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)

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• The New Yorker has some very Jewish fiction from Nicole Krauss. [New Yorker]

• Go the F*ck to Sleep author Adam Mansbach is offering a fake college course you should probably enroll in. [Salon]

• Animating the Talmud, G-dcast style. [Tablet]

• Jonathan Ames and Jason Schwartzman (the man, not the flu mask) are teaming up again for a film adaptation of a Bernard Malamud story story collection. [THR]

• A look at SkinnyGirl maven Bethenny Frankel’s TriBeCa condo, presumably sans soon-to-be-ex-husband Jason Hoppy. [Curbed]

• In Adam Levine’s The Voice-inspired SNL opening monologue, Jerry Seinfeld played the Jewish card: “I get you—appealing, not as Jewish as your name. I know that racket inside and out.”

The post Daily Jewce: Ames and Schwartzman Are Back, Meet Professor Mansbach appeared first on Jewcy.

• Meet the Israelis behind Skype’s largest competitor in Belarus.

• Adrien Brody is set to star opposite Gerard Butler in Motor City.

• Read an excerpt of Nicole Krauss’ new novel, An Arrangement of Light.

• “I’m only jealous of people who can eat and not gain weight,” says Israeli Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz.

• The guy behind Israeli shoe brand Naot is stepping into (get it!) the luxury market.

• Jon Stewart warns new college students to avoid the salad bar in the dining hall:

The post Daily Jewce: Jon Stewart’s Convocation Address, Adrien Brody’s New Movie appeared first on Jewcy.

Jews have done a pretty good job holding up our end of the “People of the Book” deal, especially over the last hundred years.  Jewish writers from all over the globe have contributed fiction in a number of different languages, influencing the form in ways immeasurable, in turn helping to document the Jewish experience better than most history books.

Our criteria for this list was any work that could be considered “Jewish fiction”: written by a Jewish author or dealing heavily with Jewish topics and themes, all written in the last 100 years.   Short story collections, plays, graphic novels and novellas were all taken into consideration.  All publication dates reflect the American publication.

Think we missed something?  Think something deserved a higher ranking than it got?  We’re open to comments below.

1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka

It’s really impossible to rate anything– especially the ultimate “Kafkaesque” work—any higher.  The Prague-born writer’s ultimate work about poor Gregor Samsa is one of the most seminal works of Jewish fiction in the last century.

2. In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust

Jews are naturally nostalgic folks, so simply replace the Madeleine with a rugelach and you might have one of the most Jewish works in literature.  And yes, Proust was a Jew.

3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth

Trying to pick one book as the ultimate Philip Roth work isn’t as hard as you think.  Portnoy is the book you see every new title compared to, even to this day.  Goodbye, Columbus made him famous, but Portnoy made him a creepy god.

4. Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller

Miller’s play tells the tale of Willy Loman, but also works as the perfect parable of the death of the American Dream.

5. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger

No list dealing with best fiction of the last century would be complete without Salinger’s ode to teenage angst, and the limited knowledge we have of the late writer tells us that this book was indeed the product of Jewish neurosis.

6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka

We recognize that we should have just said “Everything Kafka did” at the #1 position, but that wouldn’t have been fair, now would it?

7. Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow

It’s hard to pick Bellow’s masterwork, but we really have to go with the book that made  mid-life crisis into an art form.

8. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) by Cynthia Ozick

Same as the Herzog: It’s nearly impossible to pick the greatest work from the Ozick canon, but for the sake of argument, we’re going to pick The Pagan Rabbi as the must read collection by this brilliant writer.

9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner

Some call it the first graphic novel.  Others dispute that.  Nobody denies this work’s greatness.  Eisner’s semi-autobiographical short stories of Jewish life in The Bronx was called “something momentous,” by the LA Times.

10. Call it Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth

This is the quintessential Jewish experience of the ghetto known Lower East Side of the early 20^th Century.  They should issue it to students in Hebrew school.

11. Angels in America (1991) by Tony Kushner

It’s almost scary how lacking the 1990s were of “generation defining” art by Jews.  Thankfully, Kushner’s tour de force play made up for that by being one of the greatest artistic works in the entire Western Canon, both literally and according to Harold Bloom.

12. The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) by Isaac Bashevis Singer

We aren’t going to play around with the Nobel-winning writer.  His short stories are the first place you need to go to experience his true greatness.

13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon

The story of how Jews created the modern superhero might not be the most interesting idea for a story, but leave it in the hands of one of modern fiction’s greatest writers, and it’s an epic.

14. American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth

15. Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume

A story about a girl growing up in an interfaith family, getting her first period, buying her first bra, and all the other fun issues that go along with being a teenager.

16.  The Odessa Tales (1931) by Isaac Babel

If there is any justice in this world, Babel’s work would be mentioned along with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and any other great Russian writer you can think of.  Until then, it’s undisputed that he’s certainly the greatest Jewish writer the country ever produced.  These, his stories of Ukrainian tough guys in the waning days of Russian Empire, are his best.

17. The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud

18. Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller

In terms of the greatest dark humor anti-war novels, we’d pick Heller’s book over other Slaughterhouse Five or anything else you could think of.

19. The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936) by Israel Joshua Singer

We’ve stated on this website that Isaac Bashevis Singer was the most famous member of his family, but I.J. Singer was definitely the better writer.  Here, with The Brothers Ashkenazi, he gave us one of the greatest snapshots of pre-World War 2 Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

20. Where the Wild Things Are (1963) by Maurice Sendak

Essential?  Isn’t every child issued a copy of this when they’re born

21. The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West

West (born Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein) gave us the great Hollywood novel through the eyes of unforgettable characters.  The influence of this novel on writers from John Fante to Joan Didion is undeniable.

22.   Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) by Art Spiegelman

The only comic book to ever win the Pulitzer Prize.  Art Spiegelman’s biography of his father’s life before, during and after the Holocaust, brought the medium to a whole new level.

23.  Goodbye, Columbus (1959) by Philip Roth

24. The New York Trilogy (1987) by Paul Auster

If anybody is looking for the post-modern mystery book of the last thirty years, look no further.

25. The History of Love (2005) by Nicole Krauss

Krauss’ second novel that launched her into the literary spotlight, is the story of a very old man and a very young woman, and how their lives are joined by one very special book. (Check out our interview with Krauss)

26. The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant

The story of a holocaust survivor attempting to live with his demons will haunt you long after you’ve read it.

27. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) by Mordecai Richler

Henry Roth had the Lower East Side, Philip Roth New Jersey and Saul Bellow ruled over Chicago; but Richler wrote the greatest books about Jews in Montreal, and Duddy is his finest work.

28. Everything is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer

Upon this book’s release, some called it “genius,” others said it was “overrated.”   We’d like to say that it is one of the finest works of “Post-Holocaust Fiction.”  Everything is Illuminated is a book for people who want to try and make some sense of the senseless.

29. Absurdistan: A Novel (2006) by Gary Shteyngart

As of the writing of this list, Mr. Shteyngart is  3for 3 in terms of great novels, but the story of the very rich and very rotund Misha Vainberg, is his masterpiece.

30.The Nimrod Flipout (2006) by Etgar Keret

31.  The Man With the Golden Arm (1949) by Nelson Algren

32. The Street of Crocodiles (1936) by Bruno Schulz

Considered by many to be the greatest Polish writer of the 20^th Century, Schulz’s masterwork is starting to peek back onto the cultural radar in the last ten years.

33. The Lazarus Project (2008) by Aleksander Hemon

The Bosnian-born Hemon might not be Jewish, but his novel juxtaposes a very autobiographical sounding protagonist with an immigrant Jew murdered in early 20th Century Chicago.  The Lazarus Project is impeccably researched, and written so well, that you’d think Hemon had been speaking English his entire life.

34.     Mind-Body Problem (1993) by Rebecca Goldstein

35.      The Tenants of Moonbloom (1963) by Edward Lewis Wallant

We’d suggest reading Dave Eggers’ essay on the book to better understand.

36. Motherless Brooklyn (1999) by Jonathan Lethem

Is it fair for us to say that Lethem’s 1999 novel set the stage for the current literary renaissance going on in the borough of Brooklyn to this day?  It certainly made the “Neuronovel” a trendy thing.

37. The Instructions (2010) by Adam Levin

If you’re going to make a big splash, write a 1000+ page book about a Jewish boy from the Chicago suburbs who might or might not be the Messiah.  That’s what Levin did with his debut, and that’s why it was our favorite work of fiction in 2010.

38. The Trial of God (1995) by Elie Wiesel

39. Bech, a Book (1970) by John Updike

The king of the W.A.S.Ps parodies his Jewish contemporaries, and gives the world the greatest work of “Jew envy.”

40. The Best of Everything (1958) by Rona Jaffe

It could be argued that this was the Sex and the City of its time.  But we think it’s so much more than that.

41. What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg

Schulberg would go on to greater fame as a screewriter, but his story of Sammy Glick’s rise calls to mind The Day of the Locust, Dickens and Citizen Kane, and is a must read.

42. Comedy in a Minor Key (2010) by Hans Keilson

It took about 100 years, but Hans Keilson was finally recognized as one of the world’s greatest writers.  This book about a young Dutch couple that takes in a sick Jewish man during World War 2–only to find themselves trying to figure out how to cover up his death–isn’t the sort of dark comedy that leaves you chuckling.  It’s the sort that makes you exclaim, “that’s brilliant.”

43. Landscape in Concrete (1966) by Jakov Lind

A story written by a Jew who survived World War 2 by posing as a Dutch citizen writes a story about a Nazi soldier’s quixotic journey to rejoin the war after being declared mentally unstable to serve.  Possibly the most absurd novel on this list.

44. Homeland (2004) by Sam Lipsyte

If you check back with us in ten years, Sam Lipsyte will have replaced Philip Roth as the writer that everybody copies – whether they know it or not.   Bookslut described Lipsyte’s third book as “disturbing and comforting,” and summed up his style quite well.

45. The Finkler Question (2010) by Howard Jacobson

Salon said the underdog Man Booker winner in 2010 would “probably distress you on its way to disarming you.  Can we pay the novel any greater compliment?”  We don’t think so.

46.   Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow

47. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisneberg (2010) by Deborah Eisenberg

Eisenberg is one of the greatest living short story writers.  Do yourself a favor and read everything.

48.  For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999) by Nathan Englander

49. Witz (2010) by Joshua Cohen

The Jewish Ulysses?  Some have said that’s the case.

50. The Extra Man (1998) by Jonathan Ames

The post The 50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years appeared first on Jewcy.

Full disclosure: When I was first handed a copy of History of Love years ago, just months after publication, I wasn’t terribly interested in reading it. I had heard wonderful things about its author, Nicole Krauss, and her widely-celebrated sophomore novel from people whose taste I trust, but still I resisted. Ultimately though, I opened the stiff pages of the paperback and began to read. Almost instantly I found myself engrossed in Krauss’ rich language, emotional poignancy and colorful narrators. In fact, I read it twice.

Krauss’ third novel, Great House, is perhaps even more indicative of her ability to weave intricate storylines, craft emotionally layered characters and expertly draw out the pain, difficulty and extreme complexity of human relationships. Like its predecessor, Great House is a novel told in short stories—vignettes, really—that cross over and seep into each other at various points in the book. The characters are bound together, like History of Love, by an object: in this case an oppressively cumbersome and much sought-after desk, which spends time in the custody of one or more characters in each story, affecting their lives in different ways. Great House is primarily comprised of four interwoven storylines: Nadia, a middle-aged writer trying to find herself again amidst a series of ruined relationships; Dovik—or the memory of—an estranged son who reconnects with his father shortly after his mother’s death; Lotte, a writer whose painful secrets are posthumously discovered by her doting husband; the mysterious antiques dealer Weisz and his two children. These, along with a young man named Daniel Varsky, a poet who disappears at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police, are the figures around which the novel revolves.

Great House is a story of inheritance, relationships, legacy and the burdens we bear. It is also a story about the complexities of space: The spaces we inhabit, the walls we erect, that which we show the world and that which is shut away. The truths and lies we tell to others and the secrets we keep to ourselves; what can be seen, and what can’t.

Though the form and approach of Great House is similar to History of Love, it is an altogether darker, more anguished story. There is no redemption or happy ending, rather it serves as a meditation on, and exploration of, loneliness, responsibility and humanity in its various forms. Whereas History of Love invited readers into the whirlwind lives and adventures of its characters Great House pulls readers inward, into the space between sentences both spoken and unspoken by the book’s keepers. Both novels are stories of loss and discovery, though that which is discovered in Great House is often unexpected and disarming, calling into question the very basis of the lives lived and histories told between the pages.

I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to talk to the endlessly thoughtful and articulate National Book Award nominee about her brilliant new novel, her influences and goals, and the desk that inspired it all.

I’m always surprised by your novels, the simultaneous subtlety and emotional power of your prose. What were you reading while you were working on Great House?

Nicole Krauss: It was two and a half years of work, so there was a lot of reading. I know there are novelists who don’t like to read as they’re writing because it will direct them or, God forbid, influence them. But I’m the opposite, I love to read always. I find reading is like opening a faucet to the great streams of language come pouring out and splash around in your mind for the rest of the day or week. I find it incredibly helpful to have a ready flow of great language. For the past few years I read a lot of Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer. I read a lot of Roberto Bolano, who I discovered in 2003 when I read the first book that was translated here in America, By Night in Chile. He’s one of those writers who absolutely changed everything for me. I love Sebald, and he’s a writer I return to a lot. Perhaps my favorite is Beckett. I re-read a lot of his novels. I’m constantly reading new work or books that are new to me, but I tend to go back and re-read sections of books I love while I’m writing to remind me of what’s possible.

I know you used to write poetry. Do you still write poetry?

NK: I haven’t since I wrote the first words of my first novel. It’s an ongoing point of curiosity for me. When I was growing up as a teenager and all through college my great ambition in life was to be a poet and I couldn’t have possibly imagined that I would have fallen from the grace of poetry into the prosaic world of novels. I read and loved novels of course, I majored in literature, but it wasn’t my intention at all. It came as a surprise that I became a novelist and that I stopped writing poetry. I feel that someday there will be a return to it. I always say I need to be older and wiser but I don’t know if that’s true anymore, because the novel as a form fits me very well; the formlessness and elasticity of it, the fact that it doesn’t have a real definition. It’s the work of a novelist every time she sits down to write one.

But how is that different from poetry?

NK: I think with poetry the form is much more apparent and clear going out. You’ll have stanzas and line breaks; there is a certain attentiveness and clarity about formal tradition that novels don’t have. When you think about novels, all you can really say about them is that they’re long. They begin, and they end. The prose usually covers the pages, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very unclear what a novel wants to be. It’s kind of amazing that it doesn’t paralyze us setting out because the possibilities are so vast.

But when you say you stopped writing poetry the moment you wrote the first lines of your first novel—what possessed you to start writing a novel in the first place, when you previously identified so strongly with poetry?

NK: I had reached a point where I felt ensnared by my own anxiety about writing poetry. I had had some mentors in college, most importantly to me Joseph Brodsky who is a real formalist and really insisted on being able to master as fully as possible formal verse before moving on. Seems like an obvious thing: you have to know what you are being free from if you’re going to write free verse. I followed that and at a certain point all of the great freedom that writing is meant to offer the writer somehow got lost for me, or was no longer accessible. I felt my poems were getting shorter and smaller and more airless. I knew in order to save the enterprise for myself I had to break a hole in my work where air could flood back in. I thought, what would it be like to write a novel? What is a novel, can I get to the end of it? I’m just going to see. It was more, what would the novel I wrote be like, and can I do it, even? I found very quickly that I just absolutely felt at home in the form, for this new freedom that returned to me and also the length of the project, the messiness of it, the necessary and integral imperfection of all novels really suited me. I liked the fact that novels can’t be perfect, and I feel that poetry can be. I don’t even think a novel aspires to perfection. It’s just too large to define. I felt at home there, and I still do.

Was that a daunting task for you? Endeavoring to write a novel understanding that there is no set definition for what you’re trying to do?

NK: I don’t know if I understood that yet. I read a million of them but you think differently when you try to write one. I think that realization came later. I can’t quite remember. It was daunting because how does one even write a novel? It’s an odd thing to try to do, and it seemed impossible. I wasn’t at all convinced that I could do it. Would I be able to get to the end, or think of a story sufficiently long enough or interesting enough? The first book, which I didn’t intend to publish, was just a question of being able to get from the beginning to the end. After that was when I sat down and thought, I really want to do this. But now the question is, what kind of novels do I want to write? I began trying to answer that in The History of Love.

The characters in Great House who are writers, Nadia, Lotte and Dovik, use writing as a means of retreat, as a way of distancing themselves from those around them. You talked about your relationship to form—novels, poetry—but what is your relationship to writing? In short, why do you write?

NK: I’m not sure I would describe their reasons for writing that way. I think what was interesting to me is the question of, what is the cost of writing? One begins to write and very soon you realize that there are things required of you, there are things you have to do and that involves solitude and a degree of remove, in order to simply have perspective on life, your relationships, the relationships of others. If you weren’t already you become an observer, and it’s very demanding in terms of a kind of willfulness you need to sustain. I was thinking about the costs of that.

But in these characters, writing is a way of not giving everything away, of keeping something to yourself, that is just yours.

NK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think what’s so interesting is, to what degree do writers have great recesses, and maybe secret recesses, that they guard in a certain way and preserve for their work, that they don’t allow to keel over into their normal lives and keep from their most intimate ones? In terms of what writing means to me is to return to the idea of freedom. As the years pass in my life, the rest of my life becomes filled up with the responsibilities of being a parent and having a family. The freedom that writing affords me is thrilling. As difficult and sometimes miserable, as hard as it can be on one’s confidence and sense of purpose, this sense of being able to sit down and potentially go anywhere and say anything; to put yourself in a position where you can get lost and enter the unknown, and put yourself up against very difficult things to discover who you are, what you’re made of, how you think about things. Again, what is the nature of life and human existence? It’s this incredible freedom that is impossible to find elsewhere in life. It’s kind of an enormous thing for me. The other thing is a sense of being able to create meaning. It seems like a bland and cliché thing to say but I find the disorganized chaos of life is not ultimately satisfying, and one wants to make out of that some solid thing. I don’t think it’s an accident that my books end up, though I never intend setting out, having a highly-wrought architecture in the way that I chose different voices and weave them together. There are echoes, thematic symmetries, it becomes, at least when I’m thinking about it, solid architecturally. It’s that sense of solid form that’s very satisfying to me because it seems like it will stand on its own after I walk away, and that all of life’s experiences can actually come to something

What are the costs, then?

NK: It’s hard to distinguish them from a personality type who often becomes a writer, and I probably fit that mold. Is one a naturally solitary and somewhat removed person and one naturally migrates towards writing because it’s an opportunity to express oneself clearly and communicate in a way that is difficult, or the other way around? I don’t know because I’ve been writing since I’m, like, 14. I think my personality has been largely formed around that work, and I was just like that since I was very young. My whole life I’ve been acutely sensitive to the divide between who we are and who we are able to bring to the surface of our lives to show to other people even those closest to us. I find that incredibly painful, from your average cocktail party to even a nice dinner party to familial relationships. The only place I find release from that is children. In children, you don’t have that sense of divide. There’s a kind of wholeness between you and them.

You talked about how a novel itself is inherently a challenge and Great House is somewhat experimental in form. You drift seamlessly between a series of very different and emotionally complicated narrators who serve as the keepers of the story. How do a series of stories become a novel? Where do you begin crafting the story, and what are some challenges associated with creating so many distinct voices?

NK: It seems to be emerging to me that this is a way of writing I’m very much drawn to.  I’m attracted to beginning these stories in very remote places and moving them towards each other. In The History of Love I had three distinct storylines—Leo Gursky, Alma and the book within a book—and there, it was slightly more obvious. I wrote it in the order that you read it so I was always held in suspense: For the longest time I didn’t know how it was going to end. There was an old man, a young girl and they were going to be drawn to each other through this third story of a lost book. I was setting out to write the book that would become Great House, and I was less and less interested in concrete connection. I was much more interested in what happens if you start in very remote places and don’t aim for a concrete connection. Yes, the novel will only be interesting to me and anyone else if it absolutely holds together and is fused at some point, that these parts standing on their own would be nothing compared to what they are when they reflect and echo off each other. It’s sounding very abstract, and it is. I wrote a lot for a long time, different voices. A couple of them disappeared and I kept four. A lot of the pages got thrown away—they didn’t develop in authentic enough ways so there was a lot of aimless wandering for a long time until there was a bristling effect, where the character stands up and you know they’re alive. I was much more interested in what happens if you try to make a book where these connections, echoes, symmetries, these convergences are oblique and subtle. I wanted to hold them at a distance from each other. I was interested in that tension. At a certain point I depended on my uncertainty as a writer. I think in order to discover and go places you haven’t been before you can’t know the outcome. I write simply not knowing. That doubt and uncertainty of my capabilities as a writer and the possibility of this novel failing began to seep into the work. At a certain point, it had to shift from process to material. The characters are riddled with that uncertainty and doubt. Like Arthur’s doubt about being married to this mystery, this woman he didn’t really know. Or the Weiss children’s inability to trust others or believe in the possibility of a permanent home. Or the doubt of the Israeli father about what kind of father he was. It’s filled with intellectual and moral doubt and self-doubt. Most profoundly to me, this doubt about how fully known we can ever really be to each other, that distance between who we are and how much of ourselves we are  able to ever communicate or expose to others. Then it became the characters’ uncertainty. Then, there’s a third level of the readers’ uncertainty. If the writer is uncertain of herself then the readers will be skeptical and that became interesting to me. For all this uncertainty to be mirrored in the reader, for her, the reader, to have to be held in doubt and to think about this idea of what it is to make one’s life in the shadow of uncertainty?

The four narrators: they are all so different but have certain similarities. Can you explain in more concrete terms where these characters came from?

NK: I always think there is a too-little-noted distinction between the autobiographical and the personal. I don’t write anything autobiographical, which means the characters really don’t come from anyone I’ve met, or even people I’ve observed, in my own life. They’re really complete inventions on every level. But, having said that, one of the most important things to me as a writer is that my work feels very authentic to me, and in order for it to be authentic, it has to be personal. The stakes have to be high. What does that mean? It means that you are inventing these lives and voices into which you can pour very deeply felt and personal feelings and thoughts. Not always your own, sometimes it’s an empathy for what it might be like in a certain situation. Some of the characters evolve in strange and accidental ways. Arthur and Lotte: I lived in England for awhile, and I used to live near Hampstead Heath and I used to always walk by these bathing ponds. I walked in the Heath every day. It was a melancholy time in my life. It was this landscape onto which I projected all of that and all these years later I find myself mentally revisiting them. I wanted to write about them, I didn’t know what, but there was something atmospheric I wanted to write about. This character was born who walks his wife to the pond every day. There was no story, just that scene. And I began to write more it became interesting to me. I sometimes use small details from life. For example, my grandmother is absolutely nothing like Lotte but she was a chaperone on a kindertransport. They are small, sketchy elements of life that allow me to invent these characters and pour all kinds of things into them. They were born, and as I was writing, it became clear to me that this swimming hole is a metaphor for Arthur, that he couldn’t follow his wife. She disappeared into this abyss where he couldn’t go, and that was somehow a metaphor for her mystery, her unknown quality. Their whole relationship was born out of that. For Weiss, the antique dealer, I became obsessed with the idea of a transplanted room. I think that came from two sources. One is the Freud house, where I did spend a lot of time myself, and that room is just so amazing. It’s reassembled for the last final year of his life, moved from Vienna to London. And there is Francis Bacon, the painter’s studio. After he died it was broken down into ten thousand pieces and moved piece by piece and resurrected in Dublin in a gallery. It was fascinating to me: Why would that happen, and why are people compelled to consider these things? So this idea of a room that is deconstructed in one place and reconstructed elsewhere became the source for thought.

A lot of the language you use to describe the characters in the book evokes the image of houses—doors being opened and doors being closed, secrets, hiding places, isolation, discovery, the notion of interior and exterior. What is it that compels you about structures?

NK: I was aware at a certain point that there were these houses in the book. I thought about the connection between walking through a house and walking through a mind. I was exploring their remembering minds. I was aware of houses, rooms, doors, but I didn’t think of that as an overarching rubber band until the very end when I thought about that Ben Zakkai story and something snapped in place. Structure is always an interesting subject when it comes to writing because in order to do it you have to be aware and unaware at the same time. For example: the desk in the book. I actually wrote the first half of the first chapter as a short story called From the Desk of Daniel Varsky. I published it in Harper’s in 2007. It was collected in Best American Short Stories, and when you’re in that anthology they ask you to write a paragraph explaining it. I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out why I wrote that story and it dawned on me that the desk I write at is awfully like the one in the story. Hugely dominating—it goes up one wall and has lots of drawers and shelves, and it’s absolutely enormous. More than that, I inherited it from the previous owner of the house who had it built to his esoteric specifications. I’ve never liked the desk. I’ve always thought, it’s this imposing thing that I’d like to do away with but I don’t know how. It would have to be chopped up to even get down the stairs and it seemed sad to me, to waste this desk. When the former owner left, he had the desk built around this painted panel that I guess was valuable to him, so he had it removed. So, there’s a gaping hole under which I work, and I realized this desk had always been a burden and responsibility to me. Then I realized that this story is actually about the burden of inheritance. I had written the story without really realizing I had written it about my own desk. You don’t know, but you know.

I was actually going to ask you, when Weiss says: “to call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always posed to offer up its back for its owner to make use of…” Of course, in Great House, the desk represents so much more—family, the power of memory—but the story is, in fact, anchored around an object. Is there an object in your life that carries significant weight?

NK: I certainly am somebody who is attached to objects that come down to me from grandparents or the old world. I have things like that, small things; A German-English dictionary that my grandfather gave my grandmother when they first met in 1940. I don’t think about them a lot, but the desk is interesting because it’s my life. On a certain level I do sort of despise it. The drawers fly open because the floor is sloped. It does, in a way, have a life of its own and I’ve agreed to let it have a life of its own, imbued it with meaning that I’ve put upon it.

The themes of this novel, in my opinion, are very Jewish in nature: pain, memory, inheritance, burden, family, history, discovery. Even the title itself, Great House, a school of thinking designed to “turn Jarusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.” Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to Judaism, and to Israel, and how it has shaped you as a writer and influenced you as a person?

NK: Every writer is born into and also grows and arrives at her own material, and it became apparent to me pretty quickly as I was becoming a novelist that there’s something about Judaism that is contradictory and argumentative, which I find deeply useful as a way of thinking about the world, and therefore something to infuse my writing with. Being born into all of the complications of being a Jew, the beauties and complications, is a tremendous gift as a writer. I won’t always use those gifts but I’m lucky to have them. With this book, it wasn’t an overly conscious decision, but again this notion of doubt and uncertainty. Judaism is extraordinary in that it allows for and even encourages doubt; in the Talmudic tradition an argument that is refuted is considered a failure. The idea is to keep the argument or idea aloft for as long as possible and continue to peel it and peel it and dice it and get to the heart of it, but continue the questioning. That intellectual restlessness and inability to accept things as they seem or as they are is what makes the religion, to me, so incredibly powerful and intellectually interesting. It trickled down without me fully knowing it.

What’s next for you?

NK: I’ve been writing a lot of short pieces but in the back of my mind thinking about a new novel. Some of these characters are still enough alive in me. For example, Dov. I thought I’d write his story in this novel; the idea of a fallen judge who has somehow compromised himself morally, and finds himself in the position of then being judged. Part of me wants to know who he is and what he has to say. Sometimes the moment passes, and once the book is published there might be an unfortunate but necessary emotional distance. But, we’ll see.

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