Six Degrees of Joan Leegant

By KEN GORDON

Want to know where best-selling novelist Tova Mirvis writes? Simply take the Green Line to the Newton Centre Starbucks, smack dab in true-blue suburban Massachusetts. I know this because we met there this past February. Mirvis wore a purple turtleneck sweater and black jeans and sat in the rounded banquette of the coffee shop. “I write here,” she said, and I realized that we were ensconced in the very place of Creation, though she sometimes schleps her laptop to the Newton Free Library or Hebrew College. Holy, as they say, moly!

Once upon a time, Mirvis’ Starbucks was over, way over, on 102^nd Street in Manhattan, where she would habitually run into other writers such as Joshua Halberstam, author of Schmoozing: The Private Conversations of American Jews. Mirvis lived for 13 years on the Upper West Side with her husband, a lawyer named Allan Galper. Then, after learning how difficult it is to raise two children in New York, the family wandered over to Beantown in July of 2004. (Her husband’s a native who grew up in Brookline and attended Maimonides School.) Turns out, she’s merely the latest Jewish fiction writer in this neck of the woods.

Boston ain't Manhattan, but it’s considerably more Jewish than you might imagine. As Anita Diamant, the Newton-based author of The Red Tent fame, recently wrote: “I would argue that Boston is the contemporary incarnation of Yavneh, which became the center of the Jewish universe after the destruction of Jerusalem two thousand years ago.”

Well, perhaps. But one could make an excellent case that this area houses the nation’s highest per-capita population of quality fiction writers who are both Jewish and female. Glance at a local literary map and you’ll notice flags marked Tova Mirvis (Newton Centre), Allegra Goodman (Cambridge), Rachel Kadish (Newtonville), Naama Goldstein (Allston), Risa Miller (Brookline), and Joan Leegant (Newton Highlands), poking out of it. Not too shabby, as literary critic Adam Sandler might say.

Why did they all congregate at the Hub? For schools and spouses, mostly. “We moved here 10 years ago when my husband got a job teaching computer science at MIT,” says Paradise Park author Allegra Goodman. Naama Goldstein, who recently published a collection of stories, The Place will Comfort You, came here in 1996 for graduate school, and then met her man. For Risa Miller, it was also a matter of religion; during her junior year of college, she and her future husband encountered the Bostoner Rebbe, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz. By graduation the couple had commenced living la vida Orthodox. “Choosing to attend graduate school—for my husband, law school—in Boston meant a final commitment to this major lifestyle change,” she says.

There is, among this group of writers, some socialization. It’s a game of Six Degrees of Joan Leegant. Miller, for instance, met Leegant long ago, while attending a fiction workshop at the Radcliffe Seminars, only to resume the friendship after Miller’s Welcome to Heavenly Heights was published in 2003. Goldstein and Leegant were pals at a low-residency writing program at Vermont College.

As for Rachel Kadish, on Yom Kippur of 2002, Leegant used Kadish’s story, “The Argument" as a drash, or talk,for her Minyan in Newton Centre. “I gave the talk before about 250 people—Minyan members I'd known for years plus guests and a few walk-ins—and afterward, a young man introduced himself to me as Rachel's brother.” Later that day, Kadish, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time and had a cold, arrived for the final stretch of services. “As I walked into the very crowded room, there was a bit of a rustle,” she says. “Strangers were looking at me and whispering. Attributing the stares to the fact that I was extremely pregnant, I waddled my way rather self-consciously to a seat beside my husband.” Friends soon told her about Leegant’s speech. The pair now meets for coffee, when they can.

Allegra Goodman reports that she once saw Leegant at a Bat Mitzvah, but adds: “Due to a tight schedule and four kids, I never get to see enough of the other writers.”

Kids are, in fact, what brought Mirvis and Leegant together. Before escaping from New York, Mirvis posted a message on Leegant’s Minyan list-serve asking for the names of local babysitters. Leegant quickly discerned that this was the author of The Outside World. “I had no babysitter names to offer,” she says, “but we had coffee.”

Now, you may have noticed that these women down a lot of joe when they get together. Leegant has a nice, freshly brewed theory here. “The coffee part may sound particularly Jewish—how do you hold a Jewish gathering without food?—but, really, it's because we have to keep ourselves charged up with caffeine,” she says. “How else are we going to take care of the shopping, the cooking, the laundry, the babies, the carpooling, the day job, the teaching—and still manage to write books?”