smith does not keep her literature inside the literary world.<\/p>\n

She and her husband, a psychiatrist, build creative-writing programs for psychiatric patients across New York City. Their nonprofit runs in hospital after hospital for roughly a decade. She designs the work for people in the position she once held, on the ward, in the dress, and she wins cultural and national grants to carry it in. She teaches writing to homeless women. She helps found the Emmett Till \/ Anne Frank Project, named for a Black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955, Emmett Till<\/a> (1941-1955), and a Jewish girl murdered by the Reich, Anne Frank<\/a> (1929-1945), and the project brings Black and Jewish young people together to read each other’s histories of hatred and survival and to talk across them.<\/p>\n

Her criticism keeps pace with her fiction. She writes for The Washington Post<\/a>, Critical Mass, Psychology Today, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Brooklyn Rail<\/a>, and serves as a contributing editor at ReadySteadyBook. The tribute she files for the Post when Paley dies in 2007 opens at headquarters, the West Village apartment, the mother of all those needy female selves.<\/p>\n

She knows her own lineage and names it. She reads Marguerite Duras<\/a> (1914-1996) and takes from her the sparse, repeating, near-cinematic line that renders trauma by suggestion and leaves the rest in the white space. She reads Clarice Lispector<\/a> (1920-1977), Elfriede Jelinek<\/a> (b. 1946), and Violette Leduc<\/a> (1907-1972), and from all of them she takes a permission to put the interior life first and the plot second. One interviewer hears Paul Bowles<\/a> (1910-1999) in the merciless distance of her sentences and Ana\\u00efs Nin<\/a> (1903-1977) in their rawness. She refuses the fashions of the market. She will not write the entertaining version of madness, the version Braziller wanted, and she pays the commercial price for the refusal and judges the cost worth it by her own internal court.<\/p>\n

Place her, then, in contemporary American fiction as a writer of the seam between the private and the historical, who learned in one childhood room that art and power share a table and in another, Paley’s, that a damaged self can become a public instrument. Her novels gather feminist concern, mental illness, Jewish memory, and Middle Eastern history into books that resist the side a reader might want them to take. She does not deliver verdicts. She shows how a war arrives inside a daughter, how a mother’s absolutism becomes a girl’s silence, how a hospital becomes a country and a country becomes a hospital. The father promised her a writer could reach the depths and still reach the stage. She kept the first half of the promise and let the second go.<\/p>\n

Leora Skolkin-Smith in the Field<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> builds his account of art on a single division. The literary field splits into two poles. At the heteronomous pole, art answers to the market, and success reads in sales, contracts, and the size of the audience. At the autonomous pole, art answers only to other artists and to the field’s own history, and success reads in prestige that pays nothing and lasts. The two poles run inverted economies. The autonomous pole treats commercial failure as proof of purity and treats the refusal of money as the surest route to the one capital it honors, the symbolic kind. Leora Skolkin-Smith’s life sits inside this map with almost nothing left over, because she is born at one pole and spends her career walking to the other.<\/p>\n

Her father holds the heteronomous pole in its richest form. He is an entertainment lawyer who represents Beckett, Brando, Fellini, Channing. He helps carry Waiting for Godot to a wide American audience. His whole work is the conversion of art into box office and back, the placement of difficult genius onto a Broadway stage and a bookstore shelf at the same time. He sits at his daughter’s bed and tells her this is the goal, the depths of existence and the paying house in one motion. The lesson is a position-taking, though the girl cannot name it. He teaches her that art and commerce share a table, and that the lawyer sets the terms.<\/p>\n

What the father gives her, in Bourdieu’s accounting, is cultural capital in its embodied form. She grows up easy around the largest figures in the culture. She hears Fellini described from the inside, collects the Brando stories, learns the manners of a house where great art is the family trade. This inheritance is the engine of everything that follows, because cultural capital of this depth can be reinvested anywhere in the field. She takes the inheritance and turns it against the half of the house that earned it. She moves the capital from the commercial pole to the pole that despises commerce. The move is available to her because the father’s world gave her the means to make it.<\/p>\n

The trajectory runs through the theater first, then through a breakdown and a hospital, then into Sarah Lawrence College. There she meets Grace Paley, and the consecration begins.<\/p>\n

Consecration, for Bourdieu, is the transfer of symbolic capital from a figure who holds it to a newcomer who does not. Paley holds a great deal. She is a canonical writer, later a state poet laureate, a name the autonomous field honors. She reads the younger woman’s work and selects it for her own imprint at Glad Day Books. She edits it line by line. She nominates it for the PEN\/Faulkner Award and the PEN\/Ernest Hemingway Award. Each act moves prestige from Paley’s account into Skolkin-Smith’s. Susan Sontag adds more from the same pole. The Sarah Lawrence teaching fellowship adds the institutional stamp of the academy. Years on, Princeton places her novels in a humanities series beside established Israeli and Palestinian voices, and the university consecrates her a second time. The prizes that Hystera wins, the USA Book Award and the Global E-Book Award, sit lower in the hierarchy of consecration, but they run the same errand. They pay in standing.<\/p>\n

The economic account stays thin throughout, and the thinness is structural rather than accidental. The autonomous pole asks its players for the appearance of disinterest, the show of caring nothing for money, and Skolkin-Smith offers the real article. She marries a psychiatrist. She says the two of them chose callings that earn little and that money worries her as costs rise. She publishes with small presses, Glad Day, Fiction Studio Books, Story Plant. The autonomous field rewards this relation to economic capital, because disavowal of the market reads as proof that the artist serves art. She has the disavowal, and she has the scarcity behind it, and the field counts both in her favor.<\/p>\n

The defining gesture comes early. At twenty-five, fresh from graduate school, she is optioned by Karen Braziller at Persea Books. Braziller wants the recognizable version, the entertaining arc of mental illness, the story a reader follows without strain. Skolkin-Smith hands her the difficult thing instead and will not take the editorial cure. They part with a contract on the table. Read through Bourdieu, this is the autonomous pole refusing the heteronomous demand in one clean motion. The writer turns down the readable book and the smoother path to sales, and the refusal becomes symbolic profit. She files it, in her own words, under the training she received from Paley. Elisabeth Sifton (1939-2019) at Farrar, Straus and Giroux supplies the matching case from the other direction. Sifton nearly takes the first book, then declines it for want of narrative drive. The respected gatekeeper’s rejection sends the writer back to learn her craft on the field’s own terms rather than the market’s.<\/p>\n

Her later statements formalize the position. She says she alone judges what fails and what survives, not an outside gatekeeper, and that her only standards are whether the work is true and whether it is her own. This is the autonomous field’s foundational claim stated by one of its members. The field becomes autonomous to the degree that it generates its own criteria and recognizes no judge outside itself, and the artist who says she answers only to an internal court speaks the field’s purest doctrine. Bourdieu calls the deep investment that keeps a player in the game its illusio, the shared belief that the stakes are worth the chase. Skolkin-Smith’s belief that being true and being one’s own settles everything is that illusio in plain speech. The field produces the conviction that produces the artist.<\/p>\n

The structure of the work answers to the structure of the position. Bourdieu calls this homology, the rhyme between where an artist stands in the field and what the art looks like on the page. Her fiction puts subjective consciousness ahead of plot, suggestion ahead of exposition, the fractured interior ahead of the clean line of story. She refuses to assign the Israeli and the Palestinian to ideological positions and renders them as people with insides instead. She names Marguerite Duras as her model and takes from her the sparse, repeating line that leaves the rest in white space. Each of these is a position-taking within what Bourdieu calls the space of possibles, the menu of available moves at a given moment in the field’s history. The aesthetic of suggestion opposes the commercial arc the way the autonomous pole opposes the heteronomous one. So the refusal she makes to Braziller at the level of career and the refusal she makes to conventional plot at the level of form are the same refusal, performed twice. The narrative drive Sifton asks for and the entertainment Braziller asks for name the heteronomous demand, and the writer declines it in the contract and on the page alike.<\/p>\n

Place her, then, and the map closes neatly. A habitus formed in a high-culture home at the commercial pole. An inheritance of cultural capital reinvested against the very commerce that produced it. A trajectory carried by consecration from Paley, Sontag, the academy, and the award apparatus. An economic account kept thin, by circumstance and by the field’s reward for thinness. A body of work whose form rhymes with its maker’s position. Field theory accounts for the shape of the career and the shape of the prose with little waste.<\/p>\n

It runs dry at one wall. The frame reaches her position, her trajectory, her capital, the rhyme between her standing and her style. It cannot reach the ward. The hospitalization, the seclusion-room dress, the interior she spends four novels trying to render, these the theory registers as biography it has no way to convert into a position. Bourdieu explains why she writes against the market. He goes silent on what she writes against in herself. The field gives the account of the writer. The patient is left over.<\/p>\n

Why This Wall Of Silence About Mother-Daughter Sexuality?<\/font><\/p>\n

That was the most shocking part of Leora Skolkin-Smith's novel Edges<\/a>. I've never seen this explored in English-language literature.<\/p>\n

I call Leora Sunday night, July 30, 2006. "I can't think of another novel about a girl-mother almost-incestuous relationship."<\/p>\n

Leora: "That was a large part of the reason I took to paper because I wasn't seeing that in [English-language] literature either."<\/p>\n

Luke: "I can't think of a single example."<\/p>\n

Leora: "There's an absence of that complex ambiguity in the relationship between girls and mothers. That bothered me. A female's progression into womanhood is dependent on that relationship.<\/p>\n

"I've seen it represented in older works, in French works, in European authors, in Elfriede Jelinek. She wrote The Piano Teacher<\/a>. She's fierce about that.<\/p>\n

"I grew weary with the standard answers about child abuse and what incest was.<\/p>\n

"I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten from women who said, 'Thank you. You just wrote about my mother and me.'<\/p>\n

"It's a fearful place to go.<\/p>\n

"I got a lot of support from men who said it was fascinating to read the female point of view. 'I've read a lot of Philip Roth and he's so honest.' But women have been holding back for many reasons, including fear of damaging the feminist movement.<\/p>\n

"I know a lot of people simply put the book down. They couldn't go there."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Is there something more Israeli or European in this openness?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "I think so. I'm only half-American. My mother is Israeli. The literature I've always read is European, with a lot about the body and sexuality and symbiosis. There's a strong Puritanical streak here with a different view of sexuality and where it belongs."<\/p>\n

Luke: Toni Bentley's book The Surrender<\/a>, about anal sex, got big play for probing the last sexual taboo. I'm thinking there are a lot more important and bigger taboos about sexuality than anal sex such as a daughter's awareness of her mother's boundary-less sexuality.<\/p>\n

Leora: "Thank you. In America, yes, we have a lot of psychoanalysis, but a lot of it is suspect and a lot given to clear-cut incest with clear-cut boundaries. There's just an entirely different sensibility and way of looking at life [in America]. If you bring up the Clinton incident in Europe, people don't even know what the fuss was.<\/p>\n

"What about Australian literature?"<\/p>\n

Luke: "Not big on mother-daughter sex."<\/p>\n

Leora: "I know how terrifying it is, but you just go with what you have to do."<\/p>\n

Luke: "There's a ton of stuff about boys wanting to have sex with their mothers. There's nothing new with that."<\/p>\n

Leora: "I'm a big fan of Proust. He's a great teacher of complexity and ambiguity."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Is your mother [born in 1920] still alive?"<\/p>\n

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

Luke: "And she's got all her senses?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "No. She's in a home. She has dementia.<\/p>\n

"She did read my book. She loved it. She keeps it on her night table.<\/p>\n

"She grew up in Palestine but was she educated in Austria. She said to me, 'You were honest.' That's her way of judging what you do as an artist.<\/p>\n

"Grace Paley is the arch-feminist and she thought it was fascinating to see the daughter's side of what was going on.<\/p>\n

"A lot of people see it as a negative portrait of my mother. I don't see it that way. She was just a complex, charismatic, problematic figure."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Really screwed up."<\/p>\n

Leora: "Yes. Definitely of the body. That's a problem for people."<\/p>\n

Luke: "We don't like mothers who have so few boundaries with their daughters."<\/p>\n

Leora: "Then I got fascinated with this whole issue of boundaries in the Middle East. That's all they ever fight about."<\/p>\n

"Part of the complexity of my childhood is that every year we went to Israel for three months. My father is a New Yorker [American Jew, atheist, intellectual] and he made sure we knew her world."<\/p>\n

Leora has a sister three years older and a brother three years younger. "My sister just hates her guts. The boundaries between a boy and his mother are different."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Was he her favorite?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Oh yeah. He could do no wrong."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did your mother help the Haganah<\/a>?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Oh yes."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What are the differences, if any, between your mother and the mother in your book?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "That's a hard question."<\/p>\n

In other words, very little.<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did your mother have these lack of boundaries?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Oh yes. She still does.<\/p>\n

"I began to heal myself from that by understanding the culture she was raised in."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What was your mother's reputation in New York?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "It was very difficult for me growing up in Pound Ridge<\/a>. Not only were we the only Jewish family, my mother was the only Israeli. She was an oddity. But everyone admired her.<\/p>\n

"There were a lot of innuendoes about my mother being a primitive. She wasn't like the other Westchester housewives.<\/p>\n

"I feel like I'll never have to write another book about my mother as long as I live because that was a very complete portrait."<\/p>\n

Luke: "I can't think of any Jewish community in the U.S. who wouldn't ostracize your mother."<\/p>\n

Leora: "Yes. The Jewish Book Council selected my book and publicized it but they had trouble with it because it didn't fit in to anything. It doesn't fit anyone's conception of Judaism or Israel."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Was she physically affectionate with a lot of people?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Yes. That's the Israeli way. Just think of the Italians or the Spanish. Somehow people just understand that Italians are like that.<\/p>\n

"Jewish Americans are very different from Israelis. They are very reserved."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Was your mother sleeping around while you were growing up?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Oh no. She stayed loyal to my father."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did your parents have a good marriage?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "I'd have to say no. It was a terrible marriage.<\/p>\n

"I lost my father early in my life. We were in a car accident together. I was 17. He had permanent brain damage. He lived for six years. My mother brought him home from the hospital and looked after him.<\/p>\n

"It was my college interview. He was driving me home from Vermont. He had a stroke [at the wheel] while we were going about 50mph."<\/p>\n

"People ask me if my mother was homosexual. My answer is that she was polymorphous."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did your mother cling to you?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Oh God. Yes.<\/p>\n

"The French sense of family is incredibly cloying. French parents don't visit their children. They stay over. I don't think my cousins have left the home where my grandmother was born. Americans are concerned with independence."<\/p>\n

Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece, writes on Amazon.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Leora Skolkin-Smith's brief novel follows fourteen-year-old Liana Bialik on a trip to Israel with her mother and sister in 1963. The three women have left their Westchester home to attend the reburial of Leona's maternal uncle, whose grave is to be moved to the Israeli side of the country's border with Jordan. At the same time an extended visit with her birth family is intended as a comfort to Liana's mother after the recent death–by apparent suicide–of her husband. The tragic stories behind the deaths of these two men, Liana's father and uncle, though only hinted at in the book, form the backdrop to Liana's coming-of-age story.<\/p>\n

Set amidst the barbed-wire borders of pre-1967 Jerusalem, Edges is more concerned with the figurative boundaries between Liana and her mother, whom Liana simultaneously loves and is repelled by. Certainly there is much in her mother, as Skolkin-Smith describes her, to send one screaming: "Her body was usually without undergarments which gave the sheets a hot, wettish odor. Her hair and face creams gave off a strong, fruity smell and tempered the raw coarse aromas that got loose from her flesh." In this and other passages the author paints Liana's mother as aesthetically odious–just the sort of way a girl of fourteen might view her mother. But reeking of sweat and other bodily fluids as she is, Liana's mother is not the only thing that smells in this book. Skolkin-Smith's Jerusalem is filled with the unappealing odors of food and people as well as of cocktail napkins, orgasms, and mirrors (which smell respectively like walnuts, curdled milk, and "sweat and old yarn").<\/p>\n

We can view with sympathy Liana's desire to free herself from her mother's stifling, sweaty, noisome affection, if not the dramatic means by which she eventually makes good her escape. Her story becomes entwined with that of an American boy who's recently gone missing and whose disappearance has caused a national stir. Apparently the boy doesn't want to be found, but why this should be is never made clear. Skolkin-Smith's Edges is a quiet novel filled with small moments. Much of the story is told in dialogue, the stilted English of Israelis conversing in an unfamiliar tongue. They pepper their speech with untranslated Hebrew, which may be off-putting to readers unfamiliar with that language. More problematic for my own appreciation of the novel is that the various characters often have fractured encounters with one another that don't quite make sense:<\/p>\n

"Two small nuns in black bowed in front of some ruins, and a priest with a scarlet-red Russian turban was smoking a cigarette beside a church door. He saw us and crossed the vestibule."<\/p>\n

"'I am American. Christian. Does it matter?'" my mother began, and he waved us along, away from him."<\/p>\n

Skolkin-Smith's characters rarely express themselves fully, much falling between their words. (Liana, for example, runs off with the American boy without the two ever having a conversation to that effect beforehand.) This imperfect communication probably reflects real-life dialogue well, but it is difficult to follow on the page.<\/p>\n

Readers who like their prose on the poetic side–and anyone interested in a story that evokes the sights and sentiments and indeed the smells of 1960's Jerusalem–should give Skolkin-Smith's novel a look.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Leora: "Debra Hamel is a wonderful person. She has a Ph.D. from Yale. But she's very American. We had lots of dialogues about what she was saying. 'Fractured encounter' is a valid criticism but that was my experience.<\/p>\n

"Artists face these challenges. Do you want to be clear? You know you'll get more.<\/p>\n

"Israel's a wild chaotic place. There are few introductions to anybody. Everybody is living on top of one another.<\/p>\n

"I chose to bring a sensibility and sometimes that won over how clear I was going to be.<\/p>\n

"I'm a visual writer. I'm not good at the logic of plot because it doesn't excite me."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Did you have any suicides in your life?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "It's better for me not to talk about it."<\/p>\n

Ivy, the sister of protagonist Liana, doesn't change much in Leora's novel. "That's true of my sister too," she says. "She's always going to hate my mother."<\/p>\n

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

Leora: "I've always wanted to write and to act. My father was a lawyer for actors."<\/p>\n

Leora married at age 22 to the son of a diplomat and 32 years later, they're still married.<\/p>\n

Luke: What's with the hyphenated name [Skolkin-Smith]?<\/p>\n

Leora: "That was very conflicted. He's a Christian atheist. I'm a Jewish atheist. I don't believe in the manifest destiny of the Jewish people or Zionism or any of that. I was very sensitive about taking away my identity. My husband is a doctor. I didn't want to get letters [addressed to] 'Dr. and Mrs. Smith.' After your fourth letter as a physician's spouse, you begin to feel faceless. 'Leora Skolkin-Smith was an announcement of identity.<\/p>\n

"It wasn't a feminist thing. I just wanted to keep my identity."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Does he have the hyphenated name too?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "No. He's just Matthew Smith.<\/p>\n

Luke: "Do you have children?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "That's something I couldn't do physically. I've managed to mother a great deal people who are not from my body."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Would you rather write a great novel or have a great marriage?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Wow. Great music. That's a fear question inside myself. I never want to have to answer that. That's how important writing is to me and he is to me. I'm glad I'm with a man who can handle that. He's a psychiatrist. My intensity forced me into writing."<\/p>\n

"I'm lucky enough to have a man who pays the rent while I write."<\/p>\n

Leora has two degrees from Sarah Lawrence College — a B.A. in Writing (1975) and an MFA (1980).<\/p>\n

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

Leora: "I love writing. I hate the writing business. I don't think writing is a consumer product. I hate competing with other writers. We're not horses. They set you up for this horse race. I was nominated for a bunch of awards for this book. I've resented it."<\/p>\n

Luke: "You resented being nominated? You resented not winning?"<\/p>\n

Leora: "Of course I resented not winning. I won one thing — a stipend from the PEN\/Faulkner Writing Foundation — and I wanted everyone to be happy for me. I'm going to Washington D.C. They're putting Edges into the school system."<\/p>\n

Luke: "When you say you hate the business, what you're really saying is that you hate that aspect of reality."<\/p>\n

Leora: "Yeah."<\/p>\n

Luke: "This is just life."<\/p>\n

Leora: "Yeah. You want everyone to love you. You want everyone to walk up to you and say you've transformed their life. Of course you want to win the Pulitzer."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The father comes into the bedroom at night to talk about Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Leora Skolkin-Smith (b. 1952) is eleven and lives between an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Pound Ridge, New York. Her father is an entertainment … 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-196418","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