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.

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

The post Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience appeared first on Jewcy.

Today in “a girl can dream” and “feeling inadequate” news, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss are selling, for a measly $14.5 million, their luxurious brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I know what you’re thinking—“let’s pool our salaries and turn that place into a classy post-collegiate fun house.” I’m with you guys. But, unfortunately, I already spent my $14.5 mil on an antique Russian fighter jet from Housing Works.

Though their books have been successful, profitable, and often cinematic, it seems like the power literary couple are making quite a chunk of change from their real estate ventures, the New York Daily News reports.

Foer, who famously doesn’t eat meat, certainly knows how to go for the jugular in real estate: The couple bought the 7,670-square-foot place for $5.75 million in 2005 — a record at the time — and now want to flip it for more than two-and-a-half times that price.

‘Eat’ this, Park Slope: Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss put their Second St. mansion on the market for $14.5M [NYDN]

(Image from Sotheby’s)

The post Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss Sell Brooklyn Home for $14.5 Million appeared first on Jewcy.

Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, begins with Jewish housewife Rose Zimmer getting kicked out of the Communist party for having an affair with a black police officer. Rose’s character was loosely based on Lethem’s own grandmother, whom he described as “fearsome.”

I spoke with Lethem over the phone about his latest book, Brooklyn, and why he hates the article headlines on Salon. Lethem is the author of Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critic Circle Award in 1999.

What was the genesis of Dissident Gardens?

It originates inversions of my own family history. Mysteries I grew up with, surrounding both my mother and grandmother, who were gone before I could approach them as an adult and demand some accounting or some explanation for things that fascinated me, things that had always been under a pall of legend or silence—in my grandmother’s case, a lot of silence.

What was your grandmother like?

My grandmother was a first-generation immigrant. She grew up in the back of a candy store in Brooklyn. She couldn’t be more classic in a way, one of six daughters pointed toward marriage and gentle assimilation, but she was an iconoclast. Without going to college she became self-educated and secularized and politically radicalized and those things separated her from her origins in many ways. Her own separation from the spiritual and intellectual life of her family inaugurated her sense of estrangement or betrayal.

I always knew her as someone with a multiple sense of betrayal in the world: politics had failed her; the Jewish god had failed her and New York city was always on the verge of letting her down. She was very dynamic, very charismatic; I loved being with her, but she was a pretty fearsome human being for a kid to hang with too. [Laughs] There was a mystery in her life: what has she done as a single woman after her husband left her in the forties? I couldn’t name it at the time, but her life was rich and problematic and she was a formidable person. She wasn’t just a grandmother. She wasn’t around for me to really interrogate by the time I could articulate those questions, so instead I wrote a novel and made it all up to satisfy my own sense of fascination.

Are you satisfied?

Hah! What happens when you render intimate parts of your own experience in fiction is that it becomes a formal problem. The novel has demands; the characters suddenly gain a gravity which attracts other kinds of material and so the character divides from life and factuality and becomes something else. The novel is a derivation and a confabulation—it isn’t life itself. As much as you as may fill it up with those feelings at the outset, it becomes something else completely. There isn’t even a question of that kind of satisfaction. I’d only be satisfied if I could hang out with my grandmother again.

One of your characters, Cicero, sort of does that in the novel. As a random segue, I find myself getting lost in your language very easily. Your grasp of language is amazing.

I think that increasingly, in the longer books I’ve written since Motherless Brooklyn, I see part of my assignment, my personal imperative and drive, as a wish to create a sensorium, a diorama of past lives or of worlds that I’ve moved through, friendships I’ve known, environments, cultural experiences. I want to reproduce them; I want to trap them in amber. The wordiness—I can be fairly accused of wordiness by now—it’s really just this trick for creating this enormous machine for reproducing past sensations or lost worlds. I guess that’s become more important to me by far than storytelling per se.

Speaking of lost words, you’ve been equated with Brooklyn. I just moved here. I imagine it’s a much different place now than how you described it in your books.

Oh God. It was changing under my feet when I was growing up. When I returned there in my early thirties, there was a kind of shock confrontation with its early gentrification that I depict in some ways in Fortress of Solitude. That was a galactic change. In the last three or four years it’s changed as much again, in ways beyond my grasp. I’m not there these days. The illusion that I’m somehow the master of this territory or can account for it all is very humbling. The world keeps going and turns out to have nothing to do with your sense of taking it personally [laughs].

You’re quoted in Salon as saying that “the literary world is like high school.” What were you like in high school?

Oh, lord. Salon seems to have a special dedication to finding the very stupidest thing I ever say in any given interview and making it the headline of the piece. That’s their M.O. I suspect I was speaking with the kind of irony that immediately gets stripped from the language the minute it gets put in cold type, especially when it gets put on the Internet. I was musing on the fact that a lot of the machinations and hierarchies and alliance-burnishing and so forth that goes on in the world, including the literary world, is no so different from what you encounter in high school. It’s a truly banal remark, but somehow it ended up sounding like I was claiming it as some fierce throw-down on my colleagues — that’s the power of a headline! “Lethem Avenges Himself Against Bullies Thirty Years Too Late”—there’s a headline for your piece, now run with it. God help me.

Let’s not dwell on this any longer, but please be certain you insert lots of “(laughs)” through your piece. You should scatter that almost randomly amidst my remarks to promote the possibility that I’m being provocative or sarcastic. Listen, seriously—the only important thing to say is I’m very lucky that anyone gives a shit about my work. At any given moment I keep that thought foremost in my mind. Sometimes I forget to incant it aloud, but that’s only because it seems so obvious to me. As for the high school stuff, any “popularity” I suffer or enjoy personally means nothing; it’s not me that’s popular, it’s an image of me that the books drag along behind them through the world. The only purpose of that image is to get the books read. That people read them remains a kind of marvel to me.

So back to the question, were you cool in high school? What were you like as a teenager?

It’s a question I ask myself. How should I know what I was like? I wonder about it. I’ve tried to explore it in my work at times, not just to brandish myself on my own sleeve, but because I’m interested in trying to figure out what I was like. Often I receive conflicting clues from other people’s remarks or my own recollections and I think: who was that? I’ve pursued it in the essays in The Disappointment Artist and in the Talking Heads book, that more or less factual me, as opposed to the totally fictional guises that I wear in a couple of novels. I suspect I was probably pretty angry and also pretty cowardly. [Laughs] I experienced myself as devilishly clever and capable, as moving through the world with a kind of sly sideways power of access and insight that none of my behavior would have given evidence of. The inside and outside of the teenage container are two very different things.

You have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of random topics that comes across in your book.

It’s done out of love. I’m the sort of person who traffics in the statistics on the back of the baseball card but it’s not really about that stuff, it’s just articulating some sort of emotional arrow pointing from me to the thing. If you see me flipping around a lot of obscure trivia—”here’s the guy who was playing guitar on Smokey Robinson’s records even though he’s not credited”—it just means my heart falls out of my chest when I hear “I Second That Emotion”. It comes from caring so much that I’m trying to manage the sensation by becoming an expert on the topic. I couldn’t be bothered to know about stuff that doesn’t move me. It’s not like I have any really area of expertise outside my passions. Passions may not be the right word for this stuff—for my emotional cruxes, things that perturb me or reach into me.

What do you mean by having your “heart fall out of your chest?”

There’s something about the way that some things speak to me that I never get over entirely. Plenty of things speak to you once, but some of them, many of them, complete their enunciation: you get it and it’s just a nice song or you forget about it. Other things stir you and can’t ever be finished—those are the things that I find I’ve been very well rewarded by paying close attention to. Whether it’s the squares of slate on sidewalk on Dean Street or a Smokey Robinson song.

Do you find that mainly connected to your childhood?

Of course but it can also still happen. I’m not some sort of finished set of issues, a door that closed when I was seventeen. I believe that I remain eligible to have the world speak to me in that way. I’d like to think so.

The post Jonathan Lethem is Happy You Give a Shit appeared first on Jewcy.

Today readers around the world will be flocking en masse to theaters to see The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, an adaptation of the smashing book debut that made Jewish author Cassandra Clare famous.

City of Bones is a colorful, vibrant, swashbuckling flick that combines traditional tropes of magic, romance, and the battle for good vs. evil. It stars Clary Fray (Lily Collins, daughter of Phil), a red-headed 15-year-old who lives in New York and spends her nights with best friend Simon (Robert Sheehan), hanging out in a club called Pandemonium. When she witnesses a murder and is the only one who can see the killer, her identity is called into question, and she discovers she’s descended from a special warrior caste called Shadowhunters. She’s drawn into their world and realizes that she may be far more powerful than she ever imagined.

What makes City of Bones of particular interest to Jewish viewers is that The Mortal Instruments book series, upon which the movie is based, is wholly enmeshed with Judaism, both ancient lore and contemporary practice.

Take the Shadowhunters, the special warrior caste from which Clary finds out she is descended. In the novel, Clary is informed that Shadowhunters “are sometimes called the Nephilim…In the Bible they were the offspring of humans and angels” (Page 78). This is based on the verse in Genesis 6:4, which states that, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.”

Moreover, the tale of how the Shadowhunters were originally formed stars “the Angel Raziel, who mixed some of his own blood with the blood of men in a cup, and gave it to those men to drink” (Page 78). In Jewish tradition, an entire work is dedicated to Raziel, called Sefer Raziel HaMalach, the Book of Raziel the Angel. In Louis Ginzberg (and Henrietta Szold’s) masterpiece, Legends of the Jews, Raziel is described as having appeared to Adam, bearing a book in his hand. The angel inquires as to why Adam is so downhearted, explains that his plea of repentance has been accepted, and that he will teach the contents of the sacred book he bears to the first man. The book is described by Ginzberg and Szold as a work “out of which all things worth knowing can be learnt, and all mysteries, and it teaches also how to call upon the angels and make them appear before men, and answer all their questions.”

Nerdy, lovable, Dungeons & Dragons-playing Simon is Clary’s best friend. He also happens to be Jewish (though isn’t depicted as such in the film). Through a series of unfortunate events, he ends up turning into a vampire, at which point he jokes, “What freaks out Jewish vampires? Silver stars of David? Chopped liver? Checks for 18 dollars?” (Page 305). Jewish readers understood the reference to chai-the number 18, which signifies life—but many readers of the series were confused, which led to Cassandra Clare writing a special post on her Tumblr to clarify:

Simon is Jewish because I had literally never read a book with a Jewish vampire in it and I wanted there to be one. He’s Jewish because I’ve had tons of kids (and adults — Michelle Hodkin, who wrote The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer****, did a signing with me in Long Island and the first thing she said to me was that she was so glad Simon was Jewish) come up and be thrilled that a Jewish guy got to be a hot kickass immortal vampire, that Jews are not shut out of what is (like it or not) a massive mainstream cultural trend.

And lastly, Simon is Jewish because of all the characters, he is the most like me, and I am Jewish. Which is something I am guessing that whoever posted that about Simon did not know. The general assumption is that I am Christian because the general default assumption, from my Western readers, is that everyone is. I’m glad Simon is not.

Shadowhunter warriors Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower) and Alec (Kevin Zegers), with whom Clary teams up, are dubbed parabatai, which Jace explains “means a pair of warriors who fight together—who are closer than brothers” (Page 87). The ritual of becoming parabatai is explained in a different companion series by Clare, The Infernal Devices. In The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Prince, Clare writes:

“The idea of parabatai comes from an old tale, the story of Jonathan and David. ‘And it came to pass…that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul…Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.’ They were two warriors, and their souls were knit together by Heaven, and out of that Jonathan Shadowhunter took the idea of parabatai, and encoded the ceremony into the Law.” (Page 92)

The very words of the parabatai oath are adapted from the words Ruth speaks to Naomi. The oath appears in Clockwork Princess and reads:

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee—for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God. Where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me. (Page 326)

Readers of Clare’s works will find many more references to Judaism, including passages from Song of Songs, a reference to Joshua’s sword, Solomon’s ensorcerelling of the demon Asmodai and Mitzpeh.

In 2010, Michael Weingrad wondered why there was no Jewish Narnia. He asked why Jews do not write more fantasy literature, and suggested it might be because “Jews are passionately invested in modernity,” preferring history to otherworldliness. He also considered the impact of the Holocaust, and the concern that “classical fantasy must have made redemption seem too easy.” He then claimed that “Judaism has banished the magical and mythological elements necessary for fantasy” and that Judaism is a “science fiction religion” as opposed to Christianity, the “fantasy religion.”

While The Mortal Instruments and its prequel, The Infernal Devices, certainly do not purport to disguise theological underpinnings of Judaism with pleasant encounters with lions and fawns, they are certainly an important form of Jewish fantasy. The author who penned them identifies herself as Jewish, and chose to create a distinctly Jewish main character, upending notions of traditional vampires. Her work is littered with references to Tanakh, and contains many Kabbalistic and midrashic ideas as well. While Clare’s books do resonate with a teen audience, they are much more than just another bestselling fantasy series for young adults. They represent a distinctly modern rendering of Jewish fantasy, and that ought to make them, and hopefully the movies based on them, part of our community’s conversation.

The post The Jewish Undertones of ‘The Mortal Instruments’ Series appeared first on Jewcy.