A Wall of Light Interview

Essay

Quill and Quire Interview

Why and when did you start writing?

When my father read stories to me on the kibbutz, I always identified with the writers and thought about how they wrote the story. I told my father I would be a writer, and that has been a part of my identity ever since. It’s not something I ever decided or thought about - it was simply part of who I was.

The first full-length book my father read to me was Alice in Wonderland. I’ve noticed that echoes of Alice in Wonderland often appear in my writing, though this is not something I have ever planned. Another early literary experience was The Little Matchgirl. I would beg my father to read it to me, and he would refuse, because I would burst out weeping each time. Finally he’d relent and I would cry for about half an hour at the end of the story.

I identified with the matchgirl, because even though I was part of a close-knit community on the kibbutz, I was isolated from my parents at night and during most of the day, which was difficult for us. As an adult I tried to read the story to my daughter in the library one day, and had to disappear behind a shelf, as I was crying helplessly again. I was at the same time laughing at myself, and my daughter was also quite amused, but I couldn't stop.

I guess it was also empathy that made me cry when I was little. I could not bear that this matchgirl had so little, and that no one cared about her, and as a good little Marxist, I already knew that this was not mere fiction.

My first attempt at fiction, though, was far from compassionate! I wrote a short novel when I was twelve, which bears some slight resemblance to Stephen King's Carrie. An unpopular girl takes revenge... needless to say I was an outsider at school in Montreal. As a friend of mine once said, society rides on the accomplishments of all the people who were tormented when they were children.

You wrote for many years without trying to get published. Why is that, and how has being published changed your life?

I have never been ambitious in terms of publishing. I’ve been writing for thirty years, but I didn’t think about publishing, because each time I finished a story or novel, I thought: the next one will be better.

I was fifteen or sixteen when I saw Pasolini’s Decameron. Pasolini himself plays an artist who is working on a fresco. At the end of the movie, the fresco comes to life, the angels begin to sing, and Pasolini says something like: what is the point of creating, when what you dream is always so much more beautiful?

That struck me very powerfully as a motif that would follow me all my life. The vision and the creation drift apart in the process of creating, and that is a continual source of despair. But over the years, I’ve learnt to accept and even be amused by the phenomenon. When I completed Ten Thousand Lovers, I felt that the novel was close enough to my initial vision to be published. I was still hesitant, though, because I was afraid of some aspects of publishing.

My fears were justified, in fact, but the letters I receive from readers, and the freedom I now have to write full-time, more than make up for the drawbacks. Really, there is only one drawback: permanence. The permanence of ridiculous misquotes in articles, the permanence of the published text (no more rewrites!), the permanence of recorded opinions that later change.

The misquotes range from major distortions to smaller tampering, such as editors changing my gender-neutral pronouns to masculine pronouns. One of the most embarrassing misquotes had to do with the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic. I was quoted as saying something absurd about the origins of those languages. I imagined my former PhD advisor reading the article and thinking I’d actually made that comment, and demanding I return my degree… one has to develop a sense of humour about these things, but I now understand why some writers don’t want to give interviews, and why performing artists often make only the blandest statements. The Internet amplifies the misrepresentation. (I also show up on the Internet as the translator of an article by S. Aloni which I never translated.)

There was as well an unexpected disappointment: the discovery that some reviewers read other reviews instead of reading the book. I suppose it doesn’t seem worth it to them, to read an entire novel in order to write a short review, for which they may not be getting paid all that much. At the same time, reviewers do influence potential readers, and it’s a pity to see some of them (not all!) copying other reviews. I had one reviewer who it seems only read a few pages of my novel, and got the basic plot all wrong – she didn’t seem to know that Sonya was deaf, or that Sonya had difficulties getting to East Jerusalem. Most of the review was copied from the press kit (which I wrote). But there’s nothing one can do – it’s part of the profession and it happens to everyone. I’ve yet to read a review of the marvelous Black Swan Green that comments on the double ending of the novel, the dissolution of the plot in those last pages and the implicit renunciation or revocation of the entire enterprise of fiction – if you skip a few paragraphs, you’ll miss it altogether.

But on the whole I’m glad now that some of my books are in print, because the miracle of reaching readers is very inspiring. And the gift of time to write is also possible only because I’ve started publishing.

The trilogy is set in politically hot territory; do you feel that it is somehow propagating a specific political view?

Inevitably, my political perceptions come through in my writing, as does my view of life in general. Writers expose themselves completely in their fiction: one is stripped naked. But my activist self and my writer self are separate. As  a writer, I deal with ambiguity, unanswered questions, unknown territory. This affects my activism, too, as I try to understand the complexity of the situation. I know there are no simple answers, though I feel there are some necessary steps that must be taken (ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).

As the South African writer, Njabulo Ndebele, has said, fiction frees you from the pre-determined formula. A novel seeks to expand possibilities rather than narrow them. That is the great pleasure of writing: the freedom to delve as deeply as one wishes, look at things as closely as possible. I am always interested in the human story, in the way people experience their surroundings and how they are affected by them.

I have heard that Ten Thousand Lovers is popular among the Intelligence community in Israel.  A former head of the Mossad has praised it, and I think it’s partly because I strove so hard for accuracy and partly because I tried to understand my characters.  It has pained me to be occasionally misunderstood by the Jewish community in the Diaspora, but I know that the conflict is a very emotional issue for everyone involved.

How does your Canadian identity help you write about Israel?

Like many Israelis who live outside Israel (about 750,000 according to some estimates), I have never lost my Israeli identity, even though English is now my primary language, and even though I have lived longer in Canada than in Israel. As soon as I step off the plane in Israel, I feel completely integrated. When I return to Canada, the adjustment takes much longer. My personality appears to be more Israeli than Canadian, especially in terms of the informality one finds in Israeli culture.

In the trilogy that dual perspective emerges in different ways. In Ten Thousand Lovers, Lily moves in and out of memory; she is both deeply immersed in the events that took place in Israel, and watching them from a distance. In Look For Me, Dana is the daughter of South Africans, and she’s an activist, which means that she’s taken a step back to reflect on policies that others take for granted. She’s grown up reading Miss Read! You can’t get more of a contrast to Israeli life than the quiet English villages of the Miss Read books. In A Wall of Light, I move closer to the heart of Israel, but once again my main character, Sonya, is an outsider.

So I think it is probably easier for non-Israelis to enter the world of my novels than it would be if I were writing from an entirely Israeli perspective. When we write as insiders, we open the doors to our literary world, and our readers enter at their own risk. When we write as partial outsiders, we offer more guidance, a tourist booth with brochures.

How did you come to create the characters in A Wall of Light?

I fell in love with the characters of this novel, and I felt truly bereft when I’d finished. I wanted to meet them; I didn’t want to accept that they didn’t exist in the real world. When I was in my twenties, I wrote such dark stories and novels! That changed gradually after I had a child. I think I was so focussed on creating a gentle and friendly environment for my daughter, and she amused me so much, that I began creating more hopeful worlds. I didn’t lose interest in the lunatics and dour pessimists, but I found myself writing more about gentler people who were trying to find their way in a difficult and often tragic world.

Where do characters come from? I really can’t say. They came to me as if out of nowhere. I adore Noah; he’s so honest and funny and straight-forward, and he’s also quite strong. I think I was interested in his strength: how does he manage to remain so centred in the midst of crisis and tragedy? I was probably exploring this question as I wrote. I love his relationship with Kostya, and how he decides to ask Kostya for advice when he begins to wonder about his sexual orientation. I enjoyed writing about Noah at different ages, from ten to twenty-two. One sees how his basic personality never really changes, and the clues to his future are all there from the start. I am very drawn to diaries, and have several boxes of diaries myself, going back to age 12. I like to think about the way we choose to narrate our stories, and the relationship between those stories and fiction - the way events are recreated and redefined the minute you find words for them and of course the endless ways in which a single event can be recorded.

Having a deaf character posed technical challenges; Sonya uses Sign, which is visual. But I discovered that people who lose their hearing when they are older continue to think in spoken language as well as Sign. I’ve always been interested in Sign, and I was glad to learn more about it; for example, I had no idea that there were so many signing systems a different one for every country.

As I wrote, I began to sniff an allegorical undercurrent. I made every effort not to think about it, because thinking that way is anathema to writing, in my experience. Writing for me has to be almost entirely intuitive; when I decide a word or passage or plot element isn’t right, it’s because it feels wrong. But I have academic training, and I’m an analytic reader, so that side of me is also quite active. I simply push it away. I was half-way through the novel before I noticed that Sonya’s name has allegorical resonance.

When I finished writing the novel, an Israeli read the MS and told me that Sonya is an old-fashioned name, and that in 1973, when Sonya was born, that name would not be an obvious choice. So I had the nurse at the hospital write Tziyona on the birth certificate. My main characters almost always come to me with names, though I do use a name book for minor characters. Noah just came with his name, as did Kostya. It never ceases to amaze me how much coherence emerges from the unconscious mind.

In Ten Thousand Lovers, there is an episode in which a nurse influences the choice of a baby name; this would not be unusual in Israel. I was almost called Ada instead of Edeet, but the kibbutz had already made a poster that said, Welcome Edeet, and when my mother changed her mind, on the day I was born, she was told the poster was already up and it would be a pity to have to redo it.

Eli is not based on anyone I’ve known, though I suppose the campus womanizer is a familiar figure in universities everywhere. I think the way I present certain aspects of Israeli culture may strike readers who are not familiar with that culture as unrealistic. A reviewer of Ten Thousand Lovers thought it was strange that the characters moved so easily from politics to personal topics, but that is typical of Israeli discourse. Directness, informality, easy conversation about subjects which might be considered taboo in other cultures, openness about sex, the acceptance of eccentricity, the personalization of politics - all these are quite characteristic. Within minutes, a taxi driver in Israel will start describing his hernia operation, his son’s drug rehabilitation, his despair over the conflict. No two people are alike, of course, but there are cultural tendencies.

For all three books in the trilogy, I gave my completed drafts to Israelis to read, including at least one army person, so they could find any mistakes I might have made, or offer suggestions.  I made sure to give the MS to people with opposing political views, as I wanted to hear all comments, from all sides. Everyone who read the MS had important contributions to make, and helped with accuracy of details and credibility.

How are the three books of the trilogy connected, and how do they differ from one another?

I had not set out to write a trilogy, but half-way through Ten Thousand Lovers I realized that it would take three novels for me to release all the feelings about Israel which I had stored inside me. I saw the novels as interconnected by theme, structure and setting, as well as through the minor characters.

Writing the first novel, Ten Thousand Lovers, was an extremely emotional experience. I cried often, and I postponed writing the ending because I knew how hard it would be for me. I was looking at very painful issues in that novel. The tragedies of war, the madness of the conflict, the cruelties of torture. I was also looking back at the early days of the Occupation and at Lily’s past. In Ten Thousand Lovers I focussed on language and meaning. The novel was influenced by midrash, which is a form of free textual interpretation, where layers of meaning are unravelled through association and imagination. I love Hebrew, its etymology and development, and I wanted to write about language because the way we use words is so closely tied to the way we understand and create our reality.

The original title of Ten Thousand Lovers was The Things We Do, and that is what the novel is about: the things we do with our bodies, for example: how the same body, the same few limbs and organs, can perform acts of love as well as acts that cause unbearable pain. The image at the end of the novel, the body of the child on the altar, is an image of purity and potential - of the choices we make, to bring down the sword or to let the child live. The first Israeli who used that image, in a sculpture, to condemn war created an uproar, and the sculpture was banished to the museum’s basement. Today there is more acceptance of the view that fighting is not the only alternative, and that sending our beloved sons and daughters to be killed in war is not always as necessary as our leaders would have us believe.

Though I did a lot of research for Ten Thousand Lovers, it was small-time compared to what I had to do in order to write Look For Me. Research for that novel quickly merged with peace activism. Was I terrified the first time I boarded a bus to go into the Occupied Territories to see new outposts [unauthorized Jewish settlement]? Yes. It was the height of the second intafada; and I was entering a war zone. But the fear passed as I became involved and committed to working towards peace. It is uplifting to see Israelis and Palestinians meeting, seeing eye to eye, wanting the same things. It is also important to see the Palestinians as they are, and not in the distorted way the media often portrays them. Palestinian society is diverse and complex, as is Israeli or any other society. This seems obvious, but it needs to be said, because we always carry misconceptions about cultures we aren’t familiar with - which is why communication and interaction are so crucial.

Dana in Look for Me is more practical than Lily in Ten Thousand Lovers, I think. She has a romantic streak but she is also quite down-to-earth; and this dichotomy is reflected in her profession: she writes formulaic romance novels.  Lily is a linguist; Dana is a photographer. In some ways Ten Thousand Lovers is about what we say (and don’t say), and Look For Me is about what we see (and don’t see).

I wrote these novels because they urged themselves upon me. The writing was personal, solitary. I was alone with my stories, and I tried to tell them as well as I could. If they now speak to others, and do some good, I am grateful.