Interview with Dara Horn: Part 3

If you’re just tuning in, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our interview with Dara Horn. And now,the thrilling conclusion:

BGB: The historical fiction parts of The World to Come focus on the famous painter Marc Chagall and the comparatively unknown Yiddish author Der Nister who were contemporaries in Imperial Russia. The men present almost perfect contrasts of one another. Surprisingly, I found myself drawn more to the almost hopelessly doomed Der Nister than Chagall. What drew you to use Der Nister as a central character in your novel and can you tell us a little bit about his work?

DH: Der Nister means “The Hidden One”; it was the pen name of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh. I was first introduced to his work during graduate school, where I discovered his short stories and wrote about several of them for my doctoral dissertation. They are completely, brilliantly insane, so much so that merely attempting to summarize them is nearly impossible; their plot structure is nothing short of demented, though extremely careful reading reveals their intricate and purposeful design. What fascinated me about them was what they revealed about my own (and most readers’) expectations for a story. We really do demand that a story have an ending, no matter how sophisticated or “postmodern” we think we are as readers. And not only do we demand an ending, but we specifically demand a redemptive ending—maybe not a happy ending or even an uplifting one, but one that somehow provides us with a sense of completion, of restitution, of the tools for repairing what has been broken in the characters’ lives or in our own. For a long time in Jewish culture there was a belief that Jewish life could be sustained on what was called a “paper bridge,” that texts and stories alone were sufficient to ensure the survival of a community from one generation to the next. Der Nister was one of the brilliant people who recognized that that was a delusional fantasy. His own life unfortunately proved him right. After the second world war, Stalin decided to destroy Jewish culture in the Soviet Union by murdering Jewish writers and artists; Der Nister died in a gulag in 1950. Nor did his stories endure; during his lifetime, Soviet censorship forced him to change his style of writing to a more conventional one, and then his last novel’s manuscript was lost forever, or perhaps never written. And of course few people have heard of him today.

Der Nister was a roommate of Chagall’s in faculty housing in a Soviet Jewish orphanage that was built after the 1919 pogroms (a series of pogroms in which over a hundred thousand people were murdered, enough people to necessitate the construction of new orphanages). Both Chagall and Der Nister had been tremendously acclaimed as young men, but what fascinated me was how their fates diverged in a way that had no relation whatsoever to their levels of talent. Chagall lived to be 97 and died as a worldwide household name, and Der Nister died in a Soviet prison camp with most of his work censored out of existence. To me this revealed another assumption that I (and probably most people) had unconsciously believed: that what lasts is what’s best, that talent is always recognized at the end of the day somehow, and that what survives the ravages of time is what deserved to be celebrated, while what didn’t survive deserved to be forgotten. It’s simply not true. I admire Chagall’s immense talent, of course, and I am in no way suggesting that his work does not deserve the recognition it has earned. But there is a certain irony in how his work is now often regarded as a kind of kitschy representation of a “lost world”, when his own imagination is precisely what was NOT lost, while so many other imaginations were—and even foresaw that they would be.

BGB: The mother in the present day scenes of The World to Come is a famous author of children’s stories. Her writing method entails translating old Yiddish stories and passing them off as her own. As a scholar of Yiddish literature, you have access to a wealth of primary material that can be read by an ever diminishing number of people. Have you ever considered translating Yiddish works for mass consumption (with attribution of course)?

DH: Yes, I have, in a sense. I was actually recently commissioned to edit an anthology of previously untranslated Yiddish stories, though the project is in its infancy at this point (and these kinds of projects have a high infant mortality rate, so no promises). I have never tried my hand as a translator, though, and there is a whole art to that in which I wouldn’t be able to claim any expertise. There have recently been a number of new translations of previously untranslated Yiddish works published by The New Yiddish Library (Yale), among others. When I first started writing this novel, there were a few works that I referenced in it that you couldn’t find in English; by the time it was published, a few new anthologies had made pretty much everything I referenced available in English. The problem, after translation, is finding ways of introducing these works to audiences that have never heard of them, and preparing them for the fact that what they will find bears no resemblance to Fiddler on the Roof. (Don’t get me started on Fiddler on the Roof.)

What I have tried to do, through my writing and also through my teaching (I have taught college courses in Hebrew and Yiddish literature), is to introduce new audiences to the variety and depth of this literature, and I’ve been really amazed by the response. I can’t tell you how many readers have told me that they’ve finished the novel and have begun reading Yiddish literature in translation, using my list of sources as their starting point. Any way that people can become excited about this literature seems wonderful to me. I recently signed a film contract for this novel. If Der Nister ends up being a main character in a Hollywood movie, then I think we can safely say that awareness of Yiddish literature has risen from the grave.

BGB: An excerpt from your novel in progress was included in the Granta Best Young American Novelists issue. As a native of New Orleans, I was thrilled to see that the novel takes place, at least in part, in my home town during the Civil War. The location and time period seem to be a departure from your previous work, and it appears to also be a spy novel. What can you tell us about the upcoming novel and how you arrived at this location/era/genre?

DH: My next novel is about a Jewish Civil War assassin. He’s a soldier in the Union army, and his commanders find out that he has relatives in New Orleans, including a cousin who’s a Confederate spy involved in a plot to kill Lincoln, so they send him down to assassinate his own cousin. From there, things for our hero only become much, much worse.

It may seem like a departure from my previous books on the surface, and in many ways it is, but I’ve always been interested in aspects of Jewish history that are rarely examined. Most explorations of American Jewish history start in the early 1900s, when the largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived. But I first thought of this idea while on a book tour a few years ago in New Orleans. I was there to speak at their Jewish community center, and I was wandering around the neighborhood when I came upon a Jewish cemetery there. Many of the graves were from the early 1800s, and when I began reading more about it, I was surprised by how much material I found about Jewish communities on both sides of the Civil War. It’s very common today for Americans to have family in different parts of the country, but in the nineteenth century it wasn’t so common– except among American Jews, who often had relatives who had settled in different places and with whom they maintained close ties. I was interested in the ways that choices about what home is can define who we are. You are right that it’s a spy novel, but it’s really a story about loyalty, about how we decide who deserves our devotion, and why.

Many thanks to Dara Horn for taking the time to chat with us. Now go read her books!

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 2

Dara Horn Interview: Part 2

Yesterday we presented Part 1 of our interview with one of America’s Best Young Novelists, Dara Horn. Part 2 of the interview continues below.

BGB: You appear in a recent article in the New York Times about the Jewish Book Network, an organization that supports Jewish authors by coordinating book events nationally with Jewish Community Centers and other organizations. The results seem to be fairly impressive – the article names other authors who have participated in the network, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krausse, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, etc. How did you get involved with the group? Did you have to go through one of the “star search” style interviews described in the article? And finally, do you think that your experience with the Network was a big boost to your career when you were starting out?

DH: I was very lucky in that my first book was published in 2002, about a year or two before the Jewish Book Network began their auditioning system, so I was spared the trauma of having to pitch my book to an audience of hundreds of bookfair people in two minutes or less. At the time, the director of the program apparently just read my book and liked it, and I was invited to a Jewish Book Network lunch during BookExpo America (the annual book industry convention, which in 2002 happened to be held in New York, where I live) at which I basically ended up doing an audition—pitching the book to representatives of Jewish book fairs from around the country—but in a more one-on-one
kind of way. I think publishers have recognized what a resource this is for promoting books of Jewish interest, and as a result the Jewish Book Network had to set up the audition process because so many authors were interested in getting involved.

In my experience, the Jewish book fairs have been a wonderful way to build an audience for a new writer’s work. For Jewish communities in cities outside the northeast, these fairs are very important communal events, and they can draw pretty big audiences even for writers who aren’t so well known. People come to the fairs because of the community and to be involved in Jewish culture (particularly in parts of the country where such opportunities are rare), even if they haven’t previously heard of the author. For an author who hasn’t been on Oprah, having 25 people show up at a bookstore reading in St. Louis is usually an amazing turnout, but at the last Jewish book fair I spoke at in St. Louis, about two hundred people came. They do a remarkable job of building an audience.

It’s easy to be snobby about the Jewish book fairs, since not everyone in the audience is there solely out of a love of literature. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Jewish book fair where at least one person didn’t ask me whether I was married and whether I wanted to meet their son/grandson/nephew/cousin’s-college-roommate’s-dogwalker. Despite all the crazies who tend to show up at bookstore readings (like the reader in Boston who presented me with a handmade collage with my name pasted across dozens of newspaper clippings about local murders), it must be said that no one at Barnes and Noble has ever tried to marry me off. But in an era where everyone is always complaining about how hard it is to sell books, I have nothing but gratitude for how the Jewish Book Network introduced my work to readers. And it is really a gift for a writer to be able to meet so many readers in person who have read and enjoyed her work.

BGB: Let’s talk about your most recent book. The World to Come is a wonderful novel that combines elements of the art heist genre, a bit of historical fiction, and a profound spiritual element. Let’s start with that last bit. The book presents a very comforting
idea – our unborn children are taught in heaven about our world by their own ancestors. I love this idea of “the world to come” as somewhat circular. How did you come up with this concept?

DH: It originated with a story in the Talmud about what happens to a child before he is born. In the story, we are told that the child spends the pregnancy being taught all of the secrets of the Torah—by which is meant not merely the five books of Moses, but all of the secrets of an ethical way of life. Just before the child’s birth, an angel slaps the child across the face (which is the reason why we all have dents below our noses), causing him to forget all of the things he has learned, and then, once he is born, he is forced the spend the rest of his life trying to remember. There is something terribly haunting about this story’s suggestion that when we learn new things, we are in fact remembering them from before we were born rather than learning them new. This implies a further question: from whom did we learn them?

In developing the supernatural “world to come” as it appears in the book, I answered this question by using another strand of Jewish tradition, the idea that one’s deceased ancestors bear the responsibility of being “gute beters” or “good requesters”—that is, that they are responsible for interceding with God on behalf of their descendants. This is a very old Jewish idea that is built into the structure of Jewish prayer, which repeatedly invokes the patriarchs and other ancestors by name, as well as the promises God made to these ancestors, when asking God to intervene in the present world. In the novel, I took these two traditional ideas and combined them, so that those who haven’t yet been born are taught all of these secrets by their own ancestors.

This may seem like pure fantasy, but I believe that the ideas behind both of these stories are reflected in the reality of genetic inheritance. A person at birth is exclusively made of spare parts from people who lived before him, but despite the fact that this is all that we are, we cannot access it or “remember” those who made us who we are. But the way I have dramatized this—which you refer to as “comforting”—is in fact much more than a metaphor for genetics, because it suggests that what we might rationally think of as genetic codes are in fact real people that we (or our parents) have known, and that therefore there is a way for such people to continue living.

I am interested in the points in human experience where religion, instead of being a metaphor, becomes a genuine description of life as we live it. No matter how rational or secular we become, we remain unable to answer two fundamental questions: when a person is born, where did he come from? And when a person dies, where did he go? Being present at a childbirth or a death makes it very difficult to be satisfied with a merely physical explanation of how a person (rather than merely a body) comes into our world or leaves it. I think it is possible to imagine that “the world to come” is just what the phrase suggests—that whether or not one chooses to believe in a supernatural world beyond our own, our reward or punishment for our acts in life is also embodied in the impression that those acts will leave on our own world in the future—that is, on the world, to come.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in Part 3…

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 3

Interview with Dara Horn: Part 1

Dara Horn is the author of two novels. Her first novel In the Image won the National Jewish Book Award, and the Reform Judaism Award for Jewish Fiction. Her second novel, The World to Come also won the National Jewish Book Award and was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly. I liked it an awful lot myself. Horn was also named one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta. In addition to all of that, she also holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University where she studied Yiddish and Hebrew literature. She’s also a mother of two.

I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed by Baby Got Books, which shows up in some of my rambling early questions. Don’t worry, I eventually get a hold of myself. Below is Part 1 of our conversation that spanned several weeks via e-mail. Parts 2 and 3 will follow.

Baby Got Books: You were recently named to Granta’s list of Best Young American Novelists. How did you find out? Has being named to he list become a life/career changing event? Who of your fellow honorees are you most excited to join? Who are your contemporaries that should have made the list with you?

Dara Horn: I found this out through a phone call in December, which was preceded by an email from a Granta editor requesting my number in order to ask me a “rather delicate” question. I have the pessimist’s habit of always expecting the worst, so my immediate assumption was that I was somehow about to be sued. (My last novel was about Chagall, and I had had a similar fear when Chagall’s granddaughter called the publisher for a copy of the book. Fortunately she liked it.) I was quite amazed to hear the news, though it turned out that the “delicate” part of the question was that the magazine wanted to include never-before-published fiction from everyone selected… and needed everyone’s submissions in three weeks! I’ve never written a short story, so I didn’t have anything lying around to hand in other than the novel I’m currently working on. I had never published anything from a work-in-progress before, and it’s actually been very exciting to hear responses from readers about it.

The list of writers in the Granta issue is pretty remarkable, as is the issue itself. I don’t read a ton of contemporary fiction, so the fact that I was familiar with a fair number of them was enough to impress me. One of my favorite things about the other names on the list, though, is that one of them– Akhil Sharma– lives downstairs from me in my apartment building. Apparently it’s a very small literary world. As for authors I might have liked to see included, I’ll put in a plug here for Jon Papernik, whose The Ascent of Eli Israel I found fascinating, and for T Cooper, whose surprisingly strange Lipshitz Six was even better in the thinking-about-it-afterwards than it was in the reading itself.

The Granta selection was a bit of a career-changing event for me in that most of the honors my novels had received previously had been from Jewish literary sources, so this has given my work some new attention. As for “life-changing event,” though, I’m afraid the Granta people really couldn’t compete, because I gave birth to my second child a few weeks after the issue came out.

BGB: You’ve never written a short story! I’ve read that you wrote your first novel while in the middle of pursuing a doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew comparative literature at Harvard. How did you decide to write a novel in the middle of what was surely a rigorous course of study? Having never written a short story how did you find the confidence to crank out a novel? How did you go about getting it published?

DH: No, I’ve never written a short story. That’s mainly because I never took a fiction-writing course after middle school. In the introduction to the Granta issue, the writer Elif Batuman (who happens to be my childhood best friend) is quoted as saying that the short story form is played out in American literature and is merely kept alive artificially through fiction-writing courses. I do agree with that. I also think that writing a short story and writing a novel are very different skills.

Being a writer isn’t so much a career as it is a disease, like finding out you have asthma at the age of six. After you’ve diagnosed it, you just have to find a way to work your life around it. I was always looking for ways to support myself that would accommodate this habit. When I was a college senior, I won a scholarship to spend the year after graduation at Cambridge University in England. It was the kind of set-up no one could turn down—tuition to study “anything at all,” a “scholarship suite” in an 18th century house, and a stipend big enough to pay for all the takeout Indian food one could possibly need. It should have been a dream come true, except that I got engaged a few months before graduation, and my fiancé had a job in America and couldn’t join me. I was therefore doomed to spend the year alone, crying into pints of Guinness in smoke-filled pubs packed with crazed soccer hooligans. I soon realized that I don’t like Guinness, smoke-filled pubs, or crazed soccer hooligans. When you spend a year in England avoiding these things, you have a lot of time on your hands. So even though I had begun my graduate work, I found that I still had plenty of time to write. I had never planned to write a novel, since I had never written any fiction at all before I started writing that book. I had always thought I would be a journalist, and to that end I kept a notebook where I would write down ideas for articles and essays. At some point I read straight through these ideas and realized that many of them were strangely related to each other, because of certain preoccupations I had at the time when I had written them. And I saw how they would make more sense as part of a novel. I was quite bored that year, and I really wrote it to entertain myself. The idea of publishing it was more of a dream than anything else.

The story of how I got the book published also involves something inane that happened in England. In college, I wrote a lot of magazine articles, and at one point a publisher contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in expanding an article I had written into a nonfiction book. I was then able to find an agent without much agony, since I already had a publisher lined up. The problem was that I ultimately decided not to write that book. Two years later, I was writing the novel in England, and my masters program in Hebrew literature hosted the Israeli author Meir Shalev for a lecture and dinner. During the dinner, Shalev sat at the center of the long table, and I sat on the end. I didn’t get to speak to Shalev at all, but instead I spoke to the person seated across from me: Shalev’s British publicist. At some point I mentioned that I had been writing a novel and that I had had a contact with an agent years before, but that he would never remember me now, so it seemed quite unrealistic to me to try to get it published that way. The publicist told me, “Of course he’ll remember you. It’s his job to remember people like you.” The next day I mailed the novel to this agent. He called me when he received it, agreed to represent me, and sold it to W.W. Norton.

I did write my second novel while getting a doctorate at Harvard, where graduate students generally drink a lot less beer. But the nice thing about a doctorate is that no one ever expects you to finish it. In academia, procrastination is a way of life, and I used this to my advantage. Whenever the dissertation became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the novel, and whenever the novel became too frustrating, I’d procrastinate by writing the dissertation. As a result I completed both without ever feeling like I was doing real work.

BGB: I agree to a point that modern short stories can often come across as annoyingly didactic, writer-ly exercises. There is also a sense that short story writing is akin to the literary minor leagues. Some of your fellow Granta “best young novelists” had not actually written a a novel and were honored based upon the strength of their short stories. The idea being, I suppose, that they are headed for the major leagues. I’m not sure I agree with that thought process. However, there are some great writers that are doing wonderful things with short stories. Can you not imagine that there will come a time when you would want to tell a story that would be perfectly captured in a short story or novella form?

DH: Well, I recently wrote an extremely short story (three paragraphs) on a cocktail napkin, for Esquire magazine’s “Napkin Fiction Project.” I assure you it was quite “minor league.” But the short story and novella forms are far from “minor league” in the literatures I study, Yiddish and Hebrew; the great modern masterworks in both those languages are all stories and novellas, not novels. So I’m not against the concept of short stories. I just don’t have any reason to think that I know how to write them. What motivates me in writing novels is developing characters and following the plot to see what happens next, since I don’t plan the books in advance. It’s my impression that one has to have some slight preconception of where one is going in order to write something shorter, though I may well be wrong about that. I’ve also grown very accustomed to writing novels; I like creating characters that I can live with for a long time and get to know really well, since you generally have to spend a few years with these people when you’re writing a book. It’s therefore hard for me to imagine doing what I would want to do with less time and space. But there was a time when I would have said that I had no idea how to write fiction at all, so why not?

Come back tomorrow for Part 2!

Interview Part 2

Interview Part 3