I'm doing lots of logistical things this week, like booking travel for the
Big Book Tour, and sorting out more travel for the Jewish Community Center tour in November. I notice all of these events say Q&A with the author to follow. I am still amazed that the author is me. How will I answer? Or what will be asked? And then, of course, will anyone ask?
It's all fairly ominous... I have several interviews scheduled, and said Q&As, and I want to try to answer in an intelligent and truthful way the basic question that I have already been asked many times: what made me write my book. I've never answered this properly and I'm finding this terribly difficult, partially because that's a fairly complex question. It's also hard for me to imagine that anyone would really care... I think people want a one line answer, or I would like to be able to give one, but there is never really one reason ? one things leads to another, and another, years pass by and then you are a million years away from where you started. I'm realizing I can talk about anyone else's book, novels I've admired, short stories that I loved despite their glaring flaws, but I can't talk very well about my own book.
I used to teach a Jewish American Literature class at Cornell, where I went to graduate school, and I remember finding certain tropes and themes of all the books so fascinating. For one, how Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan and Delmore Schwartz and Roth (both of them) were unmistakably Jewish writers, but there was little, if any, reference to religion at all. How did they pull this off? And what made them unquestionably Jewish? What makes anyone so?
This is not a new question, I know. Identity, like so many things that make us up as individuals, as characters, is dependent on our communities, what we eat (without fail this discussion always makes me think of Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City...), our family life. And often that is so different from where we are now as individuals ? I think this is why Irving Howe made the claim ? I paraphrase here, or more likely misquote ? that Jewish American literature was dead in a sense. It had once brought European Jewishness to America, but then all the Jews moved to the suburbs; how would this experience, one of dilution really, and assimilation, be of interest?
The difference between the generations is so marked with immigrants, and this almost unbearable distance between the people who came over and their children who were raised here, as well as these issues of identity, began to kind of obsess me when I was teaching that course. My grandmother, who was alive then and who was born here, got a kick of me asking her questions: why did your family come? Her answer: Ecch, they were bored. Why Portland, Maine? Because this is where the boat landed. I was asking her what we were doing here, how we got here, but this was never an interesting ? and therefore answer-worthy ? question for her. She felt from Maine.
And then I serendipitously found a self-published book by the widow of the man who had invented Lestoil, the first real household cleanser. (Remember?) It turns out I was related to him by marriage, and his story began to fascinate me. This man came over from Russia, was a door-to-door salesman, and then got rich inventing a cleanser he mixed in his kid's bathtub. That could only happen here, at that time, when people were inventing things they needed to get through the day. Sugar packets? Sugar dispensers congealed with crystallized particles and wouldn't close. Depletory creams? You can only imagine. Now, we go further daily with technology, but the inventions of these very necessary things seem a thing of the past. There was something so nostalgic about all of it. Novel-worthy, even. And there was something satisfying about finding my family's roots. I consider myself 1,000% Jewish, but this can also translate into cultural and historical identification.
Well, that helped a little... Now back to the every day, walking through Madison Square Park on the way to lunch and watching all the dogs in the run, which of course makes me think of Maddie, my springer spaniel, and how once upon a time I used to be home all day with her. Nice that my husband is home with her now ? he has a studio in the first floor of our apartment and they are completely inseparable. Of course of course, I'm jealous. And then, sitting down at my desk, which is incidentally beneath one of the paintings Pedro made of "me" (which is to say, he's not exactly a figurative painter), and thumbing through the unduly large September Vogue (still thinking about what to pitch, still thinking it would be just too great to have a piece in Vogue), and I come across a review of my friend (and Portland writer) Jon Raymond's (and Kelly Reichard's, who directed and helped adapt it) movie, Old Joy. I saw the film in the New York Film Festival at MOMA last spring, but it has distribution now. It's this wonderful quiet unsettling movie about friendship and alienation based on one of Jon's short stories.
I love it when the people I know and love make beautiful, moving things... Which of course leads back to me and: what will I make next? When will I get back to writing my newly started and yet dreaded next book, in earnest? For now, I'll just flip back to the Vogue...