“Rosendale,” your story in this week’s issue, is something of a follow-up to your first story that appeared in the magazine, “Another Life.” It uses the secondary character from that story as the protagonist of this one. What made you want to keep writing about April P?
When I wrote “Another Life,” it’s true that April P began as a secondary character. But by the time that story was finished I thought of her as the main character, in an inside-out kind of way: she is the one who tells the story, which she has framed as being almost completely from another character’s point of view, but which is still using her language, her way of seeing the world. I began “Rosendale” immediately after I finished “Another Life,” and it felt natural for April P to keep writing, and to see where she would go next.
The story has a neat trick to it, I thought: you’re constantly subtly shifting the perspective so that we see the events alternately through April P’s eyes and then from a step back, in a more classically objective manner. That seems like a very hard thing to pull off—what’s the appeal of that narrative perspective, and how do you know if you’re pulling it off?
This question has an answer that is clear in my mind, but which may not make sense to anyone else. The way I understand “Rosendale” is that it is April P’s story: she’s writing the whole thing, including the embedded, italicized story at the end, at some later date, as a way of processing or transforming an experience she had—possibly an experience she had a long time ago, in her youth. She is, in effect, writing about herself writing a story; or, rather, she’s writing about herself trying to write a memoir, and failing, and then writing a story from the point of view of a golem.
There’s a kind of hall-of-mirrors quality to this perspective, I guess, but to me the whole thing feels pretty solid. April P invents a story about herself in which she encounters this golem and has to come to terms with it. As for pulling it off or not pulling it off, all I can say is that I tried to think about how April would tell the story, with some sympathy but also some detachment, the way a person might think about her younger self.
Dara, April P’s host, creates a golem out of clay at the ceramics center where she works, but the golem ends up having more interest in April P. What made you want to tweak the historical mythology of golems, and how does this golem differ from the golems of Jewish folklore?
First of all, I have to admit that I’m a very bad student of Jewish tradition, a very ignorant student. My wife’s grandfather and uncle are both rabbis, which helps me out to some extent, but really I’m still very ignorant. That said, it’s my understanding that there isn’t a consensus in Jewish folklore about exactly what a golem is supposed to be, or do. Even in the story about the golem created by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel to protect the Prague ghetto, there are different versions of what happens: in one version, the golem runs amok because Rabbi Loew forgets to deactivate him on the Sabbath; in another version, the golem falls in love, and in yet another version the golem goes mad and runs away. So already there’s a question about whether the golem has volition, or whether it’s a body without a soul, a kind of automaton.
For me, what’s most important about the golem in “Rosendale” is that April P doesn’t know whom it serves. At first, she imagines that the golem is a vessel for Dara’s will, or maybe Dara’s desire to spy on her, and she reacts with fear and revulsion. But at the end of the story she considers another possibility—that the golem exists to serve April P herself. In fact, April P may have animated the golem with her fear and self-consciousness; at the end of the story, she realizes that it could be a vessel for a different emotion, namely, her anger. And in a way, that’s what “Rosendale” is about: it’s April P getting to the place where she is able to command the golem, rather than being afraid of it.
You could call this a psychological, self-help-type tweak on the idea of the golem; but I suspect that the golem has always had this aspect of being a shunned part of the self, a creation that gets out of the creator’s control. From a metafictional point of view, the golem is also a figure for the story, this strange creation that, if everything goes well, eventually takes on a life of its own—Michael Chabon has much to say about this aspect of the golem in the afterword to his essay “Golems I Have Known,” in “Maps and Legends.” And surely the golem, my golem, any golem, is doing other work as well. One of the things I love best about the Jewish tradition, to the extent that I understand it, is that you very rarely have only one story about why something exists, or why it is the way it is. So the golem, like many other things, can be a subject of discussion.
April P earnestly keeps a journal; in fact, she wants to eventually turn it into a memoir, on the advice of a writing teacher she had. What’s your view on the belief in popular culture that writing can be used as a kind of therapy? Is that its most important use?
This seems like one of those questions that wants to be answered a particular way—what would you think if I said, yes, absolutely, therapy is the most important use of writing? In truth, I don’t know what the most important use of writing is, or even how that could be measured; but, as you have detected, I do poke a little fun at the idea that writing down an accurate, factual account of one’s life is a path to self-salvation. Even confession needs some transformation to make it work, I believe—you save yourself not by repeating the facts but by playing with them, by introducing the imaginary into the actual wherever it is needed, so that your writing expresses not only an outer truth but what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m going to have to call an inner truth. This is one of the things I wanted April P to figure out, as the story went on.
