Drinks With Naama

By BEZALEL STERN

Naama Goldstein, whose first book, The Place Will Comfort You, comes out in May, has only the faintest trace of an accent.  Although her speech is fluent, Goldstein’s mannerisms, her slow and deliberate style of conversation, all hint at an expatriate background.  An Israeli-American who moved to Israel in 1973, when she was three years old, and back to the U.S. in 1986, Goldstein's flawless English still carries with it small remnants of a foreign culture.

Although Goldstein is certainly at home in her environment – she now lives in Allston, Massachusetts, an urban suburb of Boston, where I met her recently at a small, intimate bar – something about her doesn’t quite belong.  “I can’t stay in any place for too long,” she confided to me. As an American with the habits of an Israeli, who “can’t stand American Humus” but appreciates the singular nature of American life, something about the consumer culture of the United States seems to both attract and repel her.

The Place Will Comfort You, a collection of short stories situated in both America and Israel, is filled with semi-alienated characters, many of whom seem suspiciously similar to Goldstein.  “Every pivotal event in my stories is inspired by an actual encounter,” Naama told me.  Her characters, which can, she admits, really be seen as one ultimate protagonist, progressing and maturing from grade school to womanhood, first deal with being an American in Israel, then grapple with being an Israeli, or at least a foreigner, in America.

Goldstein has had to personally contend with the same issues.  Her family, “for a multitude of reasons, too numerous to explain in one sitting” decided to return to America when she was a senior in high school.  Leaving Israel was not easy.  “I was incredibly ambivalent about leaving.  For years, there was this notion of a sweeter existence that was possible in America.  There was such a buildup.”  At the same time, leaving Israel was incredibly hard.  “I love the place, to put it simply.  The culture of Israel is heavily Arab, Middle Eastern.  Many of the values there are on the decline here.  There you have a hospitable group culture.  Collectivism, in Israel, is more than a political phenomenon.”

Being at home, or not at home, on two continents, in what was and still continue to be two radically different societies, did much to affect Goldstein’s image of what it was to be an insider and an outsider.  “The split perspective makes you substantiate the natural urge to question the status quo.  I was less inclined to join the popular movements because they were simply popular.  Something about the geographical switch allows you to look at things as an outsider.”

After her family left Israel, Goldstein “touched down” in Silver Spring, Maryland, a largely modern Orthodox suburb of Washington, D.C.  Six months later, she started college at Stern.  Although she comes from an Orthodox family, she was no longer Orthodox at the time, and was “very unhappy” at Stern, a predominantly Orthodox university.  She soon left, transferring to Washington University in St. Louis.  She eventually received an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Vermont College.

As a chronicler of the Israeli experience, Goldstein accomplishes what is in many ways a new perspective on the Jewish state. However, in her fiction at least, she never comes across as overtly political:  “I write about the problems.  I don’t write the answers to the problems, because I don’t have the answers.  I wish I did.”  She sees the challenge of being an Israeli today as first and foremost “staying alive, trying to begin to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians.  Then, of course, solving the social issues” that plague Israeli society. 

Goldstein is “usually reading something – I’m a slow reader.  Painfully slow.  It’s hard for me to focus.  Right now I’m reading Panther in the Basement, a Hebrew book by Amos Oz.  My favorite authors are Alice Monroe, Philip Roth – especially My Life as a Man – and Kafka.”  The author that may mean the most to her though is, surprisingly, the American novelist Stephen King.  “I started reading King when I was still in Israel, and he was truly my first window in to American society.  There are two elements in his fiction that are really sharp in my mind.  The horror, and the fact that his characters talk about products so much.  From King I learned the American’s emotional attachment to products.  It’s an American ideology, what gives people comfort.  In Israel, we had Icons, not products.  Heroism, love of the land, people in love with their country.  Here, you have breakfast cereals, gas stations.”  Goldstein’s eyes glisten and her mouth contracts slightly as she speaks of the two societies disparities, and it is hard to tell whether she is wistful.

It soon becomes clear, though, that the America she came back to is not the Sesame Street existence she remembered from childhood.  “Back to the horror – King really represents a crisis of alienation – the out-of-control alienation [in King] seems self-punishing.  Americans have a problem, they are too alone, out of touch with one another.”  She adds that, “I found it hard to live in the suburbs.  Everything in the suburbs has its own place.  You go here for this, there for that.  In Israel, everything is on top of each other.  There’s more vitality.”

Although she “writes pretty much every day,” Goldstein has “no real formula for writing.”  Advice for potential authors?  “Concentrate on figuring out exactly what it is you want to say, and how you want to say it.  Don’t pay too much attention to those who say they know how it’s done.  Pay just a little.  Writing is full of pleasure and suffering. Put up with the pain and it will pass.”

In her Israeli stories, which comprise the bulk of her book, it is always the American – the foreigner – who sees the humanity of the Arab.  The ‘sabras’ – second or third generation Israelis – on the other hand, generally see the Arab as a violent and potentially malignant other.  I questioned Goldstein as to whether she is saying that it takes one outsider to uncover the human nature of the other – that to be in the midst of the culture and the society is to be blind to its weaknesses.  “I hadn’t noticed that before,” she answered, “but you’re probably right.”