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.

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4 January 2006 | author2author |

Kathryn Davis on Exploring Thin Places

Kathryn Davis is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to fully engage myself with for a while now, ever since I found a batch of her earlier books on sale at Housing Works a few years ago. Well, life’s kept intervening since then with its own ideas, but now that Davis has just published her sixth novel, The Thin Place, maybe it’s time for me to pull it together and get cracking. In the meantime, she was kind enough to tell me, and by extension you, about the inspiration for her story.

I first heard of thin places five years ago, while visiting a friend who was a lay member of a religious community—St. Mary’s Convent—high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River outside of Peekskill. At the time one of the sisters was very sick, ill unto death. Plans were already in motion to commence the ritual ringing of the bell—the number of times it would ring being equal to the number of years of her life—when, miraculously, she recovered. “It’s because this is a thin place,” Sister Anastasia told me, going on to explain that in such a place the membrane between this world and the spirit world was very thin. Anything can happen in a thin place, she told me.

At that time, there were two Malawi sisters at the convent, participants in an exchange program between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest country. When the two Malawi sisters had arrived they’d been like scarecrows, but they were quickly gaining weight. When they heard the convent referred to as a thin place, they burst out laughing. “This is a fat place!” said Sister Martha, though of course the very fact that they were there at all was, as Sister Anastasia pointed out, very thin.

I was immensely attracted to this idea, and knew I wanted to write a book about a thin place in which “anything could happen.” I also knew that I wanted the frame of reference to be wide as well as thin, in order to accommodate my concerns about extinction, and about what we’re doing to this planet during our brief tenure here—the wages of “human time too thin to be discerned.”

3 January 2006 | guest authors |