Author2Author: Fiona Rosenbloom & Ruth Andrew Ellenson

I was a fan of The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt even before I met the anthology’s editor, Ruth Andrew Ellenson, at a reading at Mo Pitkin’s last fall, so when Fiona Rosenbloom’s YA novel, You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, landed in my review pile, I emailed Ruthie (we’d been writing back and forth by then, and bonded over lunch with Mrs. Beatrice, who was equally charmed) and told her I’d found a perfect Author2Author partner. Luckily, Fiona was up for it, too, and here’s the first half of their conversation.

Fiona Rosenbloom: There are a lot of really interesting things revealed in this anthology, but the most interesting, to me at least, is revealed in the introduction. Judaism is passed along matrilineal lines, and while your father is a rabbi, your mother converted to Judaism, making you, the editor of this Jewish anthology of guilt, technically not Jewish. So, before we get into Guilt, I thought I’d ask you if your definition of Judaism runs counter to this belief. How do you identify with Judaism? And do you even subscribe to the matrilineal blood-line belief? Is Judaism, for you, a personal choice?

Ruth Andrew Ellenson: It’s a interesting question and one I’ve dealt with in various ways. I’m probably in a extremely small club: rabbi’s daughters who are also Daughters of the American Revolution.

Just to clarify, I am Jewish because not only did my mother convert, my father actually had me converted as an infant in an ultra Orthodox ceremony. So hallachicly, according to Jewish law, I’m as kosher as they come. I grew up in a very rich intellectual Jewish world, where identity was discussed frequently and it never entered into the conversation that I wasn’t part of that world. To answer your question directly: No, I never felt Judaism was a choice; it was absolutely, definitively who I was and am. I was also lucky to spend much of childhood around the Havurah movement of the 1970s, which emphasized new ways to approach Judaism and Jewish identity. When my parents were married, I think my mother’s identity as a convert was seen an exotic. Here was a former beauty queen with a Southern accent who had lived on a kibbutz and spoke Hebrew. Not too many of those on the Upper West Side.

I think what that legacy produced in me was an openness to Jewish identities that don’t fit the mold, that don’t perfectly relfect the community as it wishes to be. Perhaps I’m especially open to ambivalence and complexity in religious identity because I was raised with such an unusual background where both my Christian and Jewish heritages were known to me and appreciated, but I grew up in such a Jewish milieu there was no question as to who I was. As I mention in the book, I never felt more Jewish than when I went with my grandmother to church.

You capture the horrible, hilarious tone of junior high school girls perfectly. One thing I loved about the book was how genuinely moving and funny it was. Was it hard for you to go back (both psychologically and as writer) to that age? Did you hang out at the mall and eavesdrop or was it something that came back to you all too easily? Was your Bat Mitzvah experience at all like Stacy’s?

Fiona Rosenbloom: I’m not sure quite what it says about me that it was not difficult accessing my emotional self at age thirteen. Perhaps it was scarring enough, damaging enough, to have etched its way permanently into my psyche that “going back” wasn’t necessary. Much to my surprise, it was all still here. I do have the added bonus of having a very young sibling, and nieces, who helped me with all the pop culture references and dressed my characters for me, but emotionally, I didn’t have to go far.

I didn’t go to any malls or Bat Mitzvahs while writing this book. While present day culture is completely represented here, it all came last: mall life, lingo, clothing… To me it was the least important (although, obviously, these features are the most important to the kids who write me or ask me about Stacy’s popularity). The experience of changing from a child into a young adult is a universal one, regardless of culture or country. The biological and mental changes are threaded through each of us and connect us all. And it was that experience I wanted to capture most, these were the felt moments I wanted to resonate. Sure, not going to malls or Bat Mitzvahs made capturing certain details infinitely harder, but I like to suffer. I’m Jewish.

Ruth Andrew Ellenson: In You’re SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, Stacy learns the painful lesson that in the absence of careful judgement, our good intentions can lead to huge mistakes, especially in the case of her mother. It’s a rather bittersweet realization. Did you intentionally put that in the book or was it a byproduct of the story you created?

Fiona Rosenbloom: It was absolutely orchestrated and set up that way. It was my intention to draw an honest portrait of how one grows up, and that by failing, over and over, one hopefully realizes that their approach isn’t necessarily the correct one. Teenagers are selfish (adults are selfish) and when our ways of doing things are challenged, we can either dig our heels in and close our eyes to the offense, or be open enough to hear what’s said, see the result of our actions, and change accordingly. It was important to me that Stacy was changed by her own actions and that she grew from her mistakes and from her Hebrew lessons with her Rabbi.