In The Family Orchard, Nomi Eve fictionalizes the
experiences of her ancestors, going back six generations, to relate a family
history that is intimately intertwined with the Jewish experience in Jerusalem
over the last two centuries. The novel is written from several narrative
perspectives, most notably that of a father who has written a family history
that provides the basic outline of the family history, and a daughter (named
Nomi Eve) who amplifies these sparse accounts by creating vivid emotional
lives for the ancestors she knows only through passed-down stories. It wasn't
until a year after she started writing with multiple voices, though, that, while
working on the book at the MacDowell writer's colony, she began to
experiment with the layout of the text on the printed page. "I tried two
columns on a page," she recalls, "then I tried centering my father's voice in
the middle. I played around with how the page looked and showed it to some
people, and they said it looked like a page of the Talmud. I said, 'Oh, my God,
you're right!' And I didn't set out to do that, but it made a lot of sense to me,
because what I'm trying to do, with the central text and the commentary on
that text, is what is done in the Talmud." And though her word processing
software proved indispensible for arranging the textual layout, she
laughingly recalls, "For the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to do the
text box, so most of it I did with scissors and tape. My room would be just filled
with little pieces of white paper."
RH: Your father really has been doing genealogical research
for years, true?
NE: I would not have been able to write this book without his work. He
started to research our family history when I was a little girl, and eventually
wrote four notebooks, around 800 pages each, one on each of his grandparents.
He spent around fifteen years researching the family history, all the way back
to the eleventh century--and I just used the tip of the iceberg, beginning my
story in the nineteenth century.
He has been really generous about the whole thing. The first part that I ever
showed him was the first chapter, which is all full of sex. It was going to be
published in a literary magazine called Glimmer Train, and around two
weeks before it came out, I realized that I had to tell my father what I'd done to
the story of his great-great-great grandmother. I was mortified that he would
be put off, but he was so amused that I was embarrassed to talk to him about
sex. He just said, "Honey, you write whatever you need to write."
RH: Did you hear a lot of stories about your family, growing
up?
NE: Both my Israeli grandmother and my father are really amazing
storytellers. My Israeli grandmother, she could be talking to you about going
to the store and buying tuna fish and then in the next breath, she'll be telling
you about something she did in the Haganah (a pre-Israeli underground
resistance group -- RH) in the 1940s with her girlfriends, like hiding parts
of a machine gun so they could go somewhere, put it together, and practice
firing it. Stories just flow out of her.
RH: And you got to visit your grandparents in Israel
regularly?
NE: Every summer we went and lived with them for two months in
their village, near the city of Natanya. I went to day camp in Israel. And then
in my twenties, I went on my own a lot, for months at a time. I was back and
forth between the States and Israel a lot because I was collecting information
for this book. I love to spend time with my family there, and we still go every
year.
RH: How young were you when you started writing the
book?
NE: I was twenty-three. I got my MFA at Brown for fiction writing; I
had tried to start writing this book but I wasn't ready yet, so I came to New
York and became an intern at the Village Voice literary supplement,
then I started writing book reviews for them. One day, the editor looked at me
and said, "You know, I need a story for next month's issue. I need fiction.
You're a fiction writer. Why don't you write me something?" I hadn't written
anything in around eight months or so, but I went home that weekend--it was
a Thursday when she said this--and wrote a story called "The Double Tree,"
which is now a chapter of the book. I came in on Monday and showed it to her,
and she said, "Yup, this is going in."
That was the first story I had published, and the beginning of my work on this
book. It's the chapter about the British sergeants who are hung in the orchard
during the wedding. It's a story my grandmother told me. But there's a funny
twist--after it was published in the Voice, I went back to Israel and I told
my grandmother, "I wrote that story you told me about the sergeants and I got
it published." And she said, "That's wonderful." Then I said, "You know what
part everybody loves best about the story? They love that the bride and groom
stayed with the villagers and didn't go off by themselves. The bride and groom
stayed to help protect the orchard." My grandmother looks at me and says,
"What are you talking about?" and I said, "Well, I wrote it just like you said."
And she goes, "They went off. It was their first wedding night. They went to
have fun." And I said, "But you told it to me the other way." She said, "No, I
didn't," which, to me, says a lot about a lot of the stories, not only in my book,
but family stories in general. Somebody tells them one way on Monday and
another way on Friday, and what we think of as our family history is always
changing.
RH: When you had written the earliest parts of the novel, like
the original short story, were you already using the multiple
voices?
NE: "The Double Tree" wasn't written with multiple voices, and that
was the only part of the book that wasn't; I added the multiple voices to it in
the end. We're talking like three pages of the book there, a very short part.
But the rest of it was written with multiple voices. When I first tried it, I
suddenly realized that I could say what I needed to say, that the pages looked
the way I needed them to look.
RH: Another aspect of the story that worked to your advantage
while writing is that because it is episodic, you wouldn't
necessarily get stuck trying to write the story. You could say,
"Okay, I'm going to go write another section."
NE: That's true. I know that in the future, I will write books that have
two or three characters in them and that deal with a fuller span of their lives.
But in this book, I needed to write a genealogy, so I needed to be episodic. But I
feel like, both as a writer and as a reader... I get bored when I'm reading about
somebody crossing the room. I just want to know what they did when they got
there. And I've found that writing about the most intense moments of the
people's lives, for me, made for good writing and good reading. I know that at
some point, if you're a good writer, you have to make crossing the room
exciting. But there was a certain luxury in writing just about the moments of
intensity, to define my characters by those moments, and then go to the next
one.
RH: Your family also helped you find the illustrations that
appear in the book, right?
NE: Well, in terms of the illustrations, I collected most of the books
myself, but my mother, towards the end, found a bunch of books that were
very helpful. I wanted the illustrations from the beginning for a number of
reasons. When I go to Israel, my experience there is so sensory. I love the
smells. I love what I see. I love what I feel. And I wanted to be able to convey as
much sensory information in my book as I possibly could.
Most of the pictures come from books that were written by missionaries who
went to the Holy Land on pilgrimages, came back to the States or to England
and wrote these accounts of their travels and included these images as
illustrations. I feel like, in some way, my book, even though it's a Jewish book,
is in communication with these accounts of their pilgrimages. For me, every
time I go to Israel it's like a pilgrimage. I'm going to a place that's holy to me
and that I love.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
NE: Growing up, I loved the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. I loved them so
much. I read and reread and reread them over again. Even though I didn't
know they were a Christian allegory at the time, the fact that they are, that in
some way the characters are involved in a religious pursuit, appealed to me,
even then. Even though I'm not religious, I think about religion a lot and my
characters think about God a lot, and that's something I loved in those books
early on.
My favorite book ever is Anna Karenina; I think of it as a guide for
living. Not that you should live like Anna, but the other couple in it, Kitty and
Levin, if you can follow their example, you're going to do well. I also love
Nabokov. My favorite book by him is Pnin, and I also love his memoir,
Speak, Memory. I really like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I love Chaim
Potok's book, My Name is Asher Lev. It's one of my favorite books, very
important to me. I love David Sedaris's work. I love Amy Bloom's short
stories.
RH: This book took you seven years to complete. Have you started
your next book?
NE: I think the next one will take me less time to write. This book, in
the beginning, I had to write many, many, many pages before I got a final
page. Towards the end, the number of pages that I had to write in order to get
my good work was much less. I'm sure it will still take me a good amount of
time, because I take my time. I don't force it. I don't write just to write. I write
to get my good stuff and it takes me time. [The next book will take] maybe three
or four years, not seven, but the thing about writing slow is that when I'm
done, I'm really done. This book needed maybe an afternoon of editing. It was
really a finished product. Even though it takes me a long time, I really put
every word in place and then don't need a lot of fiddling with it afterwards.
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