Posted on October 1, 2021
Abigail Pogrebin, author of My Jewish Year:18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew — The question I get asked most about this book is: What was your favorite holiday of them all?
It is, in a way, a funny question to be asked about a calendar tradition that has endured for so many generations because it’s not as if Jews choose holidays the way one chooses a favorite movie or dessert. But at the same time, we actually do. That was one of the realizations I had while reporting and writing this book — that Judaism is a choice, not just once, but every day. We inherit this tradition, yes, but we also decide whether to continue it, or leave it behind us. So it makes sense to ask me about which holiday was my favorite to learn about and observe, because it gets at the truth: we decide, as adults, whether a ritual is worth prioritizing when no one is forcing us to observe it.
And yet asking me to pick my favorite feels like being forced to choose between treasured relatives. But I do know my answer: Yom Kippur. Why? Because it’s the most demanding holiday in terms of requirements, discomfort, and emotion. Because it forces a kind of concentrated introspection that I tend to dodge the rest of the year. Because it reminds me that life is a fleeting gift, that getting another year is not guaranteed, that I’m accountable, responsible, and that I have a precious chance to do better. I love the “Kol Nidre” melody, the Unetanetokef liturgy, the pounding of the chest. And of course, there’s nothing like breaking the fast with my family and a good bagel. So my answer is Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. It’s the holiday that distills why life is not a luxury and why gratitude takes practice.
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Ben Nadler, author of The Sea Beach Line — The question I get asked most often is: How long did it take you to write The Sea Beach Line?
I worked on the manuscript over the course of five years, basically the entire second half of my twenties. The novel was inspired by my experiences as a street vendor, but I ended up spending more years writing about street vending than I had actually spent street vending. Novels are inevitably multi-year efforts—I’m now a couple years deep into a new book, with a lot left ahead. Over the years of work, you end up living a strange fictional life in parallel to your actual day-to-day life.
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David Hirshberg, author of Jacobo’s Rainbow — The questions I get asked most often are: Why does the prologue end with ‘My guess is that you’re going to believe this is fiction; that would be a delusion.’ and why is it signed by Jacobo Toledano, the main character, and not you, the author?
It is helpful to read the whole prologue: It seems as if anniversaries have a way of letting spirits loose, and they don’t respect boundaries any more than viruses do, so the only way to fool yourself into thinking you can control them is to make others believe that they can see them as well. A conjurer uses sleights-of-hand, feints, and misdirections, which can succeed because you’re willing to suspend visual disbelief. However, an author only has one dimension to work with, as well as a disconnected audience, which can be a disadvantage. But on the other hand, there’s no one to say that what you’re reading is false. Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of a momentous event in my life-the day I was sent to jail. It’s the obvious time for me now to tell my story. My guess is that you’re going to believe this is fiction; that would be a delusion.
The short answer is that by having Jacobo write the prologue, he is recounting a story that is true for him; in other words, a non-fiction account of events. The idea of creating a novel in which the lead character recounts what is for him a non-fiction story is somewhat analogous to the play-within-the-play or the movie-within-the-movie genre. At the outset, I want the reader to know that while the story is fictional, it does represent what could have been actual events with characters that are true to life.