Author2Author: Naama Goldstein and Pearl Abraham, conclusion

While Pearl Abraham and Naama Goldstein were emailing each other about their books, an interesting digression from the first question about modernist language continued to work its way around the main discussion. I've tied the threads together here as a special bonus round in the dialogue....

Naama Goldstein: Joyce's Ulysses makes good sense as an example to consider when discussing your book, with its abundant weave of genres and the scholarly hand at the loom. (Did you know the computer evolved from the loom? I didn't until recently.) I do have to say I truly love Leopold Bloom's thread in all of that or to put it more simply: I love Poldy. I love the life of that character. He utterly convinces me. I can't think how to put it better. He lives. And then there is also his job which he does so well and I don't mean the selling of ad space, or maybe I do: the selling of Joyce's brazen ideas. I mean the very idea of it, to present this bumbling and wise, native and foreign, cuckolded and dignified character as a patriarchal hero to unsettled modernity, or so I take it. From a parochial perspective I find it personally touching also that Bloom's a Jew, especially considering the much less affectionate metaphoric exploitation of the eternal(?) transplant by Joyce's contemporary, T.S. Eliot. What a progressive that Joyce was, although the same thing made him progress into absolute wackiness eventually, the innovative impulse run amok…

Pearl Abraham: I understand (from an essay I read) that the Hebrew word for computer comes from the word “m'kha'shefa,” referring to the computer’s witch-like powers, which really amuses me. And loom is the word my friend Aryeh Lev Stollman (The Illuminated Soul), a neuro-radiologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital, uses to describe the way the brain works. And, yes, stream of consciousness was never better than in the hands of James Joyce, with Poldy, and Molly in her aria, and Stephen of Portrait of an Artist, and Stephen Hero, which my students at Sarah Lawrence opted to read one year alongside Portrait. The point being that Bloom’s stream of consciousness really does capture our minds at work precisely because it is so interrupted and non-linear, so hop-about, brilliant really, but this was/is the rare exception rather the rule in stream of consciousness literature.

Naama Goldstein: You know, I hadn't ever considered the near-homophonousness of the Hebrew words for computer and witch. I do love happy linguistic coincidences. The root spelling of the words shares only one letter, though, so sadly I think the coincidence is only that. Mah'shev/computer, comes from the root HET SHIN VET, meaning think, compute and calculate. M'ha'shef/warlock and M'ha'shefa/witch, on the other hand, are built on the root letters HAF SHIN FEH, as in sorcery and magicmaking. Considering also the very recent vintage of modern Hebrew (and computers) I doubt superstition influenced the new coinage. Certainly your average computer geek in Israel's hyperdeveloped high-tech industry branch does not take his computations as voodoo, though s/he might enjoy leaving this impression on the company creatives.

Author2Author: Pearl Abraham & Naama Goldstein, pt. 4

The dialogue between Pearl and Naama comes to a close (except for the bonus round, which will appear this weekend) with some reflections on the possible connections between setting and character...which will actually come up in another context next week as well, as Paul Elie and Pankaj Mishra find common ground--and fascinating divergence--in The Life You Save May Be Your Own and An End to Suffering.

Pearl Abraham: One of the many aspects of The Place Will Comfort You that intrigues me is the effect on your young Israeli characters, who are practically force-fed the teachings of the national ideology, of the burden of the state's foundations, of the complicated and dangerous world they are born into, and how it parallels, or doesn't, Biblical nation building. Living 21st-century life in such a Biblical place, hyperbolically dubbed "the land of milk and honey," would seem to add serious weight to every decision. The very real dangers of the new enemy, in contrast to the old Biblical archenemy Amalek, whom we are enjoined to remember to forget--an interesting dialectic , it seems to me, since we only remember the name Amalek because we were asked to be sure to forget it--makes this a place, a country, a people, who do not have to worry about, to quote a Kundera title, the unbearable lightness of being.

Talk, if you can, about how the burden of life in Israel forms your characters, shapes your stories, and whether this burden requires unique countermeasures to solve issues of craft.

Naama Goldstein: I don't know…I don't think of my characters as burdened. Burdened sounds pretty tragic, and with maybe one exception I don't think of the characters in The Place Will Comfort You as tragic. They're much too big a pain in the ass, generally speaking. They all push back at life even if the only way they might know to do this is going on strike or flailing about: a good way to keep from being burdened; you don't make for a reliable surface with all the frantic motion and misdirected energy. Why misdirected energy would be of interest to a writer who once spent an afternoon penning a letter of repudiation to Rusted Root and their pernicious brand of ersatz ethnic music, I really can't say. (Sent it, too. A very long time ago, many, many years. Still no response.)

But actually the matter of misdirected energy does relate to your question of burden, as well as the overwhelming shadow of ideology, or nation-building, you refer to. One recurrent theme that emerged as I wrote was the matter of counter-ideology, the personal kind, private rebellions, in particular, which can't quite steer themselves out of a panic of rejection and into a productive course of action. I found a lot of fodder there. And I found that the subject allows a good range of motion, room for all kinds of humorous as well as terrible and stirring developments, just like life as I see it, so it's a natural place for me to write.

Author2Author: Naama Goldstein & Pearl Abraham, pt. 3

The textual analysis takes a Scriptural turn as Naama and Pearl continue to exchange questions about each other's stories...

Naama Goldstein: The patriarch Jacob is referenced in a big way in The Seventh Beggar, through Joel Jakob and later JakobJoel. And the makeshift pillow of stone that becomes the cornerstone of an intellectual tradition seems to figure into your book's attraction to undying impermanent structures, for instance the succa hut and the seasonal bluegrass village. But there's also of course the prophet Joel in the mix, and I would be interested to hear how you may have envisioned this hybrid of biblical personae operating in your characters. And speaking of patriarchs--and succas--there is a very affecting moment in your novel when Joel's father, Moshele, explains his choice of a medicine-bottle decoration for his family's holiday hut. This is not a man who is normally swept up by aesthetics, and the Vulcan-like seriousness with which he supports his choice of colored glass is both telling and touching. It seems he is much more comfortable fitting together the precut, rabbinically-vetted succa parts. Could you speak about the genesis of this scene?

Pearl Abraham: On the Biblical references in my book: I don't think the names themselves, which are to some extent everyday names even in non-Jewish America, resonate, at least for the common reader, so powerfully with the patriarchs. But The Seventh Beggar does indeed partake hugely of Biblical tropes, which isn't a surprise since the characters in the book, given their deep immersion in the material, can practically be said to be breathing Biblical air. I'm thinking for example of Joel's idea that if only the sun stood still as it had for Joshua, then he could get more done, pursue both his own interests and tend to the requirements of his yeshiva schedule. The literary references and language of these characters all hark back to the stories of the patriarchs and prophets, and all this makes its way onto the page.

After the metaphysical description of creation, the brevity and beauty of the Hebrew, and the living and breathing characters of the stories, what also excites me about the Five Books (of Moses) is the composite, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of it all. Very novel-like, don't you think? I'm thrilled by such unexpected passages--what readers today might think of as mere nation building--as the abrupt insertions of the lists of the generations. And of Joseph's dreams, which are stories within stories, of the fragments of ancient songs, and of the long descriptions of the materials used for the tabernacle, and even the sacrificial offerings, which the young narrator in one of your stories has to memorize for class. This is genre mixing, time conflation, interruption of the mythic dream, all alternate ways of pacing, and a spectacular use of techniques we think of as postmodern as if they were newly-minted. This is truly throwing the reader a curve, as art should do, I heard a composer on David Garland's NPR show recently suggest.

In The Seventh Beggar, I refer to the bluegrass festival as a descendant of previous festivals, re-enactment rituals, the Mt. Sinai festival, and then allow it to morph into a storytelling festival. I really do believe that though such events are temporary--they last a week and then dissolve--they are part of an ongoing chain, representative of a continuity, of the history of human life, going back to the most primitive days, and that this is why they are important to us, why we continue attending them. I'm just back from the Virginia Festival of the Book, which featured about a hundred authors reading from and talking about their books, and it occurs to me that this too can be thought of as a re-enactment of our origin myths, a secular version of more primitive religious rituals.

Author2Author: Pearl Abraham & Naama Goldstein, pt. 2

Our latest Author2Author conversation began when Naama Goldstein enquired about the post-modern craft of Pearl Abraham's The Seventh Beggar. The textual analysis gets deeper as Pearl asks her first question about Naama's stories....

Pearl Abraham: Since we're on the subject of structure and texture, I wonder whether you'd elaborate on the partition of the stories in The Place Will Comfort You, with the first five stories set in Israel, under the Hebrew title Olim (Ascending), which is how Israelis refer to new citizens. Olim has a positive connotation: To come up to the land of Israel is or was, at least since Biblical days, considered a blessed move. Its direct opposite is the title of the second half of your book, VeYordim (And Descending), which refers to Israeli citizens who've abandoned their land and moved elsewhere. The stories in this second half are set in America. Though the titles bear the positive and negative connotations, in the stories themselves the reader will find no idealization of either place or decision. Indeed, this is an aspect I like about your stories; they don't have that nostalgic idealization that weighs down so much Jewish literature. Can you talk about how your ideas of ascent and descent, which is also a Kabbalistic concept, relate to the stories, and how the Biblical story of Jacob's dream of the ladder, which serves as your epigraph, refers to your themes? And, since the characters in all the stories are displaced, having moved from one culture to another, perhaps you want to talk also about how place and cultural displacement, a venerable theme in literature, shape your stories.

Naama Goldstein: The book of Genesis is close to my heart, not least because at that early point in my education I was still full of good will and interest and paying attention. But the reason I chose to pull an epigraph from there is the fascination it affords me now, on revisiting. I like best to read the text without rabbinic commentary. I like to rely on my own primitive mind and try and imagine the circumstances of the ancient people who wrote these stories to explain their world.

Now, you are the last person I need to fill in on the story of Yaakov's (Jacob's) ladder, but given the orchestrated characters we are in this exchange I will pretend that I must. So: On the run from Esau, his impulsive, furry hunter brother, Jacob, the more domestic and inhibited, or forward-thinking, sibling, must sleep rough with a rock as a pillow. What a setback for the young man whose mother was so certain that, of her two sons, he was the one destined to engender the enduring culture. But all is not lost. In his sleep he sees a ladder to heaven. On the ladder he sees Godly beings, ascending and descending. Next, God Himself appears to him and promises the exiled Jacob future rootedness and proliferation precisely there, in what had seemed like a low point, the very spot he chose for his nomadic rest. Jacob comes to in a mystical mindset, rattled and edified. He understands that he happened on the gates of heaven, and calls the place Beit El, or House of God, notwithstanding that the place already has a name, given by locals: Luz (pronounced--by weird coincidence, from an Anglophone point of view--Looz, as in lose).

As for the significance of this story to The Place Will Comfort You, the short of it is that it contains the very stuff that attracted me, too, in writing my stories, namely the confluence of family dynamics and personal crises with collective history and myth and symbolism. I frighten myself when I begin to speak this way--or, I fear I will frighten off all future fictional characters who much prefer to think of themselves as folks rather than constructs--so only a little bit more on the topic of ascent and descent, to answer your question about the stories' division. You point out that I don't seem to perceive these categories as better and lesser poles in a continuum, and that's true. Neither section conveys an ideal state of being; all the characters are unsettled. With this bunch of stories I found myself drawn to agitated, balky folks, all trying to better their circumstances or the lives around them with often questionable outcomes. Why some of the characters fall under the category of Ascenders and others Descenders has more to do with the terms in which they understand themselves than with their geographic place. Their agitation and balkiness may not rise and fall due to locale: Their humanity is universal, but the terms in which they understand it relate specifically to where they are, or where they imagine they are or should be. My personal circumstances, having grown up from early childhood in Israel, in a Zionist Orthodox milieu, and then returned as a young adult to America where I chose a relatively secular life, no doubt have a lot to do with the collection's impulse to simultaneously catalogue and shuffle its characters by traditional values.

Author2Author: Naama Goldstein & Pearl Abraham, pt. 1

Last week, while Pearl Abraham was sending us dispatches from her appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book, she was also fielding questions about her latest novel, The Seventh Beggar. And she was giving back as good as she got, asking Naama Goldstein about the short stories collected in The Place Will Comfort You.

Naama Goldstein: I'm very curious about the narrative form of The Seventh Beggar, which seems to emerge out of a dissatisfaction with existing expectations for sensual and psychological representation and dramatic development and flow. There is the sense of a more dispassionate perspective in your book than in the eye (and gut) level depictions of what I think of as humanist modernism. You address this explicitly early in the book, when you write, "For the twenty-first century, the pretext of represented reality and the containment within one consciousness are too restrictive. Hence a straightforward insertion--"

I'd be interested to hear more about the thinking that led to this statement, as well as the novel's texture, and how it might tie into your sense of our hyperlinked times.

Pearl Abraham: In the twentieth century, stream of consciousness was the breakthrough in narrative and, it seemed at the time, a truly modern, representation of the inner mind. (Think of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses.) Today's mind doesn't usually sustain that kind of continuity, which is akin to the extended monologue you might hear on stage; in other words, to the modern ear, this construct feels artificial. I might even question whether extended, focused stream of consciousness narration was ever a true depiction of a mind at work. I believe our minds are much more hop-about and easily distracted, though very capable of layering and interweaving disparate thoughts and ideas. Sometimes the incoming variety itself can benefit the thinking by bringing something new into the picture. Such human capacity, which is absolutely necessary today given the amount of information we receive in any given moment, lends itself to non-linear narrative and to composite structures made up of different genres and sources, to different times, and so on.

The sentence you quote introduces the first insertion of an excerpt from Arthur Green's biography of Nachman of Bratslav, whose tale inspires The Seventh Beggar.The main character, Joel Jakob, is engaged in reading the biography and rather than force Joel to think about it afterwards only in order to key in the reader, I made a decision to allow the reader to experience the biography the same way Joel does, that is, to read it directly. The alternative, which is a rather old-fashioned narrative strategy, seems to me much more forced and has a whiff of the clumsiness found in unskilled writing, when a character says something to another character, though they both know it, only in order to provide the information to the reader.

About your idea that there is a dispassionate perspective in the book: I don't think you're talking about a lack of emotional or psychological life in the book, because the novel depicts plenty of raw emotion and also psychology. I think that what you're sensing is the presence in the novel of a narrative voice that provides another perspective, what Wayne Booth (in The Rhetoric of Fiction) refers to as a narrator's "aesthetic distance," which, as in the example you offer, allows the narrator to step out and introduce the biographical insertion. For a long time in writing workshops of the 90s, such a maneuver was largely frowned on as an interruption of the fictional dream, and this rule limited and circumscribed the writing produced in writing programs. Some of the greatest novels of the 18th and 19th century used narrative commentary freely; without Laurence Sterne's intrusions, for example, Tristram Shandy wouldn't be anywhere near as entertaining.