Elisa Albert—long-ago Jewcy editor!—is the acclaimed author of the The Book of Dahlia (a novel), How This Night is Different (a short story collection), and most recently After Birth, a novel of childbirth, motherhood, daughterhood, and friendship, which was aptly described by Merritt Tierce in the venerable New York Times as “a shriek of a carnival ride inside a spinning antigravity chamber, the ultimate trippy trip” — i.e. very, VERY good.

After Birth is literally searing in its descriptions of labor, delivery, and the early months of motherhood. It’s also very compelling, funny, and deliciously dark. Michael Orbach sat down with Albert for a light conversational repast of religion, adolescent suffering, the art of writing, the Holocaust, and C-sections.

You grew up somewhat observant, correct? When I read your book I couldn’t help thinking of that blessing Orthodox Jewish men say about thanking God for not making them women.

What’s your religious background and how do you look at it now?

I find the further away I get from observance, the more fondness I have for it. I find it quite lovely on a lot of levels, now that I’m pretty disentangled… I grew up pretty solidly Conservative; I went to day school and then Hebrew High from seventh grade on. Then I went to Brandeis. My mom belongs to both a Conservative and Orthodox shul and she goes back and forth as she sees fit; my stepfather is into Chabad. My mom came to observance pretty late in her life. She was Jewish but a hundred percent secular. Then she had this midlife crisis—call it what you will—and became very religious, almost punitively so. It wasn’t until I was much older and in the homes of very observant people who are comfortable in their observance that I noticed [religion] had a nicer energy. My mother was never relaxed about it. She was trying to inhabit it very hard.

What was the genesis of writing After Birth?

I feel fortunate that I had an established writing life before I became a mom, so all of the confusion and fascination that goes along with motherhood had this very natural outlet. Of course I’m going to write a novel about it: that’s what I do. I didn’t do much writing until my son was about a year old. I was pretty deep into early motherhood, and when I finally got my bearings and could carve out some space to write, there was no question that that was what I was going to engage. I’m not really the kind of writer who looks too far afield… This was what my mind was full of.

How close are you to Ari, the narrator of After Birth?

I would say she’s like a distillation of a really bad day; a haunted house mirror reflection of fears I have. She’s a rumination on a dark corner, blown up ten times. I really like what Susan Sontag said in her notebook: “To write, you have to allow yourself be the person you don’t want to be, of all the people you are.”  Like an id. [Ari] is someone so incredibly hopeless and in such a dire state of despondency. She has that tendency to hold on to really negative stuff and let it define her. That’s a danger in this whole being alive business.

There are lots of dangers in being alive.

That’s true.

Speaking of the not letting go, Ari can’t seem to forget her deceased mother throughout the book.

She’s a really nasty mother who even in death won’t let up; just that very broken maternal line and that incredible legacy of damage and darkness and secrets and unresolvable stuff that gets passed down as a matter of course if we’re not super conscious and careful. Ari’s struggle is to break that chain: can I be a mother and not hand down more of the same? Can I end that legacy? Can I not let my dark shit get on this [new] person?

It’s like that Philip Larkin poem, This be the Verse.

“They fuck you up your mum and dad,” I can recite it. And interestingly, it ends, “Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

How did your mother take the portrayal of Ari’s mother in the book?

My mother’s an exceptional reader. She taught me to love books and it’s been a huge benefit and boon to our relationship. I learned from her how to love books and to go to books to find what I needed. My mother’s not one of those people who doesn’t understand what a novel is. She’s incredibly well read and that helps a lot. She makes jokes, like, “Well that character isn’t me, I’m not Israeli,” or “This time the mother’s dead!”  I think it might be harder than she lets on but she knows enough about books and fiction to stand back and I’m grateful for that. I have acquaintances whose parents are very threatening with ultimatums, like “If you ever write about us…” That’s pretty bad. I’m lucky. My parents just say, “Congratulations on being a writer.”

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

I did. I didn’t know if I was any good—I mean I think I knew I was kinda good—but it still seemed so far fetched as I made my way toward it.  I think I always wanted to be seen and heard. When I was little, I wanted to be an actress.  I always had parts in the school play. I always had a need to be seen because I felt unseen in general.

Why?

Complicated family stuff. Growing up not super attractive in L.A. From puberty on, things were kinda dark.

Aren’t they always?

Some people just sail through, seems like.

They don’t become novelists; they become housewives and bankers.

Writing comes out of that feeling of invisibility.  It’s incredibly valuable but you don’t realize it until later. Sometimes I feel like whispering into the ears of passing adolescents, “I know things seem really bad but if you stick with yourself and don’t try to change…”

“Or kill yourself.”

I’ve noticed that the book seems to go after the sacred cows—both motherhood and, with regard to Ari’s grandmother, the Holocaust. Especially how her grandmother survives by becoming a prostitute to the Nazis.

People tend to put motherhood on a pedestal but think nothing of denying women the right to decent birth. The Holocaust has to be spoken of vaguely, in hushed tones, leaving out the basest human elements. I feel like this character’s irreverence is actually showing respect for the real issues, the real suffering, not all the gift wrap and bunting.  It’s so common for us to talk around the difficult things; the job of a novelist is to talk about the difficult thing. Baby showers are irrelevant. Standing in line for two hours to take a picture of Anne Frank’s attic is Tragedy Disneyland. The way it is in our culture, the baby registry is super important but we are silent about what happens to women in birth. Reverse it: there is something sacred and important here, but it’s not what we’re used to talking about. There is something incredibly harrowing and hard to look straight at, here; let’s show respect by actually trying to talk about it, even though it makes us really uncomfortable. Let’s not have our cathartic easy little cry and call it a day.

I think the graphic description of Ari’s grandmother’s having sex with the Nazis is a good example of that.

Right. Nobody wants to think about that. That’s how this woman saves her own life. A lot of people had to do things that are just too horrible to speak about. Everybody loves Anne Frank, me included, because she’s an innocent who believed in the triumph of the human spirit. That’s really easy to admire and cry about. Let’s graduate to something not so easy to admire or cry about.

When you said parts of motherhood that people don’t talk about, what were you referring to?

A lot of women go into motherhood wanting to not know much about birth. They choose to outsource birth, be a passive participant, give over their will and trust in whatever institution or whatever kind of care provider they’ve chosen.

Just a question of clarification: Ari describes her C-section as a bit like a rape. As you mentioned, some readers seem to think you’re anti-C-section. I didn’t take that you were anti-C-section insomuch as opposed to the passive nature of other people taking control during the birthing process.

I would say that. I’m anti-ignorance, I’ll go out a limb and say that. [laughs] Who’s going to argue with that? I’m anti-ignorance and the willful ignorance around birth is a shame. It causes a lot of problems. The book is not anti-C section; C-sections save lives in 10-15 percent of cases, where they’re really medically necessary. Unfortunately, it’s the most commonly performed surgery in America today and it’s performed on a third of all women giving birth.  That’s obviously problematic. Ari didn’t need surgical birth. She was bullied and terrified into it and she didn’t know enough to say no.  No one is saying we should go back to the time when women died in childbirth. But one in ten is very different from one in three.

What I took from the book is it sort of contrasts between birth, this really visceral experience, and the rest of our lives that are super non-visceral.

That’s a huge part of the book. A bit of a push-back against the disembodiment of modern life. We live a lot between our eyeballs and screens. Birth is one reminder that we are mammals.  We are monkeys and we have bodies and our bodies matter. When we disown them, ignore them or try to distance ourselves from them, there are severe spiritual consequences.

Related: The Book of Dahlia: Good, or Just Jewish?

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David Bezmozgis’ new novel, The Betrayers, follows the late-life travails of Baruch Kotler, a celebrated Soviet-Jewish-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician, who bears some resemblance to the real-life refusenik Natan Sharanksy. Like Sharansky, the fictional Kotler spent many years in jail before emigrating to Israel—where he was received as a hero—but unlike Sharansky, he finds himself embroiled in scandal when his extra-marital affair with a much younger woman is revealed.

Kotler flees the furore in the Holy Land for Crimea (because irony), where he encounters Vladimir Tankilevich, the man who once betrayed him. What follows is a delicious, compelling, literary psychodrama—and a fascinating exploration of Zionism, the right-wing trajectory of Israeli politics, and the legacy of Soviet Jewry. Writing in The New York Times, Boris Fishman (also interviewed by Jewcy) raved thusly about The Betrayers: “A novel of ideas and an engrossing story? It’s the umami experience: salty and sweet, yin and yang, the rocket scientist who is also a looker.” Tablet’s Adam Kirsch described it as “the rare book that makes being Jewish feel not just like a fate or a burden, but a great opportunity.” Michael Orbach talked with Bezmozgis about these big ideas—and more—earlier this month.

What was the genesis of the book?

I’d written an obituary in 2004 for The New York Times Magazine about a Jewish dissident in Moscow, Alexander Lerner. In researching it, I came across this detail that Lerner stood accused, along with Natan Sharansky, by a fellow Jew, a guy named Sanya Lipavsky, which I’d never heard before. I became fascinated by this idea that this one Jew had denounced his ostensibly Zionist brothers for a regime that then ceased to exist. I wondered what happened to this man when the Soviet Union fell apart; what his life would have been like. That was the beginning of it, but it led to a larger question that fascinated me about morality: why are some people—like Sharansky—incredibly principled and willing to sacrifice anything for their principles and what is it that separates them from most other people? The moral question is the heart of the book. I wondered what would happen if these two men ever encountered each other and if they did so in the present day, with the background of what was happening to the former Soviet Union and the background of what Israel had become and was changing into. That was what inspired the book.

It is a rather lovely book and it does ask that question. Do you think that question has a sort of predestinated answer?

This is part of the project of the book: one is to ask the question and then to dramatize it and the other is to pose an answer, which the book does. I don’t think we should reveal the answer during an interview; I feel it takes some of the excitement out of the reading away. But it does pose the question of what separates the highly virtuous people and most other people and how would we ever know? That was what was interesting about these two characters, Kotler and Tankilevich, because of the Soviet system a lot of the people were actually forced to declare and expose themselves morally and constitutionally: what kind of person are you and will you denounce your brother? Will you resist and, of course, what price would you pay for your resistance?

Was there a good deal of research involved in writing this book?

Yes. The Betrayers derived almost nothing from my own experience so there was a research on a number of levels. First of all, to understand people like Kotler, the refuseniks and Zionist dissidents. I read memoirs they published; I visited Israel, in part, to meet some of these people, see what their lives were like in Israel and how they felt all these years later about the country. This was in 2012, before the Gaza War that proceeded this most recent war. In 2011, I was in Crimea and traveled around to find where to set the story. I hadn’t thought it would be Yalta, but Yalta was the only place I could do it.

Why?

For the very simple reason that I needed large, fancy hotels and outside of Yalta, no place on the Crimean coast had these things.

What was the difference in your writing process between writing something loosely based around your own life (like Natasha) and something like this?

I think by the time I start writing it doesn’t make much of a difference. By the time you start writing it’s just the complication, the challenge, of writing good sentences. Whether I’m writing about myself or I’m writing about someone like Kotler, it really didn’t make much of a difference. It was leading up to the process of starting—trying to understand the subject—that was the big change.

The obvious parallel to Kotler is Natan Sharansky, but I noticed there’s a section where Kotler reminisces about being put on trial in Israel by another refusenik. For some reason, this reminded me a bit of Rudolph Kastner and his experiences post-WW2. Was this based on him?

No, in fact it was this other little detail that I discovered when I was in Israel talking to refuseniks. There was an actual trial against Sharansky that I was fascinated by and it finds its way into the book. In Israel Sharansky stood accused of being a fraud, the opposite of what everyone believed him to be, not a victim but one of the villains. That was a fascinating detail. Not much directly from Sharansky’s life enters into the novel. It is significantly fictionalized, but that detail was striking.

What was it like meeting the refuseniks in Israel? I remember speaking to Gal Beckerman, the author of When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone, and he made this joke in passing that a lot of refusniks complain jokingly, but also not, that Israel is just like the Soviet Union.

That wasn’t my experience at all. In fact, that was one of the things I was curious about: how did these people, who sacrificed so much to come to Israel, feel about Israel? When they came to Israel a lot of them struggled. The people I spoke to, across the board, remained very committed Zionists and loved Israel. They were on the political right and not on the political left which is true of most former Soviet Jews.

Sharansky is on the right of the Israel political spectrum and that comes across in Kotler’s character as well.

There are people far more on the right. There are moments when [Sharansky] articulates democratic positions that other people don’t. At the time of the Arab Spring he was one of the few Israeli officials that believed this sort of thing should be supported and not immediately suspected. As the case turned out we now know what happened to the Arab Spring. But he wasn’t one of the cynics.

Tangential question: Is there a more right-wing trajectory in all Israeli politics right now?

I think Israeli politics have swung to the right. The Likud has been in power for a decade or some version of the Likud, that’s a fact. Part of what prompted me to include Israel as a part of the book has to do with how that country has changed. How it’s changed has been a function of absorbing more than a million Soviet Jews. I’ve written these three books and this last one was intended to be completely contemporary and to ask the question: what is going to be the legacy of the Soviet Jews? Their real legacy isn’t in North America; their real legacy is in Israel. They’ve changed that country. And if people are interested in why that country has swung to the right, part of the answer has to do with these Russian Jews. You have to understand the mentality and the context of what formed them politically and ideologically: what the Soviet Union was like and what it did to Jews and what it means to all these Jews, speaking broadly, to no longer be the oppressed, but to actually wield power.

They’ve also contributed a lot to the culture and economy in Israel in the best possible way, but politically they’re part of the reason why that country swung to the right. The book continues on with Kotler’s son and the difference between Kotler—who most people on the left would consider a politically conservative guy—and his son. That’s the other part of the family story, which is the rise of the Zionist Orthodox and how that has changed the country.

I’ve noticed that in your story collection Natasha and this book, bad people seem to go to minyan [services]. I think any fictional character who attends minyan in your book is bound to be unpleasant or bound to meet someone quite unpleasant.

Go to any minyan in your own world and I’m sure that one of those people aren’t as pure as driven snow either. That uncle who has some real estate holdings and maybe a scrapyard. He’s the one who sponsored the Kiddush, standing there by the herring.

You’ve spoken many times about the great Jewish writer Leonard Michaels. How were you influenced by him?

Part of the experience in encountering a writer you connect with is also recognizing something of yourself, that feeling of identification: this person has written the book that you were meant to write. There was an instant of admiration and envy when I encountered Lenny’s stories. His approach to his childhood and upbringing seemed in line with mine. The way he looked at urban Jewish life wasn’t purely intellectual, he had these athletes and hustlers. It wasn’t bookish nebbish-ey representation of Jews, and growing up in a community surrounded by Soviet Jews. All the men of my grandfather’s generation served at the front; my father was in sports and many of his friends were athletes. That was the world that made sense to me: where Jews could be both physical and cerebral.

And the beauty of his prose: how economical it was and yet not at the expense of just being evocative and poetic. I still haven’t encountered very many writers that move me the way that Leonard Michaels moved me. I go back and re-read him all the time.

I don’t think anything can match his story ‘Murderers’. That’s a perfect story.

It’s a perfect story. And you can read it, and re-read it and find something new. There’s not a wasted image and everything comes together. There’s humor in it; there’s a real understanding of the darkness that attends being mortal and there’s just great artistic beauty. “We sat on the roof like angels, shot through with light, derealized in brilliance.” My God, somebody else write a better line than that.

Read also: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

(Image: author’s website)

The post David Bezmozgis on Zionism, Betrayal, and the Legacy of Soviet Jewry appeared first on Jewcy.

Inspired by this historic, poignant correspondence, comic artist Liana Finck—a Fulbright and Six Points fellow whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Forward and Tablet—wrote a graphic novel, also called A Bintel Brief. Slate‘s Dan Kois describes her style as “sharp, evocative,” and reminiscent of Ben Katchor and Roz Chast. I spoke with Finck talk about art, becoming a book person, and the making of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.

So, basic question: how’d you get to A Bintel Brief?

It started as a grant proposal for the Six Points Fellowship. I decided to become a serious comic book artist after college, and I gave myself one year. I had a Fulbright grant that was going to last less than a year, so I needed to finish a great comic. I was planning this amorphous, ambitious first novel and when the nine months were almost up I realized it wasn’t going to be finished and I needed another grant that would give me another year or two. I wanted something less ambitious and more limited, so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to locate and bare my soul. I was being calculating; jadedly I thought, “I can pretend to be the version of me that I’m not.” I can pretend to be this nice Jewish girl from the suburbs and write this small, nostalgic, non-intellectual Jewish story. If I could’ve sold my soul and done something that wasn’t me, that’s what I would have done with A Bintel Brief, but I really fell in love with it long before I finished the grant proposal—I fell in love the minute I started reading the letters. Once I read the letters I wasn’t jaded anymore.

What spoke to you from the letters?

They’re very simple and at the same time they’re seething with emotion. I’d always felt apart from the people I knew, especially people who were artists. I think I had a lot of feelings when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and I related a lot more to books and art than to people. I was expecting these letters to be things that I didn’t relate to, because they weren’t literature in my mind; they were in the human camp. But I did relate to them. Reading them made me realize that I wasn’t actually a high art person in an ivory tower; I was just a person who seeks human intensity.

Do you think that’s a part of growing up?

I think when you’re in your teens and early twenties—at least for me—you are a much more intense person than a full-fledged adult. I felt like I was miles away from other people with their small talk. I couldn’t find humanity in them. Just in Chekhov, etc.

I used to like books about people, but not people.

It’s so strange. I’m still like that, but I think it’s a delusion. We refuse to see humanity in people because we are so scared of them. They are layered and full of veils and contradictions. I used to think I liked it because only smart people could understand it, but I’ve realized that I like it because it’s abstract, and not trying so hard to make sense of all the feelings and mysteries. Abstraction does not lie.

It was The Catcher in the Rye’s anniversary last week. I re-read that book five times before I really got it—

I keep on seeing people reading it, I look at this guy and think, “He’s a brute of a Wall Street stock broker,” or “He’s a gangster wannabe,” and then I’ll see he’s got Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. It changes everything. That’s the best feeling, seeing Catcher in the Rye in the back pocket of a pushy guy in a loud suit. I have to read it again. I read it when I was a young teenager and then an older teenager. I liked it but I don’t think it changed my life. I didn’t understand parts of it, and I wasn’t a book person yet.

When did you become a book person?

I became a poetry person at 13 and then a book person at 17. I stayed a poetry person until I was 21 and realized I wouldn’t be a poet because the poetry world seemed like a storm of ice crystals. I think I was always a story person, fairy tales and kid novels, but poetry was something totally different. When I was seventeen I realized that there were books that had the things I loved about poetry. I had a teacher who recommended great books to me when I was a junior in high school, and I started to read modernist novels like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Much earlier, my mom had given me [Vladimir] Nabokov and [Isak] Dinesen; I loved them the way I loved fairy tales as a kid, then I rediscovered them as puzzles as I got older.

Does your art mimic the puzzled thing that you liked in poetry?

I think working on art is a puzzle in of itself. I tried to be a poet and abstract painter when I was in college because that was the kind of art that really moved me, but I realized I liked abstract art and poetry because, looking at and reading it, I was doing a lot of work in my head that the artist or poet generously left unfinished. I’m not that generous in my work. I like to figure out the puzzles myself, and give the reader something more packaged and dogmatic.

What’s your favorite piece in the book?

I liked the first stories I started. I did more drafts of those, and was able to figure out slowly what the mood of the story was—time was my friend. I’m also fond of the blue parts [between the stories], I made those pages after I made the stories. The stories are adaptations—which is a limiting, tricky form to work in—you keep having to ask yourself, “Why does this letter need to be transmuted into comics?”—but also a safer art form. You aren’t telling your own story, so if the story turns out badly it’s not a reflection on your soul. Working on the narrative between stories gave me a very small, safe venue for telling my own semi-autobiographical story. I felt so free when I made it. It was also the least ambitious work of fiction I’ve ever tried to make, and working on it taught me that dry ambitiousness is NOT my friend.

One last question: Why did you draw Abraham Cahan with a heart-shaped face?

Because my mom used to draw heart-faced people on my lunch bags as a kid. She said I had a heart-shaped face. Cahan was a total brain-man. In creating A Bintel Brief, he tried to access his heart and he succeeded; he turned his brain into a heart. Sometimes I’m afraid his head looks like a turnip like the guy in Howl’s Moving Castle. Afraid is not the right word. The right word is delighted.

Image: © Liana Finck, reprinted from A Bintel Brief, published in 2014 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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Gary Shteyngart is… Oh hell, you probably already know who Gary Shteyngart is. Part myth, part blurbing machine, part bear, Gary is the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, and most recently the memoir Little Failure. He spoke with Michael Orbach about his new book and his typical Soviet upbringing.

As someone whose father was active in the Soviet Jewry movement (he wrote a book about it actually), I wonder if I should begin the interview by apologizing for getting you out.

Was it? I just read your descriptions of unending misery in Solomon Shechter and I was kinda wondering about it…

It was this weird historical accident where we ended up being in a country where we were the enemy. These kids just heard what was being said on the TV and around the dinner table and they couldn’t help equating us being Russians because we looked so Russian, like we stumbled out of that Wendy’s Soviet Fashion Show commercial. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

When the original Red Dawn came out were you like, “Dammit!”

By that point I was so Republican I wanted to bomb Russia even though that meant bombing my grandmother. That made me a little concerned. I don’t think there’s been an enemy to match the Soviet Union in terms of the fact that we had missiles pointed at each other. It was an existentialist thing for many people.

I suppose Solomon Schechter boys and girls aren’t known for subtly dealing with enemy empires.

I’ve been on this book tour for a month and so many Russians come up and say, “I survived Solomon Schechter.” I met someone in Florida who said in second grade her parents yanked her out to public school and nobody made fun of her there.

Should there have been a movement to save Soviet Jewry from Solomon Schechter?

That would’ve been a one-two punch. Get us out and get us out again. [Laughs.]

I’m not trying to butter you up for a blurb, but I really loved the book. One of the things that struck me was how fiction helped you escape from who you were, like when you started making up stories so kids would stop beating you up.

Storytelling is great. Being surrounded by Jews was a positive thing because everyone had a sense of humor. Well, not everyone. But a lot of people had a sense of humor and that is how you progress in a Jewish society: make jokes.

It didn’t make me popular but it did, as they say in L.A., change the narrative. It made me not Russian so much as this weird Gary Gnu Telling Stories Guy. It wasn’t great, but it was certainly better than being The Russian. I was amazed looking back at the yearbook how all the references to the other Russians were all about them being Soviets and Reds, but for me it was about how I was this nutty, crazy guy. That was a step up.

I suppose that sort of happens to everyone, where you shed your persona to try to impress people and become the person you want to be.

The thing is I exchanged what other people were thinking about me with another completely fraudulent persona too. Fraudulent in the sense that there was no inner life, it was an act, but even the act felt more real than people calling me a Commie. Good lord, by that point I was the most Republican kid on the planet. At age 11 I had membership in the NRA. It doesn’t get any more right-wing than that. I was very confused. I wanted to love America as deeply as I loved the Soviet Union and it worked for me. I fell in love with it so blindly. I couldn’t believe America had any flaws other than the Democratic Party. It was very blind love, but at school no one would return that love.

The Americans around me didn’t seem interested until I met people like Jonathan, my friend, and that was sort of a turning point. Having a friend like Jonathan saved my life in a big way. It was an indication that I could have real lasting friendships with people. I didn’t know that before. He and his whole family were my model American family, the first idea of what a smart, intelligent well-meaning American family could look like. I don’t want to glorify or exalt them. I’m sure they had their problems as well, but they were, as I was growing up, that was what I wanted. I wanted that wood-paneled station wagon and Lassie and they just generally seemed to love each other without the kind of Soviet residue that everyone around me had.

Can we talk about that Soviet residue? It seemed like a lot of pain.

This is cultural. What seems very abusive to Americans would make a lot of sense to Russian readers. On this tour so many people came up to me and said, “I know exactly what you mean, I had the same life, my parents called me a failure too.” There’s an incredible cultural dissonance between these two countries that I think still exists even though the Iron Curtain is down and Russia has some psychiatrists running around at this point.

I’ve noticed, we’re Facebook friends, though you haven’t liked any of my Facebook posts yet, FYI.

I’ll start liking immediately.

On Facebook you posted that your favorite Olympic event is Bobsledders Breaking Down Elevator Doors.

I have a very natural fear of getting stuck in elevators that coincides with the fact that everything in Russia gets stuck every once in a while and you have to break out of it with your fist. I pack a lot of Ativan for the elevators.

There’s this rather haunting line in the book where you write about your parents and you describe them by saying that some people weren’t made to have kids. Do you still have that sentiment?

No, I don’t. I think that the book charts an evolution on my part. I was such an angry child in many ways—there was a lot of anger and that anger floated around. I was angry at the kids for making fun of me, and I was angry at my parents for not understanding my pain and causing some of it.

By the end of the book—in going back to Russia—all these feelings turn to sorrow for my parent’s lives. I wish they had been born in a normal country. I wish my father had a chance to become an opera singer if he grew up somewhere that wasn’t as anti-Semitic as Russia. Learning about their lives and their first memories and the way Stalin and Hitler were so responsible for the world they came into, it was very sad. So by the end of it, I realized that they did the best they could. They really did. But what they were given was very faulty. The country did not prepare one to become anything: a parent, a husband, a wife. Look at the past of so many Russian families: you get married by 22, you have your child by 23; you’re divorced by 25, and you’re an alcoholic by 30. That was the trajectory. People weren’t prepared for any real kind of emotional life. There was no psychological insight and you were spouted lies all day long. How were you expected to become a decent human being?

Do you think that’s changed in Russia now?

Russia doesn’t really change. I think there is a correction for the better, then a correction for the worse. The overall path of the country is a disaster. I often mention there’s a restaurant in St. Petersburg named “1913.” I asked the owner why 1913 and she said that was the only good year in Russian history. That seems really right to me. There was so much hope after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a democracy might develop, a middle class might develop, but it frustrates you on every turn. After finishing this book, I almost thought: “Hey I’m kinda free of Russia for a while.”

And are you free of it now?

I’m going to try to be free of it. I’m going to try to write about other subjects for a while. As a travel writer, I travel around the world and that’s been eye-opening. It would be wonderful to try my hand on something that doesn’t focus entirely on Russian Jews.

One of the people I look at is Philip Roth. He wrote so well about people who came from the same part of the world as he had, Portnoy and Zuckerman, for example. Then in his earlier career tried to jump away from that. He tried to write about non-Newarky subjects and I gotta say that that isn’t the work I love the most. So there is some danger of it as well, but let me try at least to see what happens. I enjoyed writing the Korean character in Super Sad True Love Story. Maybe the only way of writing about Jews these days is writing about Koreans and Indians.

There’s one other thing I wanted to apologize to you for on behalf of all Jews: your botched circumcision. We’re sorry about the Soviet Jewry movement and your bad brit mila…

No. No. [Laughs.] It’s fine. I feel much better now. It doesn’t hurt as much.

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