The Koret Diaries
By RACHEL KADISH
Rachel Kadish, winner
of the 2004 Koret Young Writer on Jewish
Themes Award, has just moved from Boston to Palo Alto,
California. Kadish has offered to post diary entries of her Koret-funded tenure
on the West Coast. Watch this space for future entries.
Yesterday I biked onto campus past fountains and palm trees, under a
cloudless sky. Entering the library, I commented to someone that it was a glorious
day. The response was a tolerant smile. I suppose when every day is perfect, it
is kind of dumb to mention it. I
couldn’t care less. This place is paradise—Disney World for academics. It ought
to be appreciated.
The thing that most astonishes me about this quarter at Stanford is that the
Koret Foundation truly wants me to concentrate on my writing. There’s no other
agenda, no requirement to teach. When we were planning for my arrival,
Stephanie Singer at the Koret Foundation actually asked me to describe my ideal
writing residency. (Nobody ever asked
me this before.) So I went ahead and described the plan that I knew would be
most productive. While I love teaching, I do enough of it already—I’m currently
teaching long-distance for Lesley’s MFA program. And I’ve got a toddler. So I
said I’d rather not teach if I didn’t need to. I said I wanted to give readings
in the community, have time to work on my own projects (including a novel I’m
currently revising) and—if possible—sit in on some Jewish Studies classes. I
write so much about Jewish themes… yet I’m relying heavily on my childhood
Jewish education—Solomon Schechter from ages 5 to 12. It’s time I did some new
learning.
When I write, I like to alternate between several projects, working on whichever
feels most alive—beginning the research for a future project while finishing up
another one. Right now I’m editing my new novel, which is titled Love [sic] and is sort of an existential
romantic comedy. Love [sic] is a book
about love, and how a thinking (and thinking, and re-thinking) woman finds it
and metabolizes it and struggles with it and nearly loses it and learns how
much work happiness really takes. The narrator is an American Literature
professor. She’s Jewish, but her Jewish roots are utterly atrophied (in
childhood she was puzzled by her superstitious grandmother’s repeated
invocation of the name of an Irishman, “Ken O’Hara”; only as an adult does she
retrospectively decipher her grandmother’s bulwark against the evil eye—keyn ayin ha-roh.
As I prepared for this latest revision of the novel, I realized I needed to get
better acquainted with my narrator’s chosen specialty. So I made myself read
through the Norton Anthology of American Literature—five volumes, each with
over 1,000 small-print pages. I did skim and skip a fair bit, but I also read
an enormous amount, and it was delightful. (Along the way I also got a
refresher course in some fun literary trivia: Did you know that Christopher
Columbus eventually went mad? That some Thomas Paine admirer exhumed his bones
years ago in order to re-bury him in England… but the project ran out of steam
and now no one knows where poor Paine’s bones are? That H.D. and Ezra Pound
were once engaged? That Lew Welch, American beatnik poet who had a day job in advertising,
wrote the most famous four words by an American poet: “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”?)
While I revise Love [sic], there’s
another project I’m starting to research—just the first inklings of what might
eventually become another novel.
When I start a book, I don’t have any idea where it’s going. All I have is a
set of feelings about a couple characters, a few images, and maybe a few
phrases. (For me, that mystery is part of the fun, part of what drives me to
write and keeps the story honest—I write to find out who these characters are,
what they think and do, what happens to them.) I know that the piece I want to
write is historical. Set, in fact, in a Jewish community in Medieval or
Renaissance Europe. (Why am I so focused on such a distant period of history?
This past year the political situation and all the attendant fears about
terrorism, world events, etc., prompted me to speculate about other times in
which people felt powerless and the world seemed to close like a trap.)
Conceiving a project set so far back in history makes me quite nervous, because
of the prodigious amount of research and thinking I’ll need to do before I can
write even one line. But that’s the time period I’m drawn to right now. Lots of
projects never get off the ground, so who knows whether this one will. But I
keep daydreaming about three particular characters and keep pricking up my ears
at certain subjects, so I’m going to pursue this one for a bit and see where it
goes.
I’m sitting in on two classes relevant to this future project. One class is on
Renaissance Jewish history, the other on medieval notions of poverty and
charity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s odd and delightful to be
sitting on the student side of the classroom again, thirteen years after my own
college graduation. My approach, of course, is a bit different from my fellow
students’. An example: at the first meeting of one of my classes this week, the
professor was discussing the medieval practice of giving charity for the
redemption of captives. Apparently it used to be commonplace—and in fact an
accepted part of the local economy—for bandits to take travelers captive. The
captives were not harmed, but were ransomed. Back at the captives’ home-town
church, there would be a collection pot where the rich would donate money for
ransom—thus guaranteeing themselves a place in heaven through good works. The
relatives of a captive would hire someone—often a friar—to go negotiate for the
prisoner’s release.
It’s my fellow students’ job to understand the religious, historical, political
and economic dynamics at work in that whole situation…and I’m interested in
those aspects too. But my job as a fiction writer is also to think about that
collection pot—what was it made of? What sound did money make when it was
dropped in? And the man who dropped the money, what was he wearing? And how did
he speak? And what did he and his family eat for breakfast, dream about, yearn
for?
It’s going to be an interesting couple of months. Love [sic] is due out from Houghton Mifflin next year, and I need
to finish the revision this autumn. So as soon as I can get over admiring the
palm trees I’m going to need to kick things into gear. I have a key to a sunlit
carrel in Green Library, plenty of support from the Jewish Studies and Creative
Writing folks here, and a chance to speculate about coins clinking into clay
pots in Medieval Italian churches. I feel blessed to be here.