This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 5, 2012 - One of the best stories in Nathan Englander’s latest impressive collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” is about an author on a book tour who goes from place to place only to find just one person in the audience each time – the same person, who demands that the reading continue as scheduled despite his sole presence.
Englander is not likely to find himself in the same lonely position when he appears at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival’s “BIG Jewish Community READ” event on Nov. 12. The stories have won praise from fellow authors like Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers, whose blurb says:
“The depth of Englander’s feeling is the thing that separates him from just about everyone. You can hear his heart thumping feverishly on every page.”
He told the Beacon that he has been on the road talking about the book since February and he learns a lot about the stories and himself from the people who read them.
“It’s been a really positive experience,” he said. “My experience of the work is very different. I composed the stories. I almost feel like aesthetically, the reader needs to be right. What I learn, I understand in a much larger, broader way.”
In addition to short stories that have appeared in “The New Yorker,” “The Atlantic” and several anthologies, Englander has written a novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases.” His play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” is based on a story from an earlier collection that he said in a way provided an earlier bookend to his later story “The Reader.”
“It is set in a Stalin prison in 1952,” he said. “I feel, all these years later, that like ‘The Reader,’ it is about the choice to write and dream of being a writer. It is about me thinking what it is to lead a writer’s life. One really needs to think about what matters and what is important, and I wanted to explore that idea in a changing book market.”
The unnamed author in “The Reader” says he writes “to touch people in the way that I, as a reader, have been touched.” Englander said his philosophy is similar.
“If you spend your life writing stories,” he said, “and one person truly receives it and understands, aren’t you already a rich man? When you find the people who say I was an unhappy child, and then I discovered books? It’s like clockwork. Books can cure cancer and grow your hair back and change your life in a hundred ways.”
In addition to his new story collection and his play, Englander also collaborated with Foer on a new translation of the Haggadah, the book used by Jews to celebrate the Passover holiday. For someone who grew up in an Orthodox household but now describes himself as a “God-fearing atheist,” the experience was “unbelievably enriching,” he said.
He spoke with the Beacon by phone. The interview is condensed and edited for clarity.
Beacon: So many of your stories have Jewish protagonists and Jewish themes. Do you identify yourself as a Jewish writer?
Englander: I am really careful about that. It’s the opposite of write what you know. This book, more than other things I’ve written, has taken a half step back, and the themes are closer to my life. The Jewish theme is not my subject at all.
I struggle with my religiosity. I feel like I’m not going to leave it all to the born-again folks. I wouldn’t characterize it as turning away. It was not that for me. I think we would live in an unbelievably flat boring world if we only had a religious mother and a religious father who had religious children, or a heterosexual mother and a heterosexual father who had only heterosexual children. That lifestyle was not for me.
It scares me that what we shoot for is tolerance. I don’t want someone to tolerate me. I don’t think I am anything to be frightened of. I respect my family and respect their choices and when I am with them I am happy to live by their rules. It has been a comfortable balance for me, and a radical change for my life.
I’ve thought about this for years and years and years and years. It may frustrate many folks who say I don’t identify as a Jewish writer. My point is that I now understand it and explain it. I grew up in an Orthodox world, but I broke out of that world. It’s a complete universe, not a subject matter. I spent a decade writing a book about Argentina, and nobody calls me an Argentine writer for that. It’s all about me being a Jewish writer because my main character is Jewish.
Why shouldn’t my characters be Jewish? That is what people are to me. That is my standard way of being. It’s not a choice of subject, it’s just my normal world. I see my stories as part of normal things – marriages falling apart, war stories. That just happens to be my state of being.
Toni Morrison and Philip Roth are probably the most legendary American writers now. But Toni Morrison still needs to be called an African-American writer, and Philip Roth still needs to be called a Jewish-American writer. It’s interesting they still need to be hyphenated. At what point do they just get to be an American writer? People don’t refer to John Updike as a Christian-American writer. You have to have cultural themes, but I don’t qualify the work. Maybe I’m resistant to it because it’s limiting. Jewish readers will come up to me and say, ‘Can I give this to my Christian friends? Will they understand it?’
Beacon: The title story of the collection echoes the title of one of the most widely read American short stories, Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” How does that connection work with your story?
Englander: As the story unfolded, with two couples in a house talking, I remembered the Carver story, which I hadn’t read in 15 years. I had a memory of the story, a mental image of two couples at a table, with a bottle of gin between them, and the changing light at the end of the day. I couldn’t tell you any more about that story years later except that picture. You can read words that are symbols that make memories. That only happens with stories. It doesn’t happen with movies or with a song. It’s not a fake reality. If the story is functioning, it literally is a reality.
At that moment, I decided to marry my story with the Carver story. The idea of referring to one of the most beloved and legendary stories of the last 30 years in America was terrifying to me, and I was really gratified by readers’ reaction to it. And I had no idea about what one reader pointed out, that the Carver story was based on a Chekhov story. It was really moving to me to discover after the fact that I was part of this tradition.
Beacon: Anne Frank herself has taken on a symbolic significance that has seemed to grow stronger over the years. How did it feel using her as a subject?
Englander: I have talked about the story in Amsterdam and in Austria. It was a very big question, a large moment for me in front of a kindly audience in Amsterdam. I don’t know if I have ever had a more literal title.
I have not read the “Diary of Anne Frank.” We get a very intense Holocaust education; and it’s very heavy and not necessarily in an age-appropriate way. It has been a huge part of my education. But this is the idea: There is a person named Anne Frank, there is the girl Anne Frank who lived and was murdered. Then there was the diary she wrote, and the versions we have of it. Then there is what happens when someone turns into a symbol, and what we are talking about when we talk about Anne Frank.
I don’t think we are talking about the person in that way. At a school in San Francisco, a librarian told me some students don’t understand that she isn’t a character, like Boo Radley.
You have this idea, as years go by, that 6 million Jews were killed, what did it mean? I don’t know if I’m ever writing about the Holocaust. I am writing about how we remember the Holocaust, the legacy of the Holocaust, almost this refractive idea of it. That title story is about how the Holocaust gets used. A character says intermarriage is a second Holocaust. Who owns this idea?
I have unbelievable Holocaust images in my head, obsessed with the crime itself and the moral questions about it that echo across the world. What I know is absorbed from the culture. Who is trying to control or shape how we remember history? If you ask people about the Holocaust, they talk about train tracks and gas chambers. That’s the point. Anne Frank is not in my book. She is not a character in my book. It’s the idea of these symbols. That is how a story lives.
Beacon: Talk about the Haggadah project and being the translator of a timeless story rather than the creator of one.
Englander: It was Jonathan Safran Foer’s idea. A few years ago he came to me. I do not identify myself as a translator. I did not want to translate. I’m not religious anymore, and I was not looking for a project that would have me looking at an ancient text for years on end. But I am really thankful he talked me into it, because it was great.
Working as a translator changed me. Working as a playwright, which I do not identify with, and as a translator, which I do not identify with, forced me to become utterly absorbed in them and learn new rhythm and learn new crafts. Sitting with a text that I grew up with, that I was so familiar with, and I would have time to sit for an afternoon with a word, to sit for a day with a sentence -- it was an unbelievably enriching project for me.
Beacon: Do you like working in varying genres, like novels, stories, plays, translations?
Englander: I am really open to collaborations of all kinds. I really thought that the play and the translation would take away from my fiction time too much. I didn’t know that they would really enrich it. My artistic time has almost become like a fable -- it has increased.
It’s become really simple to me: The writer’s job is to put stories into the world, and different stories can take different forms. Putting out all these different shingles has simplified things for me. Some need to be stories. Some need to be novels. Some need to be plays.