Earlier this year we learned that legendary novelist Judy Blume—bard of bra, prophet of period—would be releasing her first book for adults since her 1998 bestseller, Summer Sisters. Carole Baron, Blume’s editor at Knopf, was elusive in her description of the book, coyly promising readers “writing about family and about friendships, about love, about betrayal… quintessential Judy,” but offering no details of the plot.

Now, happily, the press machine is swinging into motion, and we can officially GET EXCITED. In the Unlikely Event is based on three real-life plane crashes which occurred in the author’s hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. in 1951. Blume was 13 years old at the time, and—not surprisingly—freaked out and mystified by the tragic events.

“It was a crazy time,” Blume said in a press release issued by her publisher. “We were witnessing things that were incomprehensible to us as teenagers. Was it sabotage? An alien invasion? No one knew, and people were understandably terrified.”

Knopf elaborates: “… Blume uses this background to weave together a story with an unforgettable ensemble of families and friends across three generations. The hallmark traits of Blume—a deep concern for her characters and the authentic capture of an era—are evident on every page as we see her protagonists grow up, fall in love, marry, cope with loss, deal with estranged parents and difficult friendships and familial obligations, remember the good times, and finally, wonder at the joy that keeps them going.”

Quintessential Judy, indeed.

The book will be released on June 2, 2015.

Started researching this novel in 2009. Now it is almost ready for you to read. Excited! #InTheUnlikelyEvent pic.twitter.com/4pWMO8mybn

— Judy Blume (@judyblume) December 15, 2014

Related: Judy Blume on Censorship, Death Threats, Divorce, and Not Retiring Like Philip Roth

The post Judy Blume Reveals the Cover and Title of Her New Book for Adults! appeared first on Jewcy.

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)

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Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

The post Jewish Authors Land on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014 appeared first on Jewcy.

It was a smart move to ask beloved Israeli weirdo Etgar Keret to co-edit Tel Aviv Noir, Israel’s entrée into Akashic Books’ expansive series of noir-themed fiction anthologies. Keret—aided by compatriot Assaf Gavron—allows his fantastical leanings to push beyond the genre’s typical boundaries. As a result, only a few stories invoke the genre’s classic tropes: more often than not, the streets are not rain-slicked, the dames not long of leg, and the mysteries not so compelling. In fact, the more memorable characters in this collection would be markedly out of place on the streets occupied by Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled heroes.

The upshot of this thematic liberalism is an anthology of startlingly varying quality. The stories that stick to Chandleresque modes of storytelling are often weaker than those that attempt subversion, perhaps because it’s so difficult to improve on the masters—I found myself torn between wanting the stories to hit the genre notes and then, when they often did, wanting them to subvert the clichés.

In the clunky opener “Sleeping Mask,” Gadi Taub’s protagonist narrates the story in relentless exposition; on the same page, we read that his “sex was like a tornado,” and that “everything was up in the air. [They] were playing with fire.” Lacking are the whimsies of The Big Sleep, or Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Instead, we’re given stock characters and stock plot set in motion by a conspicuously authorial voice.

The other stories in ‘Encounters,’ Part I the anthology, fair slightly better. In Matan Hermoni’s “Women,” a failed novelist meets the ghost of an obscure Polish poet while attending the funeral of famed Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, and they become roommates. “The Time-Slip Detective,” by Lavie Tidhar, is a particular highlight. Tidhar is a ghostly presence in the story itself: the protagonist, a journalist, is on assignment to interview Tidhar about his recent World Fantasy Award—which he won in 2012 for Osasma. The journalist finds himself magically transported to 1930s Mandate Palestine, where he is chased by a fictional detective from a series of Hebrew pulp novels. The disorienting and propulsive story allows for cliché—eyes are frequently twinkling and sparkling—but it feels earned in the context of smarter language: our journalist describes cars moving “like tiny beetles,” an unsettling image that calls to mind the surrealist shrinking of tilt-shift photography. A story of fused identities, disruptions in time, and literary parlor tricks, Tidhar’s piece is not the only one in the anthology to borrow heavily from Borges.

Part II, ‘Estrangements,’ falls flat, but contains a jewel in “Swirl,” by Norwegian journalist and critic Silje Bekeng. Her story finds the wife of a seldom-home foreign diplomat encountering the strange, spectral man who has been subtly misplacing objects in her apartment, whilst riots on the streets of Tel Aviv threaten to spill over into her world. Sandwiched between misfires from Gon Ben Ari and Julia Fermentto, “Swirl” shines.

If hints of noir seem absent from many of these stories, a pervasive sense of terror and violence certainly is not. In Taub’s story, one character warns another against hitchhiking, saying, “There are Arabs out there, trying to abduct soldiers.” The hero of Tidhar’s “Time Slip Detective” is comforted by the threat of terrorism when he returns to modern Israel. And in Alex Epstein’s eccentric and sadly too-short “Death in Pajamas,” the Grim Reaper visits a café while missiles erupt near Hadera, a double car bomb detonates in Jerusalem, and a pregnant Palestinian woman miscarries her twins because of a delay at a checkpoint. (It’s curious—and disappointing—that from a roster of international authors, including a Norwegian, a Colombian, and an Iranian, no Arab or Palestinian writers are represented.

Sensibly, Keret and Gavron save themselves for Part III, ‘Corpses,’ offering strong stories that finish a wildly uneven anthology on a high note, and illustrate the problems inherent in opening up the definitions of noir.

Keret’s “Allergies” is the story of a couple who can’t conceive, so they adopt a dog with a picky appetite and violent tendencies. The dog, as you would expect, threatens to derail their relationship. But smartly, Keret pivots from the obvious, and the story ends with a touching and absurdist twist. Though it’s dark, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a single detail that evokes the concept of ‘noir.’

Meanwhile, Gavron’s “Center” is noir subversion at its finest, featuring two renovators who pretend to be private detectives for a few days and wind up solving a gory murder mystery. Gavron brilliantly allows amateurs to take the reins in his story, perhaps signaling to the reader that he himself is an amateur in the genre. Instead of trying to best Chandler at his own perfected game, Gavron gives us lovable fools running amok in a noir universe. The result is a story that gleefully calls to mind the absurdist, hard-boiled logic of a Coen Brothers film.

Despite the unfortunate ratio of clunkers to winners, Tel Aviv Noir evokes the mood, sensitivities, and neuroses of Israeli life to good effect. As Keret asks in the introduction, “Tel Aviv is one of the happiest, friendliest, most liberal cities in the world. What could possibly be dark about our sunny city, a city nicknamed ‘The Bubble?'” Turns out, plenty—even if isn’t actually noir.

Zachary C. Solomon is a Brooklyn-based writer and fiction M.F.A. candidate at Brooklyn College. Follow him on Twitter at @z_solomon.

The post New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side appeared first on Jewcy.

Yelena Akhtiorskaya, 28, is the author of Panic in a Suitcase, a novel spanning 15 years in the life of a family of Ukrainian emigres struggling to adjust to life in the United States. The Nasmertovs live in the Soviet immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where the tension between the past and future is acutely felt by all—and exemplified by a visit from Pasha, the famous poet uncle who remained in Ukraine. In 2008, 15 years after Pasha’s visit, his niece Frida—now a medical student—travels from New York to Odessa for her cousin’s wedding, a journey rich in wry observations about displacement, homesickness, and culture shock.

Panic in a Suitcase has received rave reviews from The New York Times (“crisp and gorgeous”), the Washington Post (“genius”), Vogue (“a virtuosic debut”), and many others. (And this morning Akhtiorskaya was named by the National Book Foundation as one of their “5 under 35” for 2014.) Earlier this summer, Michael Orbach talked with her about writing, misery, Brighton Beach, and Russian literature in translation.

What’s the story behind Panic in a Suitcase?

A lot is based on my life. It’s kind of a composite of a few things: one is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being. And the third idea was about a character who chooses not to emigrate. I love Russian-Jewish immigrant novels and that whole tradition, but they don’t entirely speak to the way it is now, or not the way it was with my experience. I wanted to explore the way we romanticize the old country and the authenticity of it.

When did you move to America?

I came in 1992. I feel like I can’t say I grew up in America; I meet Russians who moved to California or Ohio and they’re so Americanized. I grew up in Brighton Beach where I spoke Russian wherever I went.

I think that’s why everyone says they hear an accent. I shouldn’t have one, but I do, because I stayed in Russia. Growing up in Brighton Beach was kind of like growing up in the 1950s. It’s like Brighton Beach Memoirs mixed with Requiem for a Dream. Wholesome and Jewish, but at the same time lots of wandering the streets and drugs and all this desperation. The parents are working really hard to rebuild their lives and the grandparents are watching over you, but it’s easy to fool the grandparents.

Did you disappoint your parents by not becoming a doctor?

My mom used to say every day, “Please just reconsider, it’s not too late to go to medical school.” I think the fact that she no longer says that, or not as regularly, means she must be proud. It is hard to tell. Ideally, you become part of the tradition of Russian writer-doctors—Chekhov, Bulgakov, Tsypkin. I’m considering becoming a clinical psychologist. This summer I took an intensive statistics course… I can’t tell how much of it is for me and how much for my parents.

I know you went to Columbia for your MFA, what happened afterwards?

I really needed to make money, but I didn’t want to work. There were some dark times. First, I worked at The Strand.

Like every other novelist.

It was the only place I could get a job, but it didn’t last long, then I moved to New Orleans. My friends from high school were there and I thought it would be a good break from New York, but it was too joyful. Then I moved back here and I got a job at Columbia University Medical Center on 168th Street.

Uh, shouldn’t you be happier?

Do you know how to do that?

No, but I haven’t written a novel that’s gotten great reviews.

If you know how to be pleased with yourself, you will be, but if you don’t, you won’t.

You are so Russian.

My friend says that my capacity for misery is greater than anyone he’s ever met.

You should drink more. I think you need a hug.

Maybe that’s true. People usually say that on the phone but people are scared of giving me a hug.

Do you prefer to read in Russian?

It’s much harder for me to read in Russian. I read poetry in the original but for the fat novels there’s [translators] Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s necessary to take Babel in Russian, but luckily he spawned two of my favorite American short story writers: Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels.

What do you like about the Russians?

Russian writers are like Russian people: there’s not a lot of bullshit. I can relate to the inherent darkness, the pessimism, and all that misery. They get to the essential stuff pretty much right away.

What is the essential stuff?

Life, death, love, time. Russian poetry in particular cuts through to the heart of you in a way that is very not-American. I have to make a distinction: it’s a Russian quality, not a Jewish quality, and I don’t have it. I can’t help but make the joke. I don’t have the Russian thing where it’s really pure, dark tragedy. I can’t help but write in a funny or crooked way, even though at core there’s the darkness.

It’s very dark for you?

Being a writer you spend most of your time holed up in a room by yourself trying to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s not a very positive occupation. It doesn’t correlate to optimistic fun-in-the-sun-Frisbee time.

I noticed that you have some lovely passages about the sea.

I go back to Brighton Beach every weekend to swim in the ocean. That’s when I’m not in the miserable mode. I have a very good relationship with the sea. It’s like my home.

Read an excerpt from Panic in a Suitcase over at N+1.

 (Image: Riverhead Books)

Related: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

The post Debut Novelist Yelena Akhtiorskaya on Misery, Writing, and Brighton Beach appeared first on Jewcy.

Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

The post Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid appeared first on Jewcy.

That distant cheering noise you’re hearing is the sound of scores of Judy Blume fans the world over reacting to the news that the beloved YA author will be publishing her first novel for adults in 16 years.

According to The New York Times‘ ArtsBeat blog, details about the book, which is due out in the summer of 2015, are “sparse”—no title or synopsis just yet—but Carole Baron, Blume’s editor at Knopf, describes the novel as “pure Judy Blume, writing about family and about friendships, about love, about betrayal. It’s quintessential Judy.” Apparently it’s been in the works for a number of years.

Blume’s last book for adults, Summer Sisters (1998), depicted the long-standing friendship between Caitlin Somers and Victoria “Vix” Leonard over the course of many summers at Martha’s Vineyard, and was an instant bestseller. (Think Beaches meets Girls, with a touch of lesbian intrigue. As the title suggests, it’s a great beach read.)

We’ll report back when we learn more. Hurrah, Judy!

Related: Judy Blume’s Amazing Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’
Lena Dunham Interviews Judy Blume and All is Right With the World

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

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Anne Frank would have turned 85 today, and to honor her legacy, Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House asked followers to tweet about the impact the iconic teen diarist had on their lives, using the hashtag #AnneFrank2014. If you’d like to have your spirit lifted and your faith in humanity (and social media) restored, we recommend checking out the stream of tributes. Here are a few favorites:

Because “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” is my mantra. #AnneFrank2014 http://t.co/Q5QPGVtDn1

— Caiti Ward (@coolcaiti) June 13, 2014

#annefrank2014 She showed me both the great evil & good men are able to do. She taught me I cannot falter when I’m tired, that I must go on.

— Schwanenlied (@dark_swan) June 13, 2014

Courage and optimism in the face of unimaginable fear and disparity. She taught me to value life at a very young age. #AnneFrank2014

— Amber Hampton (@iMayNotFollow) June 12, 2014

Other ways to remember Anne—aside from reading her book, of course—download a free copy of the audiobook (thanks, Random House!), make a donation to the Anne Frank House, and watch the lovely, powerful two-part 2001 miniseries based on her life, “Anne Frank: The Whole Story.”

Also, here’s an assemblage of interesting Anne Frank-related links we came across while perusing the internet today:

The Prescient Poem 10-Year-Old Anne Frank Penned in Her Schoolmate’s Friendship Book (h/t the ever-wonderful Brain Pickings)

A Kiss in the Anne Frank House (h/t Sarah Seltzer, The Forward) — interesting piece about the controversial ‘make-out’ scene which takes place in Anne Frank’s attic in teen tear-jerker “The Fault in Our Stars.”

Extraordinary new play brings Anne Frank’s secret world to life (CNN) — A new play based on Anne Frank’s life is receiving rave reviews in Europe.

Someone Made an Anne Frank Video Game (Tablet) — Bizarre, true.

Meyer Levin’s Anne Frank: A controversial radio play of the famous diary—rejected in 1952 as too Jewish—gets a second airing (Tablet) —  Podcast!

http://youtu.be/VFAVWmFMLVE

http://youtu.be/GHeRd7L_9SA

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Boris Fishman, 35, is the author of A Replacement Life, a dark, hilarious new novel about a failed young journalist who begins forging Holocaust restitution claims for Russian Jews in Brooklyn, at the behest of his incorrigible grandfather. I talked to Fishman about writing, grandfathers, Russian hirsuteness, and the immigrant experience.

So when I first saw that you were 35, I became quite jealous of your success. Then I looked at your author photo and realized you look like you’re 50 and like you might have killed someone in the Gulag.

Maybe you should be worried. Since the novel is about a crime and the first question anyone asks of a debut novelist is how autobiographical this is, I guess there’s a possibility that I have those tendencies. But I don’t. My temperament is the diametrical opposite… People assume you’re one kind of person but I’m a total teddy bear. Everyone’s kind of thrown by that.

You do seem awfully nice. I was expecting a Russian cliché.

I’m really nothing like the typical Russian person except for several key departments.

What are those key departments? Are you hirsute?

I am hirsute, absolutely, but nothing compared with my father. But really I’m talking about a certain quickness to intimacy. There’s a really wonderful essay in the New York Times by Alina Simone about the meaning of “How are you?” in American versus Russian culture. American culture is far more civil than Russian, if we are going to generalize and be reductive, but Russian culture tends to go soulful and deep much more quickly than American culture. I really don’t want to have small talk–I want to get down and deep very quickly. I don’t mean you, the person I’m speaking with right now, but hell, you too.

And the next thing is a real devotion to Russian literature and Russian culture. For all those horrible things that happened in the Soviet Union—there were many–the one thing that was remarkable was that there was state-mandated intellectualism, so to speak, in the sense that cultural production wasn’t dictated by the market, but the government. There was no low-brow literature published, and by the time you graduated high school, you were deeply familiar with all the Russian classics. In a society like that, there was obviously a big problem in the individual-freedom department, but at the same time you had a lot of people with a tremendous amount of respect for literature, a cultural literacy that was really impressive. I have a lot of respect for that heritage.

You got the good and none of the bad, except for the hirsuteness?

The hirsuteness gets rough especially when it’s warm. Some days, it really isn’t the most awesome cultural patrimony.

I’m speaking to an author about hairiness. I don’t know when exactly my life went wrong.

I do appreciate the novel direction this is going. There are only so many times I can talk about where I got the idea for the novel. [Laughs.]

That’s good–I really don’t care about that. I’m really more interested in your hair.

Well, I’ve got none on my head: an odd bargain. I took after my father. Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather, who is 87–may he live till 120, as we say–has a full head of hair and not a wisp on his chest. His hair is like goose down. He lives in Midwood. Sometimes I go down there just to eat his home-attendant’s cooking and rustle his hair.

We should trade grandfathers.

I should rent him out. Rent a grandfather.

He’d make a great pick-up line.

The thing about my grandfather is if I brought him as a wing-man, he’d collect more women than I would. He’s a really interesting storyteller.

When the story broke about the group of Russian Jews defrauding Holocaust restitution claims, did you see a novel in that?

The novel was formed by then. I started writing in November 2009 and this was exposed in November 2010. I had just gotten to a seven-month writing residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which is very remote from all things Jewish and all things New York. I was stunned to see this in the Times, but I didn’t really feel like my thunder was stolen. It didn’t feel like it was a story that would own the mainstream news for weeks and weeks. It was more that it was a bizarre and really depressing vindication of what I imagined.

What happened afterward was quite interesting. I wrote an article in Tablet Magazine saying that, legally, there’s no question these people are culpable and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But morally, let’s not dismiss them as pure evil. Let’s instead try to understand why they did something like this… The people who did this were primarily ex-Soviet Jews. For me, they’re trauma victims, and trauma victims inflict a lot of damage. But I feel that their culpability is mitigated by the trauma they underwent. I don’t know if they can plead insanity, but actually something close. They spent decades in a system whose perversity and abusiveness and discrimination against Jews is difficult to convey. That doesn’t make what they did okay–but I think it obligates us to be nuanced in our moral judgment of them. Certainly, you can’t write fiction about them without that capacity.

So what was the kernel that started the novel?

For me the genesis of the novel had to do with the fact that Holocaust survivors behind the Iron Curtain were not able to apply for restitution because it was felt that their governments would poach the money—a reasonable thing to have been concerned about. My grandmother, a survivor, did not become eligible to apply until we got here from the USSR in 1988. When she got set to submit her paperwork in the 1990s, it was given to me even though I was just a teenager because I had the best English in the family.

Two things stood out to me, one leading to the next. The first was that virtually no documentation was requested, for obvious reasons. You weren’t given a confirmation voucher when you went to the Minsk ghetto. So it kind of came down to how good a story you could tell; a matter of history became a matter of storytelling. I didn’t need to make it up for my grandmother since she went through it, but that idea was intriguing.

And the second thought I had was: It’s just a matter of time before someone has a field day with these applications. And that someone, I knew, might very well come from the ex-Soviet community. If you lived in that place, you couldn’t get certain basic things without going around the law. Some people remained honorable and did without; some people lucked out and knew the right people; others just wanted a little more for their families. I’m not talking about Rolls-Royces and gold watches. I’m talking about another pair of shoes or a banana. Tangerines were a once-a-year luxury. Sometimes, you could not get basic things without resorting to light crime.

Speaking of Russian Jewish writers, Gary Shtenygart just came out with his memoir. Was your arrival in America as painful as his?

I would guess that it was, but every pain is its own. That’s why people fail to learn from their mistakes, not because they’re stupid but because every mistake has its own character profile.

It’s brutal at such an impressionable age to switch from one place to another that’s so different. In my case, I became the adult of the family. I learned English the fastest and became my family’s ambassador to a world that had things going on that we had never dreamed about: phone bills, credit cards, medical insurance, car insurance… Suddenly I was responsible for all this being handled properly, for the family coming to no disadvantage or harm. I used to be so terrified of making a mistake that when I collected cans to bring to the supermarket for the five-cent deposit, not only did I wash them out with water, I sprayed them with my mother’s Parisian perfume so the supermarket would have no way to say no.

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

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Imagine this: you’re at Chipotle, chowing down on your liberal, guilt-free, ethically-sourced burrito, when—horror of horrors—you realize you have nothing to read. Your smartphone’s out of juice, you left your kindle at home, and you don’t have a paperback in your back pocket (because, hello, 2014, death of the novel, etc). What do you do? Eat without distraction for ten blissful, quiet minutes? GOD FORBID. This is America, not France.

Such a fate befell Jonathan Safran Foer recently, and he wanted to “die with frustration.” That is a real quote, you guys. But from deprivation comes innovation! Vanity Fair breaks the news that as of today, you’ll be able to read flash fiction and mini-essays by Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Michael Lewis on Chipotle’s bags and cups.

What happened was this: frustrated Foer emailed Steve Ells, Chipotle’s CEO, and suggested putting words on their food packaging. He told VF, “I said, ‘I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text… So I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service.'”

The union between Chipotle and Foer is a curious one. In 2009, Foer penned Eating Animals, a searing critique of America’s meat industry, and consequently became a vegetarian. Chipotle serves meat, albeit “naturally-raised” meat, procured from farms and slaughterhouses that allow their animals to roam free (or free-ish). But dead animals are still dead animals, and when asked how he felt about working with a company that serves meat to a lot of people, Foer replied: “I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”

You can read Foer’s contribution, ‘Two-Minute Personality Test,’ here. He posits some interesting questions, like “Are you in any way angry at your phone?” and “Is it any way cruel to give a dog a name?”

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