In your story in this week’s issue, “Zusya on the Roof,” you write about Brodman, an old man reflecting on his life and on the burden that Jewish tradition—and his sense of duty to it—have placed on him, a burden that his own daughters shrugged off. Where did Brodman come from?
Brodman had many sources, living, dead, and literary. But what shook all of those sources into a sudden constellation, was, oddly enough, a review of my last novel “Great House,” written by an Israeli psychoanalyst in Haaretz. It was called “Nicole Krauss Protests Against the Duty of Loyalty to Jewish History.” Once I’d staggered out from under the headline, I read the piece. Much of what was written there didn’t ring true to me—what review of one’s work ever does?—but the psychoanalyst had read an interview in which I’d spoken about the burden of emotional inheritance as a theme, and he’d ventured an analysis. It struck me as an interesting one, and I wanted to take it further. My writing has been wrapped up in ambivalence toward the demands and constraints of memory and history since my first novel. But the Haaretz psychoanalyst pointed to something more potent than ambivalence. Protest! Duty! Loyalty! It got me going.
Do you think that the burden is specific to—somehow inherent to—Judaism, or common to all religious traditions?
Orthodoxy of any kind requires conformity, and a certain kind of person will always bridle under its restrictions. But because Judaism had to survive the total dispersion of its people, the task of remembering became uniquely critical to its survival. In the first century, post-exile, Judaism was reshaped by the rabbis, and underwent drastic changes. The integrity of an entire people came to rest on the power of their memory. Zakor, Hebrew for the duty to remember, is at the core of Jewish practice and, I’d argue, the strain of that obligation is central to Jewish psychology.
All that having been said, every one of us is shaped by familial and historical pressures, and we spend much of our lives sorting through the impact that those forces have had on us. In that sense, Brodman’s struggle certainly transcends religion.
In a brief moment of post-illness excitement, Brodman imagines that his grandson will be free of everything that has weighed him down, that the boy will not have to live a life defined by duty to parents or to tradition or to anything else. Do you think those things are ever avoidable?
No, but nor would we want to be entirely free of those sorts of inheritances. And not just for their enriching qualities, either. The best parts of ourselves—the strongest and most original—are usually forged in opposition to the things that are meant to define us. I suppose a lot of my characters have broken their heads on that paradox.
Brodman has been intellectually paralyzed for years, unable to think or write or act, except through rage. What is it about his illness, his temporary “death,” that gives him this sudden forward momentum?
It frees him from himself. In life, the approach of death can rarely be anything but terrifying. But in literature, for a certain kind of character, it can dissolve self-mythology and clear the way for breathtaking frankness. Brodman has nothing left to lose.
In your second novel, “The History of Love,” you wrote about an old Jewish man tormented by thoughts of a son he doesn’t know, whose life he has missed. Are there any parallels for you between Leo Gursky and Brodman?
In their let-it-all-hang-out verbal style, their longings and regrets, their urgency and lack of time left—yes. But Leo doesn’t need to be drugged and feverish to access his great imaginative gifts. He uses them daily to alter both his sense of the past and his experience of everyday life. For him, and the other characters in “The History of Love,” individual will and the imagination are more powerful, finally, than history, and that’s what makes it fundamentally a hopeful novel. In its more sober view of the ongoing reverberations of the past, “Zusya” is probably closer to “Great House.” And, however much I’ve changed since I wrote my first novel, to me, “Zusya” is closely related to “Man Walks Into a Room.” That novel, about an amnesiac, began as a way to experiment with escape from the claustrophobia of memory and the self. Untethered, Samson finds himself in a position of radical solitude, struggling to assemble a new sense of coherence. “Zusya”— in which Brodman bends dutifully to his father’s and Judaism’s demands, thus failing to fully become himself—is the inverse of that story.
You’ve written a number of pieces from the point of view of aging men—two sections in “Great House” are narrated by older men as well. What draws you to that kind of voice?
Clark Kent has Superman, Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce, and I have old Jewish men.
You have two young sons. Do you worry that they will be somehow burdened or limited in life by their own cultural heritage?
The older one recently felt the universe realign when he discovered that George Washington wasn’t Jewish. When he was four, he wept inconsolably for Moses, who could only look down on the Land of Israel from Mount Nebo, but could never enter it. But Hebrew school has since changed all that, chasing off his interest. Now he finds his burdens elsewhere. The younger was born with a well of irreverence that, as far as I can tell, appears to be bottomless.
Illustration by Martin Ansin.
