If there’s one thing that’s for sure about the state of the media, it’s that there are no certainties. If we are to believe the hype, print as a medium is dead and buried—this is not news anymore. But as technology advances more and more quickly, and new forms of social media emerge and eclipse their predecessors like rapid-fire, it takes a unique type of individual—creative and enterprising, adaptable and versatile—to roll with the punches. As media mavens go, Edith Zimmerman might just be your hero.

“I love the internet because of its immediacy, because you can see right away if people like what you’ve put up, and you can see what they’re saying about it, what little dialogues are sprouting below it, who “likes” it, who “recommends” it, Tweets, hearts, Diggs, whatever,” Zimmerman said. “Also because when you see that something’s stupid, you can just go back and fix it. Or delete it months later when you’re drunk and ashamed.”

A 27-year old Massachusetts native, Zimmerman moved to New York City in 2005 just after college, for an internship at Esquire Magazine. Since then, she has been steadily making her mark on the media world on her own terms, and is in the midst of solidifying her celebrity both in the annals of online and in the pages of some of the most esteemed print publications in the world. She began her career as a contributor to The Awl, a culture website with a serious cult following, with a series of fake letters to the editors of women’s magazines. Her series earned her a fanbase almost immediately, and served as a springboard for Zimmerman to expand her repertoire, and write for other publications regularly. Shortly thereafter, Zimmerman launched The Hairpin, a sister website to the Awl, where she now serves as the editor.

Zimmerman’s work is fiercely smart and observant; part satire, part self-referential social commentary, The Hairpin is billed as a women’s website—but one that is far removed and radically different from the classic trappings of traditional, pointedly gendered media outlets. While her focus tends to be on women—writing about them, and typically for them—The Hairpin represents a modern and progressive perspective of pointedly gendered media.

“The Hairpin is a women’s site, but I try to approach it as just a site that I like where most of the writers are women,” Zimmerman said. “And to keep it fun and funny and playful. When we go girly, to do it in a fun way–as humorous and honest as possible.”

In fact, at Jewcy we love Edith Zimmerman so much that we included her on the Big Jewcy list despite the fact that she isn’t even Jewish. She just sounds Jewish.

“Everyone thinks I’m Jewish, but I’m not, I swear. To Christ, my Christian savior,” she said. “That I wrote for Heeb probably contributes to the whole seeming-Jewish thing. Gotta keep ’em guessing.”  She adds, “Just kidding, I’m not religious.”

Since we like her so much, we’re making her an honorary member for the Big Jewcy.

The post The Big Jewcy: Edith Zimmerman – TheHairpin.com appeared first on Jewcy.

While we await to hear more news about the Coen brothers adaption of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, we can at least take comfort in the fact that Michal Chabon has sold a show to HBO, and that it will probably rule.

According to the writer, Hobgoblin is about “a motley group of conmen and magicians who use their skills at deception to battle Hitler and his forces during WWII.”

The post Michael Chabon Sells Show To HBO appeared first on Jewcy.

No matter how hard you try and fight it, 2010 will be remembered as Franzen’s year.  Freedom is the book that everybody talked about whether they were hating on it, or planning on making it the only book they were going to read.  Whether it be Oprah embracing him after his public shunning of her endorsement for The Corrections, or Lev Grossman’s profile on him making the cover of Time (we talked to Grossman about that here), Franzen left his stamp on all 365 days of the year that was.

We liked Franzen just as much as the next guy, but there were ten works of fiction we liked a whole lot more.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)

We loved The Instructions for reasons beyond the fact that it was over a thousand pages.  Levin’s book is #1 on our list because it’s a debut novel that was epic, ambitious and a hell of a lot of fun to read.

2. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg (Picador)

This was more than a collection, it was a blessing considering that Deborah Eisenberg is possibly the greatest living short story writer in the English language.

3. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor (Harper Perennial)

Justin Taylor is like the Luke Skywalker of Jewish writers: he’s the next great hope, and this collection of short stories was a perfect introduction for what might be in store.

4. The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer ( Spiegel & Grau)

Langer, who is on a book-a-year tear, gives us his best work yet with this Thieves.  It was hard to put down this highly entertaining and stylish literary caper.

5. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2010 will hopefully remembered as the year Sam Lipsyte became formerly recognized as one of the greatest fiction writers with this fantastic comic novel.  [Read our interview with Lipsyte]

6. The Melting Season by Jami Attenberg (Riverhead)

Attenberg got to the heart of so many different things with this novel: self-liberation, the dynamics of female friendships, letting go, and hitting the open road.

7. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

Shteyngart gave us the the years best novel on the subject of a future where people don’t like books.  Encouraging?  No.  Great book?  Yes.

8. What He’s Poised to Do by Ben Greenman (Harper Perennial)

What Greenman was poised to do in 2010 was put out this collection of stories (as well as the hilarious Celebrity Chekov) and leave us asking what he’s poised to do next?

9. Something Red by Jennifer Gilmore (Scribner)

Family and country are the themes of Gilmore’s second novel; how those things can let you down are also themes.  [Check out our video interview with Gilmore and Gal Beckerman]

10. Bad Marie: A Novel by Marcy Dermansky (Harper Perennial)

An ex-con attempting to adjust to post-prison life becomes the nanny to a two-and-a-half-year-old.  We have to admit that we were lured in by the tag of “wickedly nihilistic,” but were sold by the time the book was closed.

Also of note: Witz by Joshua Cohen, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The post Jewcy Top 10 Fiction Books Of 2010 appeared first on Jewcy.

• Gal Beckerman, Annie Cohen-Solal, Barry Hannah, Joshua Ferris, and a bunch of other writers and their books make it to The New Yorker’s 2010 “best of” list.

• Howard Jacobson finds himself on Slate’s list.

• America Abroad Media speaks to David Grossman about his newest novel, To the End of the Land, and the complexities of life in one of the world’s most contentious regions.

• Avi Steinberg guest blogs over at the Jewish Book Council.

• Sam Lipsyte gives a roundup of things he’s read in 2010 at The Millions.

• A Fran Lebowitz wish list.

The post Weekly Yiderati: Jews Dominate “Best Of” Lists, David Grossman Videos, Fran Lebowitz Lists Avi Steinberg Blogs And More appeared first on Jewcy.

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a Paul Auster apologist. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve spent a lot of time defending him to friends who don’t share my enthusiasm. I have been a fan of his for years, but my interest blossomed into some kind of obsession roughly two years ago, upon the looming publication of Invisible, when I decided I wanted to interview him. When I asked Auster for an interview at one of his readings, he flatly and unsurprisingly said no. In response, I launched a year-long campaign of following him through the city, attending readings, events and parties I thought he might show up to. In the end, I succeeded—I managed to convince his publicist to grant me access—and it was, at the time, the highlight of my literary life. During the interview Auster mentioned the book he had just finished writing, describing it as a novel about a group of twenty-somethings living in an abandoned house in Brooklyn, to be called Sunset Park.

A brief aside: Around the time when I received the Sunset Park galley, I was rounding out a two-month obsession with the Gilmore Girls. I always thought the Gilmore Girls was annoying when it was on TV: The two characters around which the show revolves—quick-witted single mother Lorelai Gilmore and her overly-intellectual daughter Rory—seemed unbearable to watch. But one frozen Sunday I sat down and watched three episodes of the Gilmore Girls in a row. For the next eight weeks I found myself spending an embarrassing amount of time with Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, and becoming completely invested in their fictional lives. Amy Sherman-Paladino, who modeled the main character after herself, wrote and directed the show for six years, flawlessly crafting emotionally complicated and dynamic characters that were not only pleasurable to watch, but easy to relate to. That is, until she quit the show after learning of the producers’ decision to tack on a seventh season after Paladino had planned to terminate it. A new writer was brought in to replace Paladino for the last 18 episodes. It was an undisputed disaster.

As I watched the Gilmore Girls egregious seventh season—uneven characters, contrived dialogue, unrealistic plot twists that seemed to go against the very ethic of the show—I was struck: My disappointment was palpable, and matched only by my disappointment in Sunset Park. Like Amy Sherman-Paladino, it was as if the Paul Auster I know and love had left the building and was inexplicably replaced by someone going through the motions. It looks like Auster and sounds like Auster—it looks like Lorelai and (sort of) talks like her—but it isn’t, not really.

Sunset Park, like so many other Auster novels, plays with the ideas of chance, destiny, luck and memory. It is predominantly a story of wreckage and ruin—broken houses, families, economies, relationships, hope, belief, humanity. Miles Heller, a tortured young man haunted by the death of his brother and racked with guilt at the possibility of having caused it, is the character around which the novel revolves. After dropping out of a prestigious school on the East Coast he moves to Florida and takes a job “trashing out,” going through houses that have been abandoned upon the threat of foreclosure and ridding them of all remnants of their former residents. He is, in effect, a collector of garbage, but also a collector of memories, stories, refuse—all that is, or was, attached to the objects he disposes of.

In reality, Miles is the broken thing the others in the story painstakingly try to repair, or at least understand. After his brother’s accident, Miles went into hiding, isolating himself from his friends and family, including his publishing tycoon father Morris Heller who is by far the most well-rounded and sympathetic in a cast of damaged, misguided and self-involved characters. After meeting and falling in love with his muse—a brilliant and bookish seventeen-year-old girl named Pilar, though as a reader I detected no signs of the intellectual depth and maturity the author so often refers to—Miles is forced to relocate due to forces beyond his control. And he does, to a derelict house in Sunset Park with three other lost souls: Bing Nathan, a gentle giant and the leader of the pack who runs the Hospital for Broken Things, a repair shop for obsolete items of a bygone era; Ellen Brice, a young woman with self-esteem issues, her own guilt surrounding a tryst with a minor and a mind full of perversions; and Alice Bergstrom, the hyper-intellectual graduate student with a part-time gig at PEN America. Systematically, Miles’ new roommates all fall in love with him in various capacities, though the reader is given almost no insight into what makes Miles tick. Auster explicitly shows and tells us that Miles is an introvert, unwilling to expose himself to those around him—even to his beloved Pilar—but he deprives the readers of too much. His pain is familiar to those who have read Auster’s previous novels, and is centered around a certain denial, but unlike Adam Walker, the protagonist of Auster’s last novel Invisible, there are far too few redeeming qualities about Miles and, as a result, I found him undeserving of the affection, admiration and devotion of his peers.

The structure of the novel is so classically Auster—disjointed, slightly post-modern but incredibly methodical. It is broken up into sections about each of the five central characters, and narrated in the third person, creating an even greater distance between the reader and the subjects. Interspersed throughout the story are anecdotes about baseball players who have either been the victim of, or the beneficiary of, fate including Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, who cheated death time and time again, and Herb Score, whose career was cut short by a baseball to the face. Miles loves these characters, these casualties and heroes of destiny, and while he tells their stories freely, he tells us nothing of himself.

What Auster has created, in his preoccupation with broken things, are a set of broken—or better yet, incomplete—characters. What we know of them is so flimsy, and so heavily based around their fixations on Miles, that the development of each is shallow.

There are moments of sincerity—the ritual of Morris and his son eating at a local diner when Miles was a boy—but other than that, Sunset Park was wholly disappointing. Like the Gilmore Girls. The difference is, the last episode of the seventh season of the Gilmore Girls was sort of alright—Rory got the job she deserved, Lorelai ended up with the right guy and I was able to, if not forget the contrivance that was the previous seventeen episodes, at least appreciate the last one for doing right by loyal fans and followers. By contrast, Auster’s packs all of the action missing throughout the rest of  Sunset Park into the last ten pages of the novel, which ends in a cacophonous, disastrous dash through a cemetery.

So, if you’re a planning on reading Sunset Park, you should probably just watch the Gilmore Girls instead.

The post Paul Auster Meets Gilmore Girls In This Review Of “Sunset Park” appeared first on Jewcy.

Full disclosure: When I was first handed a copy of History of Love years ago, just months after publication, I wasn’t terribly interested in reading it. I had heard wonderful things about its author, Nicole Krauss, and her widely-celebrated sophomore novel from people whose taste I trust, but still I resisted. Ultimately though, I opened the stiff pages of the paperback and began to read. Almost instantly I found myself engrossed in Krauss’ rich language, emotional poignancy and colorful narrators. In fact, I read it twice.

Krauss’ third novel, Great House, is perhaps even more indicative of her ability to weave intricate storylines, craft emotionally layered characters and expertly draw out the pain, difficulty and extreme complexity of human relationships. Like its predecessor, Great House is a novel told in short stories—vignettes, really—that cross over and seep into each other at various points in the book. The characters are bound together, like History of Love, by an object: in this case an oppressively cumbersome and much sought-after desk, which spends time in the custody of one or more characters in each story, affecting their lives in different ways. Great House is primarily comprised of four interwoven storylines: Nadia, a middle-aged writer trying to find herself again amidst a series of ruined relationships; Dovik—or the memory of—an estranged son who reconnects with his father shortly after his mother’s death; Lotte, a writer whose painful secrets are posthumously discovered by her doting husband; the mysterious antiques dealer Weisz and his two children. These, along with a young man named Daniel Varsky, a poet who disappears at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police, are the figures around which the novel revolves.

Great House is a story of inheritance, relationships, legacy and the burdens we bear. It is also a story about the complexities of space: The spaces we inhabit, the walls we erect, that which we show the world and that which is shut away. The truths and lies we tell to others and the secrets we keep to ourselves; what can be seen, and what can’t.

Though the form and approach of Great House is similar to History of Love, it is an altogether darker, more anguished story. There is no redemption or happy ending, rather it serves as a meditation on, and exploration of, loneliness, responsibility and humanity in its various forms. Whereas History of Love invited readers into the whirlwind lives and adventures of its characters Great House pulls readers inward, into the space between sentences both spoken and unspoken by the book’s keepers. Both novels are stories of loss and discovery, though that which is discovered in Great House is often unexpected and disarming, calling into question the very basis of the lives lived and histories told between the pages.

I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to talk to the endlessly thoughtful and articulate National Book Award nominee about her brilliant new novel, her influences and goals, and the desk that inspired it all.

I’m always surprised by your novels, the simultaneous subtlety and emotional power of your prose. What were you reading while you were working on Great House?

Nicole Krauss: It was two and a half years of work, so there was a lot of reading. I know there are novelists who don’t like to read as they’re writing because it will direct them or, God forbid, influence them. But I’m the opposite, I love to read always. I find reading is like opening a faucet to the great streams of language come pouring out and splash around in your mind for the rest of the day or week. I find it incredibly helpful to have a ready flow of great language. For the past few years I read a lot of Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer. I read a lot of Roberto Bolano, who I discovered in 2003 when I read the first book that was translated here in America, By Night in Chile. He’s one of those writers who absolutely changed everything for me. I love Sebald, and he’s a writer I return to a lot. Perhaps my favorite is Beckett. I re-read a lot of his novels. I’m constantly reading new work or books that are new to me, but I tend to go back and re-read sections of books I love while I’m writing to remind me of what’s possible.

I know you used to write poetry. Do you still write poetry?

NK: I haven’t since I wrote the first words of my first novel. It’s an ongoing point of curiosity for me. When I was growing up as a teenager and all through college my great ambition in life was to be a poet and I couldn’t have possibly imagined that I would have fallen from the grace of poetry into the prosaic world of novels. I read and loved novels of course, I majored in literature, but it wasn’t my intention at all. It came as a surprise that I became a novelist and that I stopped writing poetry. I feel that someday there will be a return to it. I always say I need to be older and wiser but I don’t know if that’s true anymore, because the novel as a form fits me very well; the formlessness and elasticity of it, the fact that it doesn’t have a real definition. It’s the work of a novelist every time she sits down to write one.

But how is that different from poetry?

NK: I think with poetry the form is much more apparent and clear going out. You’ll have stanzas and line breaks; there is a certain attentiveness and clarity about formal tradition that novels don’t have. When you think about novels, all you can really say about them is that they’re long. They begin, and they end. The prose usually covers the pages, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very unclear what a novel wants to be. It’s kind of amazing that it doesn’t paralyze us setting out because the possibilities are so vast.

But when you say you stopped writing poetry the moment you wrote the first lines of your first novel—what possessed you to start writing a novel in the first place, when you previously identified so strongly with poetry?

NK: I had reached a point where I felt ensnared by my own anxiety about writing poetry. I had had some mentors in college, most importantly to me Joseph Brodsky who is a real formalist and really insisted on being able to master as fully as possible formal verse before moving on. Seems like an obvious thing: you have to know what you are being free from if you’re going to write free verse. I followed that and at a certain point all of the great freedom that writing is meant to offer the writer somehow got lost for me, or was no longer accessible. I felt my poems were getting shorter and smaller and more airless. I knew in order to save the enterprise for myself I had to break a hole in my work where air could flood back in. I thought, what would it be like to write a novel? What is a novel, can I get to the end of it? I’m just going to see. It was more, what would the novel I wrote be like, and can I do it, even? I found very quickly that I just absolutely felt at home in the form, for this new freedom that returned to me and also the length of the project, the messiness of it, the necessary and integral imperfection of all novels really suited me. I liked the fact that novels can’t be perfect, and I feel that poetry can be. I don’t even think a novel aspires to perfection. It’s just too large to define. I felt at home there, and I still do.

Was that a daunting task for you? Endeavoring to write a novel understanding that there is no set definition for what you’re trying to do?

NK: I don’t know if I understood that yet. I read a million of them but you think differently when you try to write one. I think that realization came later. I can’t quite remember. It was daunting because how does one even write a novel? It’s an odd thing to try to do, and it seemed impossible. I wasn’t at all convinced that I could do it. Would I be able to get to the end, or think of a story sufficiently long enough or interesting enough? The first book, which I didn’t intend to publish, was just a question of being able to get from the beginning to the end. After that was when I sat down and thought, I really want to do this. But now the question is, what kind of novels do I want to write? I began trying to answer that in The History of Love.

The characters in Great House who are writers, Nadia, Lotte and Dovik, use writing as a means of retreat, as a way of distancing themselves from those around them. You talked about your relationship to form—novels, poetry—but what is your relationship to writing? In short, why do you write?

NK: I’m not sure I would describe their reasons for writing that way. I think what was interesting to me is the question of, what is the cost of writing? One begins to write and very soon you realize that there are things required of you, there are things you have to do and that involves solitude and a degree of remove, in order to simply have perspective on life, your relationships, the relationships of others. If you weren’t already you become an observer, and it’s very demanding in terms of a kind of willfulness you need to sustain. I was thinking about the costs of that.

But in these characters, writing is a way of not giving everything away, of keeping something to yourself, that is just yours.

NK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think what’s so interesting is, to what degree do writers have great recesses, and maybe secret recesses, that they guard in a certain way and preserve for their work, that they don’t allow to keel over into their normal lives and keep from their most intimate ones? In terms of what writing means to me is to return to the idea of freedom. As the years pass in my life, the rest of my life becomes filled up with the responsibilities of being a parent and having a family. The freedom that writing affords me is thrilling. As difficult and sometimes miserable, as hard as it can be on one’s confidence and sense of purpose, this sense of being able to sit down and potentially go anywhere and say anything; to put yourself in a position where you can get lost and enter the unknown, and put yourself up against very difficult things to discover who you are, what you’re made of, how you think about things. Again, what is the nature of life and human existence? It’s this incredible freedom that is impossible to find elsewhere in life. It’s kind of an enormous thing for me. The other thing is a sense of being able to create meaning. It seems like a bland and cliché thing to say but I find the disorganized chaos of life is not ultimately satisfying, and one wants to make out of that some solid thing. I don’t think it’s an accident that my books end up, though I never intend setting out, having a highly-wrought architecture in the way that I chose different voices and weave them together. There are echoes, thematic symmetries, it becomes, at least when I’m thinking about it, solid architecturally. It’s that sense of solid form that’s very satisfying to me because it seems like it will stand on its own after I walk away, and that all of life’s experiences can actually come to something

What are the costs, then?

NK: It’s hard to distinguish them from a personality type who often becomes a writer, and I probably fit that mold. Is one a naturally solitary and somewhat removed person and one naturally migrates towards writing because it’s an opportunity to express oneself clearly and communicate in a way that is difficult, or the other way around? I don’t know because I’ve been writing since I’m, like, 14. I think my personality has been largely formed around that work, and I was just like that since I was very young. My whole life I’ve been acutely sensitive to the divide between who we are and who we are able to bring to the surface of our lives to show to other people even those closest to us. I find that incredibly painful, from your average cocktail party to even a nice dinner party to familial relationships. The only place I find release from that is children. In children, you don’t have that sense of divide. There’s a kind of wholeness between you and them.

You talked about how a novel itself is inherently a challenge and Great House is somewhat experimental in form. You drift seamlessly between a series of very different and emotionally complicated narrators who serve as the keepers of the story. How do a series of stories become a novel? Where do you begin crafting the story, and what are some challenges associated with creating so many distinct voices?

NK: It seems to be emerging to me that this is a way of writing I’m very much drawn to.  I’m attracted to beginning these stories in very remote places and moving them towards each other. In The History of Love I had three distinct storylines—Leo Gursky, Alma and the book within a book—and there, it was slightly more obvious. I wrote it in the order that you read it so I was always held in suspense: For the longest time I didn’t know how it was going to end. There was an old man, a young girl and they were going to be drawn to each other through this third story of a lost book. I was setting out to write the book that would become Great House, and I was less and less interested in concrete connection. I was much more interested in what happens if you start in very remote places and don’t aim for a concrete connection. Yes, the novel will only be interesting to me and anyone else if it absolutely holds together and is fused at some point, that these parts standing on their own would be nothing compared to what they are when they reflect and echo off each other. It’s sounding very abstract, and it is. I wrote a lot for a long time, different voices. A couple of them disappeared and I kept four. A lot of the pages got thrown away—they didn’t develop in authentic enough ways so there was a lot of aimless wandering for a long time until there was a bristling effect, where the character stands up and you know they’re alive. I was much more interested in what happens if you try to make a book where these connections, echoes, symmetries, these convergences are oblique and subtle. I wanted to hold them at a distance from each other. I was interested in that tension. At a certain point I depended on my uncertainty as a writer. I think in order to discover and go places you haven’t been before you can’t know the outcome. I write simply not knowing. That doubt and uncertainty of my capabilities as a writer and the possibility of this novel failing began to seep into the work. At a certain point, it had to shift from process to material. The characters are riddled with that uncertainty and doubt. Like Arthur’s doubt about being married to this mystery, this woman he didn’t really know. Or the Weiss children’s inability to trust others or believe in the possibility of a permanent home. Or the doubt of the Israeli father about what kind of father he was. It’s filled with intellectual and moral doubt and self-doubt. Most profoundly to me, this doubt about how fully known we can ever really be to each other, that distance between who we are and how much of ourselves we are  able to ever communicate or expose to others. Then it became the characters’ uncertainty. Then, there’s a third level of the readers’ uncertainty. If the writer is uncertain of herself then the readers will be skeptical and that became interesting to me. For all this uncertainty to be mirrored in the reader, for her, the reader, to have to be held in doubt and to think about this idea of what it is to make one’s life in the shadow of uncertainty?

The four narrators: they are all so different but have certain similarities. Can you explain in more concrete terms where these characters came from?

NK: I always think there is a too-little-noted distinction between the autobiographical and the personal. I don’t write anything autobiographical, which means the characters really don’t come from anyone I’ve met, or even people I’ve observed, in my own life. They’re really complete inventions on every level. But, having said that, one of the most important things to me as a writer is that my work feels very authentic to me, and in order for it to be authentic, it has to be personal. The stakes have to be high. What does that mean? It means that you are inventing these lives and voices into which you can pour very deeply felt and personal feelings and thoughts. Not always your own, sometimes it’s an empathy for what it might be like in a certain situation. Some of the characters evolve in strange and accidental ways. Arthur and Lotte: I lived in England for awhile, and I used to live near Hampstead Heath and I used to always walk by these bathing ponds. I walked in the Heath every day. It was a melancholy time in my life. It was this landscape onto which I projected all of that and all these years later I find myself mentally revisiting them. I wanted to write about them, I didn’t know what, but there was something atmospheric I wanted to write about. This character was born who walks his wife to the pond every day. There was no story, just that scene. And I began to write more it became interesting to me. I sometimes use small details from life. For example, my grandmother is absolutely nothing like Lotte but she was a chaperone on a kindertransport. They are small, sketchy elements of life that allow me to invent these characters and pour all kinds of things into them. They were born, and as I was writing, it became clear to me that this swimming hole is a metaphor for Arthur, that he couldn’t follow his wife. She disappeared into this abyss where he couldn’t go, and that was somehow a metaphor for her mystery, her unknown quality. Their whole relationship was born out of that. For Weiss, the antique dealer, I became obsessed with the idea of a transplanted room. I think that came from two sources. One is the Freud house, where I did spend a lot of time myself, and that room is just so amazing. It’s reassembled for the last final year of his life, moved from Vienna to London. And there is Francis Bacon, the painter’s studio. After he died it was broken down into ten thousand pieces and moved piece by piece and resurrected in Dublin in a gallery. It was fascinating to me: Why would that happen, and why are people compelled to consider these things? So this idea of a room that is deconstructed in one place and reconstructed elsewhere became the source for thought.

A lot of the language you use to describe the characters in the book evokes the image of houses—doors being opened and doors being closed, secrets, hiding places, isolation, discovery, the notion of interior and exterior. What is it that compels you about structures?

NK: I was aware at a certain point that there were these houses in the book. I thought about the connection between walking through a house and walking through a mind. I was exploring their remembering minds. I was aware of houses, rooms, doors, but I didn’t think of that as an overarching rubber band until the very end when I thought about that Ben Zakkai story and something snapped in place. Structure is always an interesting subject when it comes to writing because in order to do it you have to be aware and unaware at the same time. For example: the desk in the book. I actually wrote the first half of the first chapter as a short story called From the Desk of Daniel Varsky. I published it in Harper’s in 2007. It was collected in Best American Short Stories, and when you’re in that anthology they ask you to write a paragraph explaining it. I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out why I wrote that story and it dawned on me that the desk I write at is awfully like the one in the story. Hugely dominating—it goes up one wall and has lots of drawers and shelves, and it’s absolutely enormous. More than that, I inherited it from the previous owner of the house who had it built to his esoteric specifications. I’ve never liked the desk. I’ve always thought, it’s this imposing thing that I’d like to do away with but I don’t know how. It would have to be chopped up to even get down the stairs and it seemed sad to me, to waste this desk. When the former owner left, he had the desk built around this painted panel that I guess was valuable to him, so he had it removed. So, there’s a gaping hole under which I work, and I realized this desk had always been a burden and responsibility to me. Then I realized that this story is actually about the burden of inheritance. I had written the story without really realizing I had written it about my own desk. You don’t know, but you know.

I was actually going to ask you, when Weiss says: “to call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always posed to offer up its back for its owner to make use of…” Of course, in Great House, the desk represents so much more—family, the power of memory—but the story is, in fact, anchored around an object. Is there an object in your life that carries significant weight?

NK: I certainly am somebody who is attached to objects that come down to me from grandparents or the old world. I have things like that, small things; A German-English dictionary that my grandfather gave my grandmother when they first met in 1940. I don’t think about them a lot, but the desk is interesting because it’s my life. On a certain level I do sort of despise it. The drawers fly open because the floor is sloped. It does, in a way, have a life of its own and I’ve agreed to let it have a life of its own, imbued it with meaning that I’ve put upon it.

The themes of this novel, in my opinion, are very Jewish in nature: pain, memory, inheritance, burden, family, history, discovery. Even the title itself, Great House, a school of thinking designed to “turn Jarusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.” Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to Judaism, and to Israel, and how it has shaped you as a writer and influenced you as a person?

NK: Every writer is born into and also grows and arrives at her own material, and it became apparent to me pretty quickly as I was becoming a novelist that there’s something about Judaism that is contradictory and argumentative, which I find deeply useful as a way of thinking about the world, and therefore something to infuse my writing with. Being born into all of the complications of being a Jew, the beauties and complications, is a tremendous gift as a writer. I won’t always use those gifts but I’m lucky to have them. With this book, it wasn’t an overly conscious decision, but again this notion of doubt and uncertainty. Judaism is extraordinary in that it allows for and even encourages doubt; in the Talmudic tradition an argument that is refuted is considered a failure. The idea is to keep the argument or idea aloft for as long as possible and continue to peel it and peel it and dice it and get to the heart of it, but continue the questioning. That intellectual restlessness and inability to accept things as they seem or as they are is what makes the religion, to me, so incredibly powerful and intellectually interesting. It trickled down without me fully knowing it.

What’s next for you?

NK: I’ve been writing a lot of short pieces but in the back of my mind thinking about a new novel. Some of these characters are still enough alive in me. For example, Dov. I thought I’d write his story in this novel; the idea of a fallen judge who has somehow compromised himself morally, and finds himself in the position of then being judged. Part of me wants to know who he is and what he has to say. Sometimes the moment passes, and once the book is published there might be an unfortunate but necessary emotional distance. But, we’ll see.

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Text by Juliet Linderman

Photos by Jesse Untracht-Oakner

There are certain things we can see and touch, but seem unbelievable: the way that barley, hops and cereal grains ferment and become beer; how grapes shrivel in the sun to become raisins; how sand, under a great amount of pressure, can become a diamond; how the intricate structure of a bee hive-and the complex society established by its residents-can yield one of the most integral and symbolic parts of the Rosh Hashanah tradition: Honey. But unlike so many other natural processes, the production and harvest of honey-especially in an urban environment like New York City-has carried throughout its history distinctly political, social and even legal implications.

Throughout the ages, honey has served as a spiritual centerpiece across the cultural spectrum: Ancient Egyptians used the sweet sticky stuff to make honey cakes for various rituals, while Jews of the bible referred to the promised land as flowing with milk and honey: a substance so sweet, so fragrant and so luxurious, that it represented, in and of itself, the promise of something better. In so many holy books honey symbolizes the positive and the light-all that is good. It is an eternal reward. The Koran paints honey as an elixir capable of healing sick men, while the book of Proverbs describes honey as imbuing those who ingest it with wisdom. And as the Jewish new year approaches, Jews eat apples and honey-apples the physical manifestation of the dawning of the New Year, and honey the hope for joy, success, sweetness therein.

But in spite of its whimsy, honey exists very much in the realm of the real-throughout the five boroughs beekeepers with varying degrees of discretion have been cultivating hives and harvesting home-made honey for decades in their back yards, community gardens and on rooftops. So why then, in modern day New York City, has something as holy as honey-and with such positive side effects as increased pollination-inspired so much debate?

A Brief Political History of Honey

In 1999, the New York City Department of Health under Mayor Rudy Giuliani made it illegal to keep bees in New York City, classifying them as ”wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous or naturally inclined to do harm.” Under Section 1.6 of the health code, those who defied the law were at risk of being hit with a fine fetching $2,000. While the law dissuaded many from creating new honeybee colonies in the city, it didn’t stop beekeepers from continuing to care for their hives, but instead forced them to do so in secret.

“I was clandestine about the location of my hives,” said Andrew Cote, a fourth-generation beekeeper in New York City who is the founder and president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, a 180-member coalition of beekeepers.

Over the years, in spite of its illegal nature, beekeeping in the city gained popularity and acquired a number of champions throughout the New York City legislature, including the city council, state assembly and even the Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, all of whom spoke out in favor of amending the health code to legalize beekeeping. In June of 2009, Councilmember David Yassky, who represented the 33^rd district in Brooklyn between 2001 and 2008, introduced a bill that would allow beekeepers to legally register their hives. Shortly after the legislation was approved and adopted, the Department of Health proposed an amendment to the code, which would officially legalize beekeeping in the city.

“Honeybees play an important role in urban food production, and beekeepers throughout the five boroughs are vital to making our city greener, healthier and more sustainable,” Stringer said in a statement in early 2010. “New York City should join other major cities across the United States – including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco – to show its support for legal and safe honey-beekeeping.”

The results were overwhelmingly positive: On Tuesday, March 16, 2010, the ban on beekeeping was officially lifted, and beekeepers throughout the city rejoiced. Now, six months later, the beekeeping community in Brooklyn is more vibrant than ever. But if honey is so readily accessible in supermarkets and specialty stores, why keep bees in the boroughs at all?

Beekeeping in the Borough of Brooklyn

On a hot summer evening, Annie Novak is harvesting vegetables atop the rooftop farm she has cultivated above a massive, 2,000-square-foot warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She walks through rows and rows of fresh vegetables, plucking plump cherry tomatoes from their winding vines and untangling bright purple eggplants, resting just slightly above the soil in which they were planted. Novak, along with Meg Paska, who has been featured in a number of newspaper articles and magazine features, keeps several hives of honeybees on the rooftop farm, jarring the crop and selling it under the moniker Brooklyn Honey. Good luck trying to score a jar this season, though: Novak and Paska pre-sold their entire honey crop-that’s roughly 250 jars-to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, for his wedding.

“Here’s one of my girls,” Novak said, as she watched a honeybee land on the tomato plant she was pruning. In fact, the rooftop farm is full of bees, flying in and out of blooms and blossoms, crawling on fruits and vegetables and diligently doing their job: pollinating.

The hives themselves are set up in a far corner of the rooftop. They look like small filing cabinets-white boxes stacked on top of one another-though the bees are by no means confined to their structure. Honeybees have a pollination radius of roughly 3 miles, which means Novak and Paska’s rooftop bees can collect pollen from as far away as Central Park. Whereas most honey sold in grocery stores is made by commercially kept bees fed sugar-water and carries a generically sweet flavor, honey engineered by rooftop bees-which bring back pollen from a vast variety of plants and flowers-reflects the diversity of New York City’s urban flora in its notes, hues and flavors.

Novak, who began keeping bees as soon as she completed the rooftop farm a little less than two years ago, said that the act of beekeeping carries with it great environmental implications in a city like New York: bees need pollen to create honey, therefore keeping bees and jarring honey draws awareness to issues pertaining to green space-or the lack thereof.

“Keeping bees makes us more conscious of the green spaces around them,” she said. “Bees go to street trees for nectar. If they aren’t producing enough honey, I call [the city] and ask for more street trees. Bees aren’t the only insects that pollinate, but they get us thinking about pollination. Everywhere the bees go, the honey acquires a different flavor. Spring honey is light, floral, thin and firm. Fall honey has darker notes, a rich flavor.”

Though Novak is a beekeeping novice, she sees it as something that can exist gracefully and naturally in an
environment like New York City. Not only do bees aid in the sustenance of the existing greenery across the five boroughs, they are fundamentally gentle creatures that have a complicated social structure, not unlike our own. The honeybee population in an active hive can climb up to 20,000 in the summertime, and sustain itself for the better part of three years.

“The apiaries-there is cleanliness and communal nature, that we can only hope to replicate with our own condos and apartment buildings,” Novak said. “It’s the same silhouette, but the hives are more functional.”

Cote, like Novak, views beekeeping as a window into the complex and, in many ways, remarkable life and society of bees. For Cote, beekeeping is a family legacy, and though he’s been practicing the art and science for years, certain mysteries remain.

“I have learned, that the process of learning is never-ending when it comes to honeybees and beekeeping,” Cote said. “No one has all of the answers, and during those few moments when I become content that I have grasped and understood the colony, they will reward my hubris by doing something unexpected. We are caretakers of their hives at best.”

As the summertime winds to a close and the year turns in on itself, we begin the high holy days ushered in by Rosh Hashanah. And while Jews throughout Brooklyn will eat apples and honey and hope to absorb its sweetness, its power and its potency, we can rest assured that there are millions of Brooklyn bees making it for us. Each New Year brings a new crop of honey, and along with that honey-and the bees who make it-comes the promise of new generations of trees and flowers, and life in the city.

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Tell me a little bit about yourself. Are you from Chicago? I hear you are an editor at a literary magazine. How did you get involved in the literary scene?

I’m from St. Louis. My first foray into the literary world was as publisher of a short-lived satirical newspaper called The Kumar, which saw distro for a couple of issues only in STL. I moved up to Chicago in 2001 and received a BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Straight out of school, I started as associate editor of Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine. I then became reviews editor of Make, a position I started at the magazine. (I am still connected with Make as a contributor). During my time with Make, I also worked as an editor and contributor for the online magazine Is Greater Than. I’ve been ensconced in Chicago’s explosive and fun literary scene, be it through the above positions or being a part of different readings throughout the city. I was also a member of Reading Under the Influence. While I still am connected with IGT and Make, I made the choice to step down from my roles as editor so that I could focus on the Book Bike. I’ve written book reviews for Stop Smiling and Make, contributed short fiction to Significant Objects (and now to the Book Bike) and contributed interviews to Make and IGT both. (My personal favorite interview was with Eduardo Galeano which was published in Make Issue #4). I also have freelanced articles for various sites but the Book Bike has been taking a majority of my attention lately.

How did you come up with the concept of a "book bike"? How has it grown from an idea to a reality, and evolve from there? The Book Bike is beneficial for the both producers-indie presses, small publishing houses-and consumers-people who read books. How did you develop this model?

I wanted to figure out a way to connect with our community-at-large in Chicago, to maybe open people’s eyes up to the extraordinary Chicago literary scene (not to mention our extraordinary literary history…Nelson Algren for one). How can we get books to people who may not be thinking about going to the library or a reading or to a bookstore? Reviews and readings are all well and good, but if we’re playing to the same crowd, to what purpose is all this? I believed and believe that there is a way to get the general public intrigued by books, it just takes a direct connection. The idea of the Book Bike was as direct as I could figure it: Just bring the books to the people, the rest is up to them.

Everything I do is trial-by-fire. I like to take an idea and throw it to the lions and see what they go for. In that regard, then, the Book Bike and its evolution to date, is due in no small part to the community. It started as book donations from publishers. Then it got some decent Chicago press and I started getting book donations from people with books collecting dust on their shelves. And this summer I finally hit on how to make this a full-circle project: Now all the books given away are purchased from locally-owned (independent) bookstores. So not only do passers-by benefit, but every book taken home has directly supported a locally-owned bookstore. If people don’t donate money to buy the books, then there won’t be any books to give.

I know it’s heavy-handed, but I have to ask: What are your thoughts on the future of publishing industry? Why are books, in their traditional form, important, and how does the Book Bike fit into this equation?

Ooof, thoughts on the future of publishing, eh? I wrote an article for Publishing Perspectives called "The Rise of Cause Publishing", that should give you an idea of my thoughts on what can be done, it doesn’t mean I think its the only way.

I don’t have much to say on what makes books in the printed form important per se, but I can speak personally about it: Every book on my bookshelf has a history that goes beyond its content. I can pull any book off my shelf and not only tell you about what’s written in there, but I can tell you how it got in my collection, why it matters to me. My books are my autobiography. Scan the titles on my shelf and you’ll learn about my life, you’ll have an idea of who I am; and that doesn’t just apply to me, I think that can be said for anyone’s personal library. The Book Bike is there to inspire someone to start, or further, their own library; to write their personal history through the words and ideas of our great authors throughout time.

I’m not looking to start a debate on e-books vs printed because I think there is no debate. They both have their place and their purpose; e-books are fine, I see them as another tool for readers, and there is nothing wrong with that. Enough with this "print is dead" bullshit, let’s live together, eh? I can’t afford an e-reader, so there’s not much for me to comment on its benefits, and I know I’m not in the minority in that regard, but with time the prices will drop and more of us will have a chance to see what its all about. I will say this though: Back to what you can find on my shelf…The books there have a history. If there’s a bent page or a torn cover, there is a story to that. If I drop a book, I can pick it up, dust it off, and read on. (If I drop an e-book, I’m out hundreds of dollars, no?) And I have a lot of signed books, so that adds another layer, another story to tell beyond the content. A story someone can hold and ask about. I can’t do that with an e-book, I can’t go see my favorite author read from his or her newest book and ask them to sign my e-book. E-books are cool, no doubt, but they have no history. Also, I don’t need a battery to read a book…hell, I don’t even need to pay my electric bill either! The light of the sun will do (and I imagine if you’re in someplace like Montana, the stars at night).

In addition, I respect books as objects, I think I can speak for all book lovers there; we proudly display our collection. I remember one time when working at Printers Row, a woman came in asking if we had anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. We had a few. I don’t recall which book it was that I showed her (would have been a first edition, first printing) but it was signed by Fitzgerald. I was holding it at the time and her eyes popped wide open, there was a moment of silence. I asked her if she wanted to hold the book, in a near-whisper she said "Can I?" When she held it in her hands, with reverence mind you, I saw that she was crying. Holding this book, signed by this author, moved her emotionally. Its just a book, yeah? Its a dusty old collection of paper and glue with a scrawl of ink on it by the dead guy whose name is on the cover…and just holding this moved her to tears. Long live the death of books, I say.

In light of library cuts-in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the local library is actually shut down for the summer-what role does the Book Bike play, and what message does it send?

That makes me so sad that your library shut down for the summer, that shouldn’t be allowed, not ever, not in America. Libraries in summer are places of wonder for children, I speak from experience. As a kid growing up in Webster Groves, Missouri, the Webster Groves Public Library was the center of my universe, especially come summertime. No more required reading, I had the freedom to discover…How many books I devoured there, after a time the librarians recognized me and they came to understand that I wasn’t going to relegate my reading to the kid’s section; I was unstoppable…with book: invincible.

The Chicago Public Library and I agree that the Book Bike — whose spirit and mission of a love of books is kindred — is able to get to places in our communities that the brick-and-mortar cannot. We believe that everyone has the right to literature, to the plethora of resources and ideas one will find, in a library.

A side note, but a few weeks back Fox News ran a bogus story called "Are Libraries Necessary or a waste of Tax Money?" Must have been a slow news day…something wonderful did come out of that bit of ridiculousness: read (Chicago Public Library Commissioner) Mary Dempsey’s letter to Fox News after that aired. This should be required reading for anyone and everyone.

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It is universally accepted that the Merchant of Venice is, at the very least, partially anti-Semitic in nature-the text characterizes Jews as greedy, spiteful, stubborn and corrupt-though Shylock is so much more complicated than I ever could have imagined. See, I had never read the play or seen the film until today, though Shylock and his embodiment of all of the worst Jewish stereotypes have always been familiar; a deeply ingrained part of the cultural conversation about Jews and Judaism.

Today, I watched two film adaptations of the famous play, one from 1973 starring Lawrence Olivier as Shylock, and the other from 1994, starring Al Pacino (who will be reprising his role after 16 years at Shakespeare in the Park). I was struck by the vast differences between the two Shylocks-there could be an ocean between them. Olivier’s Shylock is a loose cannon-a merciless and vengeful villain who reiterates the stereotypes put upon him as such. Pacino, on the other hand, presents a much more morally ambiguous interpretation of Shylock. He is problematic of course, but unlike even the text from which the character was crafted, Pacino’s Shylock is surprisingly sympathetic-his pathologies can be largely traced to the conditions in which Jews were forced to live at the time. In the very first frame of the film Antonio, who promises a pound of his own flesh as collateral against a late or incomplete payment of a sum he borrows from Shylock, spits in Shylock’s face in the middle of a crowded, public place. Later, Shylock reminds Antonio of this, as an explanation for the perverse request of flesh versus monetary interest. Pacino’s "Jew" is, much more so than Olivier’s or maybe even Shakespeare’s, largely a product of nurture rather than a reflection of the inherently flawed and morally bankrupt nature of the Jews. Not to say Shylock’s actions aren’t perverse or spiteful or downright disgusting: Yes, Shylock is partially evil. But so is everyone else in Venice.

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