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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Shelly Oria’s debut short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is simultaneously delicate and shattering. The book derives its title from a story of the same name, in which an Israeli expat from in New York obsessively tallies the merits of the two cities that she has called home. “It’s an ongoing competition,” she says, “But I forget to keep track, so I have to keep counting all over again.”

Many stories in Oria’s collection are rooted in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, their central characters Israelis who have made their way to the United States. But New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 is more textured than a simple exploration of migration and cultural difference. Quietly and without ceremony, Oria’s narratives veer into worlds that are unidentifiable and bizarre. In ‘The Beginning of a Plan,’ a young woman flees Israel to America to escape criminal prosecution, and discovers that she can quite literally freeze time. In ‘Victor, Changed Man,’ a couple reunites and promptly separates against the backdrop of an anonymous city that has been overtaken by a dense, unyielding fog. Often, the book’s fantastical narratives border on the grotesque. Oria writes of a North American town that traffics in human organs and blood, of another dominated by a band of vengeful, violent women. “We hold our men by their balls,” the nameless protagonist says. “And we squeeze.”

Even in the stories situated in identifiable locations, there is something disarming about the characters, who speak and think in jarring declaratives. “I always look them in the eye throughout, so as not to miss my moment,” says the protagonist of ‘This Way I Don’t Have to Be,’ explaining her addiction to sleeping with married men. “In that moment, their lives turn to air.” But beneath the cryptic authority of statements like these lies confusion and chaos. The lives of Oria’s characters are steeped in loneliness, unrequited love, and confounding lust. They subsist in fluid, often queer, sexual relationships that prove agonizing. Booney, the central character of a story called ‘The Thing About Sophia,’ develops feelings for her female roommate, and is invited into her bed, but not into her heart. In the titular ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ an Israeli immigrant moves in with a former IDF soldier and falls desperately for his girlfriend, a woman who cannot be tamed.

Oria author was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Israel, and she taught herself to write fiction in English when she was an adult. If she is at any disadvantage when it comes to proficiency in the language, it does not show. Her sentences are piercing, her tone cool and assured. She is admirably bold in her storytelling, weaving her short narratives with ribbons of the strange and the surreal.

Every now and then, however, Oria overreaches in her attempts at originality. ‘Fully Zipped,’ which chronicles a series of exchanges between a customer and a salesperson in the fitting room of a clothing store, relies more on concept than on characters, and fizzles away without leaving much of an impression. ‘Documentation’ explores the unravelling of a relationship through a catalogue of kisses—a narrative technique that feels gimmicky and stale.

Some of the most striking stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 are, in fact, the ones rendered in simple linear narratives. ‘The Disneyland of Albany,’ the strongest story in the collection and the most overtly political, follows an Israeli artist named Avner, who leaves his young daughter Maya in Tel Aviv when he moves to New York to further his art career. During one of Maya’s visits to the States, Avner travels to Albany to meet a wealthy Jewish patron, who subtly attempts to bully Avner into infusing his work with Zionist symbolism. At one point, Maya becomes agitated when she learns that a community was displaced so Nelson Rockefeller could build Albany’s Empire State Plaza. “Did they use tanks?” she asks, a reference to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

If the circumstances of Oria’s more ethereal narratives are unnerving and strange, so is this story of a little girl who carries the trauma of her country’s wars. In New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, devastating realities collide with haunting landscapes of the surreal, until it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.

Related: New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side

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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)

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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

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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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We were saddened to learn that E.L. Konisburg, a Jewish American author whose true-to-life depictions of adolescent life endeared her to young readers, died Friday at 83. During her lifetime, the author and illustrator published 16 books and was a two-time winner of the Newbery Medal for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968) and The View from Saturday (1997), and the only writer to receive the Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor in the same year.

Throughout her career, she famously modeled her characters on her three children and hoped to write something that reflected their growing up. As she explained to Scholastic:

I believe that the problems that children face – the children that I write about – at the age I write about them are the same basic problems I had when I was that age. The essential problems remain the same. The dressing that goes on the problems changes. But the kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

Konigsburg also revealed that she used ‘what-if’ questions to help frame her stories. “Suppose you get on the school bus tomorrow morning. What if suddenly the school-bus driver can only speak Hungarian and your best friend won’t speak to you at all? Suppose you get up in the morning to see the sunrise, and what if the trees in the light of day are all blue instead of green and the sky is red instead of blue? Suppose you’re sitting in school, and what if you are suddenly not right-handed but left-handed? What if you are suddenly blue-eyed instead of brown-eyed?”

Born in New York City, Konisburg grew up in various towns in Pennsylvania and originally trained to be a chemist. After teaching at a private girls school in Jacksonville, Florida though, she rediscovered her childhood interest in painting and writing and soon published her first novel, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth in 1967. Her most recent book was The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (2007).

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The old saw that “comedy is tragedy plus time” has been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce, Carol Burnett, and Woody Allen. That’s according to the Internet, a.k.a. bullshit at the speed of light. But whoever authored the line was working from a different formula than the Jewish one I grew up with. Eric Jarosinski’s funny Twitter feed @NeinQuarterly says, “Tragedy + time – comedy = German comedy.” In the Jewish formula, I think, there isn’t enough time between tragedies for ‘tragedy plus time’ to apply.

The formula probably runs something more like this: Jewish comedy equals tragedy plus comedy in a hurry. That is, Jewish comedy takes place in the midst of tragedy and despite tragedy. I don’t mean theater of the absurd or any other form that treats existence itself as a sort of sick joke. (More than sick, I’d say it’s longwinded.) By Jewish comedy I mean joyous, meaningful human laughter pressed into service amidst sorrows and by sorrows, laughter engaged in subversive work upon sorrows to leaven and defy them.

Here’s an example:

A matchmaker introduced a bridegroom to his bride and the bridegroom was shocked. He pulled the matchmaker aside and whispered, “What have you done? She’s ugly and old. She squints and even has a hump!” The matchmaker cut in, “You needn’t lower your voice, she’s also deaf.”

Physical infirmities and helpless calamities beset the poor woman and the poor bridegroom in a way that’s certainly tragic but for the joke’s irreverence for the infirmity and calamity. Far from being polite about it, the matchmaker flaunts the woman’s misfortune, perhaps to his own detriment; he acts as though the infirmities are no impediment to the match he’s trying to make. The ultimate result is that he disregards the tragedy before him. Isn’t the disregard and disrespect for the tragedy what make the joke funny?

Some Jews disdain the tragic sensibility nowadays. Lately there’s Israel, the theory of relativity, Seinfeld—things are generally looking up, kein ayin hora. For a long time, though, we had kind of a rough go there. Our sense of humor has long been a survival tactic in the face of tragedy, and I’ve personally found that vein of anti-tragic humor to be a valued resource in coping with my own troubles.

My novel In the Land of the Living is about those actual troubles: My father died from a very unusual and aggressive cancer at the age of 29, when I was three and my brother was six weeks old. After that, things got easier for my family (kein ayin hara—you see how this works?), thanks to good people. But those events and that severed relationship did project a certain despair over my childhood which remained even into my adulthood. Irreverence before tragedy, black humor—or gallows humor, as some people call it—has been a survival tactic for me, and also influenced the writing style of my new novel. In that sense, In the Land of the Living is as Jewish a book as I could write.

The novel does not summon irreverence by punchline, but more often by certain tonal incongruities. When an emotionally deprived Eastern European immigrant hits his children, it’s “a technique he’d presumably learned at the Kishinev School of Cossack Child-Rearing.” When a taciturn uncle misses New Year’s Eve (because he’s dead), it’s noted that he’s even more quiet than usual.

The incongruities can work the other way too; that which ought to be happy and funny is sometimes polluted with darkness in the world of this novel; a game of basketball has the specter of death within it. The mix of light and dark may be uncomfortable for some people, but I consider these basic human rights: to spurn the darkness, and also to spurn the light when it shines too little or too late.

Austin Ratner is the author of the novels In the Land of the Living and The Jump Artist, the 2011 winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

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Philip Roth has been dying for a long time. I don’t mean this in the sense that we begin dying as soon as we enter this world—one of those rare dorm-room epiphanies that has some staying power. No, it’s more that Roth has been considering, and even choreographing, his death in a way few writers have. For decades he’s been writing and speaking about death, especially his own, with anger and bafflement, sure, but also with wonder and mystery, as if it were some esoteric math problem, theorized centuries ago by some mad monk-turned-philosopher. Perhaps, with some heroic effort, a Large Hadron Collider of metaphysics, it could be figured out, if not staved off.

Talking to Der Spiegel in 2006, Roth offered some idea of his relationship with the subject:

Most of my older friends say more or less what I say, which is that I think about dying less now than I did when I was an adolescent. The first discovery was so shocking. Death seemed so unfair. That’s what you think when you’re 14—that it’s so unfair, and ridiculous. I think the closer death comes the more people try to just not think about it.

There’s something peculiar in Roth’s saying he thinks about death less now. It becomes truly weird if you look at his 21st century output—novels about polio, the end of Zuckerman, an expired everyman (“Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre”), an actor’s senescence, a young soldier killed in Korea. And that’s just the last decade or so; from the doddering last days of E.I. Lonoff (The Ghost Writer) to a novelist’s ruminations on his father’s terminal cancer (Patrimony) to “The Day It Snowed,” Roth’s first published short story, which is about a young boy’s confusion over the “disappearance” of some family members (when each dies, he’s left home alone while his family heads to the funerals)—death becomes Roth. It’s the paper he writes on, the ink in his pen.

And here comes the opening of Philip Roth: Unmasked, a new documentary set to air March 29 on PBS, in which Roth says he has two things to look forward to: his biography and his death. He hopes the latter comes first, he says, his expression sly and even happy.

But who’s to say that it will? Maybe the great cosmic joke won’t be that Roth will die, only that the end will come later than he expects. As he writes in The Facts, “the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

Lately we’ve had a lot of time to consider the end of Philip Roth. This year he announced his retirement from writing, speaking as if he were unburdening himself of some awful weight, though it hasn’t been trying enough to stop him from putting together a few dozen books. That news inaugurated a round of encomiums and elegiac tributes that made it seem as if the great writer had died. (It’s also became a litmus test for parishioners in the Church of Roth whether you think that he has actually put down the pen. Count me among the unbelievers.)

But the old master is still vitally, crankily alive. Just last week Roth turned 80, and during a birthday celebration, he read from Sabbath’s Theater, the angriest and most death-obsessed of his books. As David Remnick cracked, “Happy birthday, indeed!”

This is how it goes and how it will probably continue until he passes and only those thousands of pages remain. You can’t have a valedictory celebration of Roth without talking about death, or about sex, Jewish identity, and the onanistic possibilities of liver. And Philip Roth: Unmasked provides a number of these opportunities, featuring interviews with Roth along with Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Franzen, Claudia Roth-Pierpont (no relation), and several others, including friends from Newark and Bucknell. Combining archival photographs with Roth’s personal reminiscences, the film is a leisurely and pleasing tour through his life and work.

Leaning on interviews with Roth, there are plenty of sparkling lines (“I had many opportunities to ruin my life”), as well as some excavations of darker periods. He talks about the breakdown he had during his first marriage and how he was tempted towards suicide, in the 1980s, when suffering from excruciating chronic back pain. But his marriages are still largely glossed over—the second, to British actress Claire Bloom, isn’t mentioned at all—and confessions are few. Viewers may wonder, for example, about his relationship with Mia Farrow, which seems quite close but doesn’t receive much examination. Blake Bailey’s forthcoming biography should answer as many of these questions as is possible.

Zooming out a bit, what emerges from this Roth jubilee is not his singular importance as a writer—though there is that—but how much the culture has shifted. A novelist would have to commit a crime today to appear on the evening news. Yet after its publication in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was not only a controversial work; it also sold 350,000 copies in a single month. That’s Harry Potter territory, unthinkable now for a serious literary novel. These days, to have public celebrations and bus tours about a major writer—or even to have one on the cover of Time magazine—feels like a collective act of irony, a deliberate throwback to a time when literature was an essential part of popular culture, rather than a private affair.

As Roth and a number of his peers (Cynthia Ozick, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, the recently retired Alice Munro) drift towards the exits, the question isn’t whether we’ll see their like again. It’s if, when they appear, we’ll care enough to honor them before it’s too late.

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The world has lost a pioneering and unwavering female voice. Pauline Phillips, better known by her pen name Abigail Van Buren or her advice column Dear Abby, died Wednesday at 94 after battling Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade.

According to the New York Times, “Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel (“Then David said to Abigail ‘Blessed is your advice and blessed are you’”) and Van Buren for its old-family, presidential ring.” In a completely perfect family detail, the Jewish writer long competed in print with her twin sister Eppie, who wrote as Ann Landers. Now that’s a movie we’d totally see.

From Phillips’ great Times obit:

If Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx had gone jointly into the advice business, their column would have read much like Dear Abby’s. With her comic and flinty yet fundamentally sympathetic voice, Mrs. Phillips helped wrestle the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20th-century present:

Dear Abby: I have always wanted to have my family history traced, but I can’t afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Have you any suggestions? — M. J. B. in Oakland, Calif.

Dear M. J. B.: Yes. Run for a public office.

Pauline Phillips, Flinty Adviser to Millions as Dear Abby, Dies at 94 [NYT]

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• Woody Allen references getting hickies in his New York Times essay on hypochondria, and it’s pretty weird. [NYT]

• Not even Paul Rudd can avoid a teleprompter fail. [Vulture]

• There’s a new Israeli cookbook out, and it focuses on Kibbutz cuisine. [Tablet]

• Philip Roth and Mel Brooks both say they don’t identify themselves as ‘Jewish writers.’ [Deadline]

• Also, Retired Philip Roth drinks a lot of orange juice these days. [LAT]

• Lena Dunham, former chimney sweep, is rocking the elfin look, according to Craig Ferguson. [Splitsider]

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