Author2Author: Pearl Abraham & Naama Goldstein, pt. 2

Our latest Author2Author conversation began when Naama Goldstein enquired about the post-modern craft of Pearl Abraham's The Seventh Beggar. The textual analysis gets deeper as Pearl asks her first question about Naama's stories....

Pearl Abraham: Since we're on the subject of structure and texture, I wonder whether you'd elaborate on the partition of the stories in The Place Will Comfort You, with the first five stories set in Israel, under the Hebrew title Olim (Ascending), which is how Israelis refer to new citizens. Olim has a positive connotation: To come up to the land of Israel is or was, at least since Biblical days, considered a blessed move. Its direct opposite is the title of the second half of your book, VeYordim (And Descending), which refers to Israeli citizens who've abandoned their land and moved elsewhere. The stories in this second half are set in America. Though the titles bear the positive and negative connotations, in the stories themselves the reader will find no idealization of either place or decision. Indeed, this is an aspect I like about your stories; they don't have that nostalgic idealization that weighs down so much Jewish literature. Can you talk about how your ideas of ascent and descent, which is also a Kabbalistic concept, relate to the stories, and how the Biblical story of Jacob's dream of the ladder, which serves as your epigraph, refers to your themes? And, since the characters in all the stories are displaced, having moved from one culture to another, perhaps you want to talk also about how place and cultural displacement, a venerable theme in literature, shape your stories.

Naama Goldstein: The book of Genesis is close to my heart, not least because at that early point in my education I was still full of good will and interest and paying attention. But the reason I chose to pull an epigraph from there is the fascination it affords me now, on revisiting. I like best to read the text without rabbinic commentary. I like to rely on my own primitive mind and try and imagine the circumstances of the ancient people who wrote these stories to explain their world.

Now, you are the last person I need to fill in on the story of Yaakov's (Jacob's) ladder, but given the orchestrated characters we are in this exchange I will pretend that I must. So: On the run from Esau, his impulsive, furry hunter brother, Jacob, the more domestic and inhibited, or forward-thinking, sibling, must sleep rough with a rock as a pillow. What a setback for the young man whose mother was so certain that, of her two sons, he was the one destined to engender the enduring culture. But all is not lost. In his sleep he sees a ladder to heaven. On the ladder he sees Godly beings, ascending and descending. Next, God Himself appears to him and promises the exiled Jacob future rootedness and proliferation precisely there, in what had seemed like a low point, the very spot he chose for his nomadic rest. Jacob comes to in a mystical mindset, rattled and edified. He understands that he happened on the gates of heaven, and calls the place Beit El, or House of God, notwithstanding that the place already has a name, given by locals: Luz (pronounced--by weird coincidence, from an Anglophone point of view--Looz, as in lose).

As for the significance of this story to The Place Will Comfort You, the short of it is that it contains the very stuff that attracted me, too, in writing my stories, namely the confluence of family dynamics and personal crises with collective history and myth and symbolism. I frighten myself when I begin to speak this way--or, I fear I will frighten off all future fictional characters who much prefer to think of themselves as folks rather than constructs--so only a little bit more on the topic of ascent and descent, to answer your question about the stories' division. You point out that I don't seem to perceive these categories as better and lesser poles in a continuum, and that's true. Neither section conveys an ideal state of being; all the characters are unsettled. With this bunch of stories I found myself drawn to agitated, balky folks, all trying to better their circumstances or the lives around them with often questionable outcomes. Why some of the characters fall under the category of Ascenders and others Descenders has more to do with the terms in which they understand themselves than with their geographic place. Their agitation and balkiness may not rise and fall due to locale: Their humanity is universal, but the terms in which they understand it relate specifically to where they are, or where they imagine they are or should be. My personal circumstances, having grown up from early childhood in Israel, in a Zionist Orthodox milieu, and then returned as a young adult to America where I chose a relatively secular life, no doubt have a lot to do with the collection's impulse to simultaneously catalogue and shuffle its characters by traditional values.