The post Disappearing Act appeared first on Jewcy.

The finished book is 350 pages. I probably handed in 600 pages to my agent, but really, with the footnotes and my annotated raw notes, it was around 1100 pages.

You expected to do radical excision?

That’s how I work. I really love to work with negative space. Otherwise I would lose my mind. It took a decade; if it was the wrong direction I would really go insane. I really believe I had to draw Lillian a thousand different ways for her to become Lillian, even if it means drawing these scenes and dropping them out.

It was really a giant test for me as a writer to not fall prey to sensationalism, too. How much fun is it for Mr. Naughty Ex-Religious Boy to do the Jewish pimps and whores? I wrote tons of chapters on those whorehouses, but that was not the story I was telling. And the same with torture. I gave it this tiny little section that was the hardest and most dangerous part to write.

It was powerfully effective to have this little girl being incarcerated in this tube-like cell awaiting her —

Thank you. That was scary. Just after finishing my book I interviewed A.B. Yehoshua on stage about his novel Woman in Jerusalem which has a Greek chorus that comes in at the end. I asked him, “Did you really need to take that chance? Are you aware of how dangerous that was? You were home free.” I love fiction and it’s holy to me; I feel like if I make one mistake, I'm bumped and its over.

What do you mean, you're bumped?

Bumped out of line. “This was a perfect book but that comma is in the wrong place and it doesn't read right for me anymore.”

Is Kaddish a common Jewish surname?

No, no.

So if I'm not Jewish, and I’m reading this book, do I get the portentous nature of the name?

Even better if you don’t. His name is explained in the book, and how he received it. It’s a Jewish tradition. If somebody, say, has a terrible heart attack and survives it, they will take on a new name. If the angel of death was coming for Steve Cohen, he might not be looking for Marc Cohen. Sometimes people take on these wonderfully loaded, portentous names. In this case, the rabbi gives Kaddish his name—which is the prayer for the dead—because he is a sickly child. He says he should be the mourner instead of the mourned.

This book will not be pegged as a Jewish book, will it? A Jewish novel?

I like the way the question is formed because I get really defensive about that. It really comes from the Jewish community. I'm happy to be anything. You can call me whatever you want. Last time people said, "He is a long haired hippie writer," so now I am a short haired —

[RB laughs]

Now am I actually different? I got a haircut. Well, so do we switch shelves? But for me, I believe that if fiction is functioning, it better be universal. If this book makes me a Jewish writer, it should also make me an Argentine writer. I spent ten years of my life on this book. I'm obsessed with this country. I lived this book for a decade. I can't feel any closer.

Historically, it feels like I have been given the Holocaust because I am a Jew, even though I am an American Jew—you are bequeathed these things. But sometimes you just adopt them. Argentina is so close to my heart now. I am just doing my work and they are my people. I should at least be one quarter Argentine writer now. But apparently that doesn't change either.

How Jewish is the Posnan family?

After the last book, I just I felt so much pressure to be like, “These are not regular people, they are Jewish people.” It’s just insane. I write fiction. And again I think of fiction as universal. My world in my head is often very Jewish when I imagine these things, but for the Posnans I actively resisted that. Once I decided the book starts off, “Jews bury themselves, the way they live,” that was one of the most freeing days, like “I’m just going to start this book with the word ‘Jews.’”

I was trying to stay away from Jewishness, but I recognized there is nothing to stay away from, that this is the world of my imagination. And it’s enough to me that it’s part of their humanity. Once I realized that I was not thinking of them as “other,” I got comfortable with the idea that none of this stuff is other, and now I feel like I can set everything in shul for the rest of my life. I am just so sensitive about it. It’s just such a strange thing that people want to do.

Why is it strange? Isn’t that what minority communities do?

Inside my head, it’s not a minority. That’s the whole point. When I grew up, Orthodox was the only way to be. I keep using the Dostoevsky example: In the Idiot, one Russian guy is talking to another Russian guy. But they don’t see themselves as “Russian guys.” You’re just in their world. They’re just guys.

What are your feelings about Kaddish and Lillian and Pato? Ten years with three people—

Day and night, yeah. I’m such a pessimist, I didn’t know if I would survive this book until the characters began to take on their own forms.. You have Lillian say one thing, and you go back and it’s just not her anymore. A friend still hasn't forgiven me this one moment I wanted so much. I think it was maybe the finest line I have ever written, but it was just a slightly different Lillian head—she would just not think this way at this point, anywhere in the book. That's when it the book felt tight to me, when I cut that line.

There was a question about surviving this book? If you felt that, what was the hump that you got over?

That moment I just said.

Nine years into it [laughs]?

I knew the book would be completed when I suddenly had another idea. I’d was writing the novel—this thing that was all-consuming, literally eating my whole brain—and then this little space opened and I thought, “Oh, that would be a good short story.” I feel like my head is now lit with ideas. It’s all free space now.

I would have thought that for some period of time, having completed the book after spending so much time on it, there would be some kind of reverberation. You’re saying you have been liberated to move on.

For me this was book was all-consuming, like most of my adult life spent on it. There really was a postpartum thing where you feel fine for a couple of weeks and then you just crash. My whole sense of purpose was this book, but then it gets balanced out by the fact that my real purpose is writing. If that’s what you are going to do all the time, you better really like it. So I feel like people get into trouble when they are only project-oriented.

Nine years later, big life commitment. Done. So what do you think about your book?

For me it’s not about whether I think it’s good. I recognize that’s not for me to do. I know what my obligations to a book are. I always quote Barry Targin, a writer who taught me about moral fiction at Binghamton. He talked about writing a fiction he could bear. The question is, do you stand by it?

You are proud of this as a good piece of craft?

Uh, I don’t know if it’s that.

You did the best you could?

Actually, it’s very strange for me to need to say, “Yes. I have tried my best” and then also to be done. Literally, my poor, poor editor, poor Jordan—I made a list of probably 75 to 100 pages of questions that I wanted to answer before the book was done. I remember sitting in her office on the last day, with her at her desk and me sitting at a small desk behind her.

Was it the kid’s table?

At the kid’s table. Other editors would walk by the office and look in and say “Poor woman. I don’t know why they love each other, those two.”

I remember sitting there crossing out the last question and being like, “And now I am done.” That’s it.

That’s a beautiful scene. Possibly shows the finer editor-writer relationship—

I'm so thankful for my editor and my agent. They take good care of me.

Let's give them names. Who are they?

Nicole Araggi and Jordan Pavlin at Knopf. I’m spoiled as can be. I’m really happy at Knopf. They care about books. Even the cover is important. Barbara de Wilde, who did my first cover, she hadn’t worked there in the intervening eight years and yet they brought her back. Nobody asked. I didn’t ask. To me that means somebody in the art department is thinking about books in a careful way. Not that anybody remembers I was alive, thank you, but I don’t think my collection would have sold a copy with a Jewish star on the front. They represented it the way I see it and that gave it a chance.

Have you spent much time thinking about who you are now, after this long boat voyage, ten years before the mast or some such?

My friends would say, “All he does is think about himself.” [both laugh] But not in that way. It’s a goal, to be very honest, to choose writing, to make time to write. I keep saying “obsessed” or “holy” because I am obsessed with it and it is holy to me. The writing will not suffer. I refuse to have it suffer but, now, after this point maybe I can balance writing and something else. I would like to be more available for dinner plans with the next book. That can be a goal.

You’re shooting for becoming a well-rounded mensch here.

I’d like to work towards being of the world.

We’ll check in from time to time and see how it goes.

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Trained as a classicist, Mendelsohn rejects the trappings of what he terms "Holocaustiana" by refusing to see his subjects as "puppets to be manipulated…for the movies or magical realist novels." The twentieth century was enough of a deus ex machina; it doesn't need a curatorial sentimentalist to intervene on behalf of its victims. The Lost, as a result, is firmly "anti-redemption," a stance that will hardly win its author fans of the Schlinder's List tendency. Not that he minds much.

The Lost was completed fairly recently but occupied you for at least five years. What is the date you recognize as the book's beginning?

The first 75 pages of my book are an attempt to answer this question, to describe in considerable detail how the search, and hence the book, began. Despite the fact that I'd always been possessed by family stories and histories, and had always hoped, in some vague way, that it might one day be possible to find out what happened to Uncle Shmiel, things didn't really get moving until I had the idea late in 2000 or early in 2001. That’s when I decided to go back to Bolechow and see if there wasn't anyone around who might remember Shmiel and his family—just walk around and talk to people and find "traces" of them.

So I and two of my brothers and my sister went to Ukraine in August 2001, an experience I subsequently wrote about as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine in July 2002. I should also emphasize that when I went on that trip, there was no notion in my mind that this might become a book. What made me feel strongly that there was a book to be written was what happened subsequent to our return from Ukraine—my being contacted out of the blue by one of the few Jewish survivors from our town, now living in Australia, and the consequent realization that there were these people still alive who had been intimates of my lost relatives and could help me learn about them. Naturally, at the starting point, I had no idea of what stories would develop, so it was a bit of a crapshoot. But as it turned out, I got so much more than I could ever have dreamed of. I always wanted to make the “search" the armature on which to hang a narrative that was complicated and rich in a way that I enjoy as a reader myself, and (more important) that allowed me to talk about many issues that have always been interesting to me: history versus narrative, family romances, storytelling, and so forth.I always thought of The Lost as referring not only to these six people who were murdered, but to a lot of things: A certain interwar European culture that has vanished; the world of people like my grandfather, European immigrants at the turn of the century through the 1920s, whose experiences as immigrants made them into a very specific kind of person that doesn't exist any more; a certain kind of Jewishness represented by those people; the kind of child I was in the 1960s who grew up around those people; the survivors I came to know, who although they survived had "lost" so much of themselves; and so on.

All those things are now "lost," I feel, and I wanted to find a way to write about all of it, from the start, and knew that the investigation, the search for Shmiel would, somehow, provide me with a structure from which I could hang the things you refer to – the circling digressions, the mini-histories, the reveries from childhood.
As to the book’s being "as much about me as about the six "lost"': I feel strongly that the book is about me only in as much as it needs to be in order to illuminate the issues I'm interested in, about family, about how people relate to the past (a subject as interesting to me as a classicist as it is to me as a Jew or a relative of Holocaust victims), about how one becomes the kind of person who is a searcher or scholar.

I am not interested in, and not a fan of, books about personal experience per se, even when they lead, as they almost inevitably do these days, to "redemptions" that readers will identify with or derive solace from. As both The Elusive Embrace and now The Lost should make clear, I'm anti-redemption. I'm suspicious of using the world to make ourselves feel better. Feeling good about oneself is, I think, a fairly low ambition. You have already mentioned that you wanted, not surprisingly, to write a book that you would want to read. In pursuit of that, what Holocaust-themed books did you read? Strange as it may seem, I'm not in any way what I call a "Holocaust professional." I don't particularly seek out Holocaust books – or films or whatever – as a rule, simply because they're about a subject I've been connected with. I suppose I've read all the usual books, starting with an electrifying encounter with Anne Frank when I was a teenager (mostly because of the teen-love stuff, if I recall, which is as it should be). Primo Levi is admirable for the moral rigor. Naturally, I read Hannah Arendt at some point, although I have to say after working on my book all these years, I'm not so sure evil is so banal after all.

Over the years I have read this or that if it seemed good or was well-reviewed. But I am not and would never claim to be a scholar of the Holocaust, and while writing my own book I actually avoided reading Holocaust lit in general. For the purposes of writing my book, I had this feeling that I wanted to be cocooned in my own story, and wanted to avoid "static" from other writings. I just wanted to go out into the world and listen to these Bolechowers talk about the occupation in their town, the way I used to listen to my grandfather tell stories about the town, and to piece together a story of what happened that way. (The Homeric, oral narrative, as it were, rather than the Thucydidean, written one, the history.) Because it was so important to me to focus scrupulously on just six people, as if one didn't know any of the rest, and in that way to recover a sense of what was done – done to people, as opposed to done to the Jews – that I avoided lots and lots of Holocaustiana during the writing of this book. It's odd, because it's precisely the opposite approach I normally take when preparing to write something, which (given my philological training) would be to read every word written on a subject before sitting down to write a single word of my own. I think it's probably fair to say that I'm far more interested in certain aspects of Central European Jewish and non-Jewish life from the turn of the last century up until the Holocaust. That’s a subject I'm happy to seek out books about. I'd much rather read Joseph Roth's The Radetsky March – a truly great book – than Schindler's List, any day. In beginning of the panoply of narratives that is The Lost, when and how did you decide to adopt this ring-like Greek story telling style?
There was no conscious decision as such to adopt a style, since, as is already evident in my first book, this is the style I've always had when writing about family narratives (since it is the style of those family narratives, as I describe in the book.) So it wasn't as if I sat down and said, "For this book, a bissl ring composition!"

When I write in my "book mode," as opposed to my critic mode, to some extent I'm channeling my grandfather's storytelling voice. Indeed I think I'm writing often as a kind of transcription of a basically oral narrative, if you know what I mean: the long winding sentences, the circling back to the starting point after digressions, etc. I started writing this book on Labor Day, 2004, and as I wrote these stories down, the sentence and paragraphs and sections just sort of happened that way: it was all, from the start, big, circling, and broadly arced. And I just went with it. Is your role of family historian self-appointed or assigned? Though you end the book poetically by not looking back at Bolechow, you wonder about how your children will apprehend this story. The kids have certainly been aware of my research, the search, since it involved my being away for large chunks of time. I have explained to them what it's all about, and certainly my older boy is old enough to be told, in a limited way, what World War II was about. But to be perfectly frank, I suspect that, like most writers' children, they will be blithely indifferent to my books and never read them until much later in life. I asked about your kids because soon the history and memory of the Shoah will be mediated exclusively through secondhand accounts. Despite your mother's appeal to "genug ist genug" as well as your own insistence that the book is over, the fact of a next generation suggests maybe it's not. I point to an aside late in the last chapter when you meet Francis Begley's granddaughter and wonder to yourself about writing a book for her generation. Did I read that incorrectly? Well, of course I am a fervent believer in the necessity of carrying over the testimony to future generations. In a way, the central obsession of the book is: How do you become responsible for other people's narratives? And I think I spend a great deal of time worrying that question (not worrying about it: worrying it, the way a dog worries a rag doll.) I go to great lengths, I think, to articulate this notion that my generation – the "generation of the grandchildren," as I call it; the grandchildren of those who were adults during the Holocaust—is the last on earth who will have had the opportunity to know people who were survivors. I grew up going to family events attended by people with tattoos on their arms; my children won't. I keep referring to my generation, therefore, as the "hinge" generation, because we are the last ones who'll have been living receptacles for the stories of those who were in the event itself; and I'm acutely conscious, obviously, of what it means to be someone who becomes the "transmitter" of another's stories, another's past. As for genug ist genug: I do think that this pull in the opposite direction – the impulse to forget about the past and live in the present and future – is worth bringing up, because as we know, it's possible to get so obsessed with the past that one becomes unable to live in the present.

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