What’s the Story, Binnie?

By BENJAMIN POLLAK

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a professor of creative writing at Columbia University and the author of five novels and two collections of stories, Married Life and Other True Adventures and History on a Personal Note. Her work, like its author, resists easy classifications. In her novel Hester Among the Ruins, which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award, a young historian confronts the Holocaust’s legacy in the arms of her German lover; while in An Almost Perfect Moment, a Jewish teenager in 1970s Brooklyn discovers that she bears an uncanny resemblance to an image of the Virgin. Throughout, her fiction is characterized by the humane cynicism with which she explores thorny questions of desire and identity, and by an unapologetic sexuality that is as thoughtful as it is seductive.

When I met with Kirshenbaum in her office at Columbia earlier this month, she spoke at length about the state of the Jewish short story, her experiences as a teacher and mentor of young writers, and the expanding readership for ethnic fiction. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

Your story “Who Knows Kaddish” was anthologized in the collection Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. In the commentary that follows the story, you write that Jewish assimilation in America entailed a kind of loss. How do you think this loss has influenced the sorts of stories that Jewish writers of your generation tell? Is there a tension, or is Jewishness altogether absent from their writing?

I don’t think it can ever quite be absent. But it certainly played less of a part, and there are lots of Jewish writers for whom the subject just doesn’t quite come up, or is not really addressed in any way [...] But I don’t think it’s entirely absent because we can never entirely absent ourselves from anything we write. Our fiction is a part of ourselves coming out. I would liken it to having a child. It’s sort of like me, but not really; it’s something else unto itself, but nonetheless my genes are there. So it’s not entirely gone, but I don’t think we mine it the way that, say, Henry Roth, or Bellow, or even Philip Roth, did. My generation didn’t, but then I look at people like Nathan Englander or a former student of mine, Elisa Albert, and they seem to be—I don’t want to say going back, because it’s not—but coming more full-circle, perhaps.

What kind of stories do the students you’re advising and teaching now write when they write about Jewish themes?

For one thing, religion seems to play a greater part in their lives, or did play a greater part in their lives. So there’s not as much of a secular worldview to start out with, and I think they use that; sometimes it’s even just in the details. For example, if I were writing a story or a scene in a book where there was a wedding, I’ve never been to an Orthodox wedding—I mean, I could research it, but it wouldn’t be my inclination. If I had characters getting married, they’d have a civil ceremony or something like that, but this generation, either because they were raised more religiously or because they know more, might be more inclined to make the wedding Orthodox. So sometimes it’s just in those sorts of details. The overall worldview might be a Jewish worldview—of being alienated, of never quite fitting in, the sense of wandering, being the outsider—those things remain constant, but it’s the details that have changed.

Do you think that your students set out to write Jewish stories, or do they write stories about experiences that just happen to be Jewish?

I think it’s both. We all write from a certain kind of experience—even though fiction isn’t memoir—from what we observe, from what we know. But at the same time, I think that when this wave of new immigrant literature came in, it was a reclaiming to say, “Oh, wait, we’re also hyphenated!” There was this rush for ethnic identity or cultural identity that in a sense became popular.

And, actually, since I wrote [“Who Knows Kaddish”], in the few intervening years, I’ve rethought the way I feel about a lot of these things. I fear that hyphenated literature, although there’s much to be said for it, has also had a negative effect on reading in general, and I feel that literature has, in a way that it never has before, become ghettoized. [...]

When I would do talks or readings [for Jewish audiences], I would find that they read nothing except Jewish books, or books by Jewish authors. There was no interest in reading other things. And when I would talk about why that was, the answer always was that they liked to identify. Over time, what I began to realize was that when I was starting out as a reader and as a student, the word “identify” had a whole different meaning, and it meant that I could put myself into this person’s place and try to understand the world as they saw it; so I could read Macbeth and figure out what it felt like to have that kind of raw ambition, even though I might not, and that’s what identification meant. Now identification means we eat the same kind of food, my parents said what your parents said, I recognize my life in this life—in the details of this life, not in the overarching human condition. And I fear—and I know that this is a terribly unpopular thing to say—that we’re limiting ourselves as readers when we do this, terribly. We’ve shut off so many other things that are out there, because they’re not ours, and we want to read ours.

It seems as though it’s pleasing to our audiences to do this, somehow, and we want to please our audiences, so we do it. Whether it’s young Jewish writers, or young Hispanic writers, or young Asian writers, we’re all sort of recognizing this. It’s a tag that the publisher can put on the book, and it makes for an immediate target audience, and then we feel embraced. But I’m not sure that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

When Philip Roth was first writing, he was reviled by the Jewish community, he was an embarrassment, and now he’s the Lord’s second coming, practically. Partly because we’ve become a more relaxed culture, and we can handle perhaps more than we used to be able to, now [we’re celebrated] when we expose our own in that way. There’s no longer that sense that we’ve humiliated our people. Rather, we’re including them in the conversation, and I think the individual communities are happy with this.

Are there any other new ways that stories are being packaged or presented to the public that weren’t going on ten years ago and that are changing the readership?

I think that’s the greatest change, this isolation. There are some wonderful things, too; websites are terrific. [...] And there seems to be a renaissance of literary magazines, and, even though there’s lots of work that I don’t like particularly, there’s a lot more experimentation than there was maybe fifteen years ago. There are those pockets that are happening, too. So the ghettoizing of it—which is probably not a good way to phrase it, but is a word that always comes to mind—is not the only thing that’s happening, and there are certainly good things. The fact that young people are writing, the fact that story collections are being published, no matter what kind of story collections they are, is pretty spectacular; and that anybody is reading them is pretty spectacular. Don’t misunderstand—I’m not denigrating [hyphenated literature]. I just worry that we’re not reaching beyond it, or getting outside of it.

Are the stories that your students are writing now different from the stories that you and your classmates were writing when you were in school?

No, I think fundamentally not. One of the things that’s so wonderful about literature is that it’s fundamentally all the same; just the telling is different, and the trappings are different.

In what ways is it the same?

There are a handful of literary themes and we keep coming back to them [...] We’re all essentially retelling—whether it’s the Greek myths or the Bible—we’re telling those stories again and again and again. What’s changed is the world that they’re in and some of the social mores or details. But stripped away, they’re all the same thing: sibling rivalry, or man against God, and death. We just keep coming back to what works. So if I strip away things like meta-fiction or technique or the fact that the internet will play such a huge part in people’s work, or that women can be sexually promiscuous and people don’t die over it—if we can allow for all those kinds of changes, the fundamental stories are the same.