Extra Goodies for Lilith's Summer Issue

In this section, you'll find Lilith's interviews with fiction writers Dara Horn and Jane Lazarre, as well as an additional resource list for that article. Plus, click here to hear an interview with Yael Hedaya, a writer for "B'Tipul," done at the PEN Center.


Lilith Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough interviewed the fiction authors showcased in Lilith's summer issue. Here's what they had to say about their work:

Interview with Dara Horn
LILITH: What drew you to the this material initially?

Dara Horn: I first started thinking about this subject while on a book tour stop in New Orleans in 2002, where I was speaking at their Jewish Community Center. Prior to my talk I was exploring the neighborhood and came across an old Jewish cemetery. I was surprised to see graves there that dated to the early 1800s. When I read more about it, I discovered a wealth of information about Jewish communities during the Civil War in both the North and the South, which made me appreciate the real depth of the Jewish investment in America--in the land itself and more importantly in its values, especially as those values changed. I was drawn to this material because of how polarized America has become in recent years, by how impossible it has become even to have a conversation with anyone about current events without knowing in advance what that person believes. So much of this rift goes back to the Civil War; when we talk about blue states and red states, they often follow the Mason-Dixon line and its legacies. The enduring divide in American life ultimately wasn't about slavery, but rather between two sets of conflicting ideas about America's purpose: between a traditional belief in the ultimate importance of independence, family and property, and a radical belief in pursuing a social ideal at all costs. This same divide also exists in Jewish life. Most of Jewish law focuses on preserving tradition, family ties and property rights, but ethical monotheism itself is a radical concept expressed most vividly in the idealism of the Hebrew prophets. In writing this story of Jewish spies during the Civil War, I found plenty of historical sources. I also discovered a community of people driven by loyalty to their country regardless of which side they lived on, but also driven by a rare empathy for the enemy. Because they were more often running businesses than running farms, Jewish Americans at the time tended to lead more mobile lives than their neighbors, and they were therefore more likely than other Americans to know people on the other side. By creating this story of spy versus spy, I was able to explore the tensions haunting not only them, but us as well?he enduring question of who deserves our devotion and why.

LILITH: Can you describe your working methods? How important a role did research play?

DH: There is an archeology of facts that underlies this book, but the novel's plot is entirely my invention. I tend to research and write at the same time. But "research" makes it sound arduous, which it wasn't. I would read until I found something cool, and then use it. Often the cool things I found were minor--one female Confederate spy could dislocate her jaw at will, for example, which became a plot point in the book--but sometimes they inspired entire characters or relationships in the story. There are a few historical figures whom I incorporated into the book intact. One of these was Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy's Jewish secretary of state and spymaster; I read a lot about his life and was very careful to be as faithful as possible to the contours of his career and personality. In other cases I used real people as a jumping-off point for invention. I was particularly intrigued by one Southern Jewish couple in which the wife, Eugenia Levy Phillips, was a Confederate spy and was imprisoned twice by the Union army, while the husband, Philip Phillips (I couldn't make this up), was a Jewish congressman from Alabama who was a political moderate and opposed the South's secession from the Union. The husband used his political influence to free his wife from prison. It was a fascinating example of how a marriage can transcend a historic moment, and it became the thematic basis for the love story in the book. I named the book's female lead Eugenia Levy, though her character is based on other historical figures as well--and also on my own imagination.

LILITH: Do you begin with the voice or story of a single character and branch out from there? If so, which character called to you first?

DH: I actually started this novel by writing about 50 pages of a book that derailed itself. I don't want to reveal much about that book in case I end up revisiting it someday, but suffice it to say that it took place a generation later, and was about two historical figures who met through their mutual acquaintance with a fictional character named Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish Civil War veteran who had served as a Northern spy by exploiting the family and business connections he had in Southern Jewish communities. Ultimately the back story of this character was much more interesting than the book I thought I was writing, and turned into the novel itself.

LILITH: Have you ever worked in a historical vein before? Would you consider doing so again?

DH: My two previous novels, In the Image and The World to Come, each had both a historical and a contemporary component. So the real question for me is probably whether I could ever write a purely contemporary novel. Maybe I'll try that next time.

LILITH: How is writing a historical novel similar to working on a contemporary story? How is it different?

DH: You are more constricted in writing historical fiction with things like dialogue and the characters' assumptions about each other and the situations in which they find themselves. But those constraints can be a great source for the story. In this period, for instance, the American Jewish community was small enough that family and business ties between Jews in different parts of the country were much tighter than they are now, and made even more so by the assumptions of their non-Jewish neighbors. One Northern Jewish spy, for instance, managed to meet with Judah Benjamin on a secret peace mission authorized by Lincoln. The spy, a podiatrist from Manhattan, had no prior connection to Benjamin other than their both being members of the tribe--but at that time, both Jews and non-Jews believed that was enough. That story, and the assumptions built into it, inspired a major part of the plot of this book. In contemporary stories, there is less to explain, but also a somewhat intimidating amount of freedom to define the terms yourself. Each has its own challenges, but in the end you are always writing about people, their emotions, the choices they make and the consequences of those choices. And the truth is that historical novels are always much more about the time in which they are written than they are about the time in which they ostensibly take place. In the end you are always writing about your own time, whether you acknowledge it or not.



Interview with Jane Lazarre
LILITH: What drew you to the this material initially?

Jane Lazarre: I was drawn to writing a novel that went back into the history of American Slavery and racism by several forces in my life. First, I had been teaching African American autobiographical traditions, from Slavery to the present, for years. I have been deeply affected by this study, by the realities of American Slavery, the details of which are so widely unknown. Secondly - perhaps primarily - I was lead to this study by the life experience of being a white woman married to a black man for many years, raising two black sons, a story and transformation in consciousness I wrote about in my memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness. I wanted to track historical and present dayforms of white blindness and white privilege, as well as the various forms white resistance to racism has taken over the years, while also doing my small part to expose the brutality and inhumanity that was Slavery in the United States. I believe deeply in the creative marriage between fiction and social/political exploration. The line often drawn between "politics and art" is, to me, a false and dangerous one.

LILITH: Can you describe your working methods? How important a role did research play?

JL: I had been doing research long before the idea of the novel came to me, as a teacher and student of the history of race. It was also illuminating to research the town of Norwalk, Connecticut, where my grandmother actually lived and my mother was raised - a city which I learned had been an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Learning about watermen, skipjacks, and the part played by these in the history of the Chesapeake Bay was very important to me as well, in part because I have a close friend who was raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and one who now lives on the Western Shore. I reread many of the texts I had used in my teaching before I wrote parts of the story, while also learning a great deal from novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter, both of which I taught in various literature classes over the years. For the last third of the novel, which takes place in contemporary America, in addition to my own experiences and those of people I know, I used much of what I had learned from the great writer, James Baldwin, who has revealed the deeper psychological layers of American racism in his brilliant essays. But at a certain point, I hope the research is absorbed, and I think only about the story, the characters, and centrally - the language.

LILITH: Do you begin with the voice or story of a single character and branch out from there? If so, which character called to you first?

JL: The first character I was "called to" was Louisa, the young daughter of a slave holder who falls in love with, and bears the child of one of her father's slaves. I read about a young woman like Louisa in text accompanying a special exhibit about American Slavery I saw in The Richmond Museum, called "Before Freedom Came." I write about this exhibit, and the young woman I called Louisa, whose real name was Jane, like mine, in Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness.

LILITH: Have you ever worked in a historical vein before? Would you consider doing so again?

JL: I wrote a novel called The Powers of Charlotte which was located in the present but delved briefly into the history of the American Communist Party. This was a significant part of my own and my parents' history, but it involved some reading and rereading of the stories of the radical movements of the '40s and '50s. Writing Inheritance was the first time I worked on a historical novel involving research into a period long past, although part of this novel also takes place in the approximate present. I found it compelling in many ways and am now in the middle of another novel that counts, in part, on historical research pertaining to the situation of African immigrants in Italy, as well as to the creation of modern Hebrew out of ancient texts as the official language of Israel.

LILITH: How is writing a historical novel similar to working on a contemporary story? How is it different?

JL: For me, the distinction is not so much a historical versus a contemporary story but how, where, how much I use autobiographical material. The relationship between autobiographical exploration and fiction is one that has driven me since I became a working writer in my twenties. I use myself, my history, whatever I discover about my own motivations, to develop more sensitivity to the motivations and feelings of others - people in my life as well as characters I write about. I am interested in layers of motivation, personal and collective, we are often not aware of and can either become aware of or, like Hannah who appears in this excerpt, fall backwards into traps of destructive denial. For me, psychological exploration is always grounded in history. As I say in my memoir, and one of my characters learns in Inheritance - the separation of individual life from historical forces is an illusion of privilege.

LILITH: Is there anything else you would like to add about the conception and writing of this book?

JL: From the beginning, I wanted to write, in part, about the history of "racial mixing" in America. I wanted to convey, through fiction and in a young woman's voice, Samantha Reed who is the central character in the novel in a way, the searches for identity and struggles I have witnessed in my own sons and in the many students I have taught who came from so-called "mixed" marriages. I made each of the three white women who are central to the story of a different background - white Protestant, Jewish and Italian - to emphasize this as a story of American inheritance we all share. I was also driven by knowledge I wanted to share that from the very beginning of the horrific systems of slavery and Jim Crow, there were some whites who, along with black people, saw the evil for what it was and fought against it. The idea that "it was the times and no one can escape their times" is an excuse which erases our proud heritage of resistance.



Additional Feminist Funerals Resources

JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) Journal Summer 2008 / Tammuz 5768 issue devoted to death and mourning

The Orthodox Jewish Woman and Ritual: Options and Opportunities Death & Mourning -- JOFA pamphlet available for download

Jewish Funerals, Burial and Mourning website of Kavod v?ichom and the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington

A Plain Pine Box A Return to Simple Jewish Funerals and Eternal Traditions, Rabbi Arnold M. Goodman. Augmented 2003 edition. (Ktav Publishing House)

The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, Maurice Lamm, 1969. (Jonathan David Publishers, NY)

Tahara manuals:

Park Slope (Brooklyn) Jewish Center Hevra Kadisha Taharah Manual, compiled by Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips. Generally egalitarian translation; includes songs and wordless niggunim to be sung throughout the ritual preparation of the body for burial.

Reconstructionist Tahara Handbook for Women and Men, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD 2005). Gender-free language in English translations with glossary and checklist.