Author2Author: Pearl Abraham & Naama Goldstein, pt. 4

The dialogue between Pearl and Naama comes to a close (except for the bonus round, which will appear this weekend) with some reflections on the possible connections between setting and character...which will actually come up in another context next week as well, as Paul Elie and Pankaj Mishra find common ground--and fascinating divergence--in The Life You Save May Be Your Own and An End to Suffering.

Pearl Abraham: One of the many aspects of The Place Will Comfort You that intrigues me is the effect on your young Israeli characters, who are practically force-fed the teachings of the national ideology, of the burden of the state's foundations, of the complicated and dangerous world they are born into, and how it parallels, or doesn't, Biblical nation building. Living 21st-century life in such a Biblical place, hyperbolically dubbed "the land of milk and honey," would seem to add serious weight to every decision. The very real dangers of the new enemy, in contrast to the old Biblical archenemy Amalek, whom we are enjoined to remember to forget--an interesting dialectic , it seems to me, since we only remember the name Amalek because we were asked to be sure to forget it--makes this a place, a country, a people, who do not have to worry about, to quote a Kundera title, the unbearable lightness of being.

Talk, if you can, about how the burden of life in Israel forms your characters, shapes your stories, and whether this burden requires unique countermeasures to solve issues of craft.

Naama Goldstein: I don't know…I don't think of my characters as burdened. Burdened sounds pretty tragic, and with maybe one exception I don't think of the characters in The Place Will Comfort You as tragic. They're much too big a pain in the ass, generally speaking. They all push back at life even if the only way they might know to do this is going on strike or flailing about: a good way to keep from being burdened; you don't make for a reliable surface with all the frantic motion and misdirected energy. Why misdirected energy would be of interest to a writer who once spent an afternoon penning a letter of repudiation to Rusted Root and their pernicious brand of ersatz ethnic music, I really can't say. (Sent it, too. A very long time ago, many, many years. Still no response.)

But actually the matter of misdirected energy does relate to your question of burden, as well as the overwhelming shadow of ideology, or nation-building, you refer to. One recurrent theme that emerged as I wrote was the matter of counter-ideology, the personal kind, private rebellions, in particular, which can't quite steer themselves out of a panic of rejection and into a productive course of action. I found a lot of fodder there. And I found that the subject allows a good range of motion, room for all kinds of humorous as well as terrible and stirring developments, just like life as I see it, so it's a natural place for me to write.