I haven't checked the weather, but I know it is a perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Cheryl stone. Thanks for joining me here at nice Jewish books
Hi, David. It's so great to see you! David Liss is the multi genre author of several works of historical fiction, including the Coffee Traders, one of my favorite books, and the Benjamin Weaver series, a young adult series, science fiction series, the Randoms, a fantasy work, the 12th enchantment. His latest work the Peculiarities incorporates elements of all of them. Historical Fiction, Fantasy, sci fi, with a dash of noir thrown in. So do you have a category for your latest work?
No, I think I, if I have to call it something, I call it historical fantasy. But you know, it does ... as you say, it touches on a lot of other genres. It could be thought of as a thriller, or mystery or horror. So it plays a lot of different literary genres and tropes.
So would you like to set up the story?
Sure.The premise is a little bit hard for me to set up the novel without also talking a little bit about how I came up with the concept of the novel. Because what I wanted to do is, I've always been interested in historical magic, by which I mean magic, as it was actually practiced by real people who really lived and who really believed that what they were doing was in some way efficacious that they were through magic, they were having an impact on the world around them. And in particular, I've always been interested in the late Victorian revival of magic, and specifically in the Golden Dawn, which was a real order of magicians. And so I started out by wanting to write a novel about the Golden Dawn. And I start to think, wouldn't it be interesting if Golden Dawn magic as they practiced, it actually worked. And that created a kind of intellectual problem for me, which is that they weren't doing anything new. All they really did was systematize ideas about magic that had been around literally for millennia. So why would it suddenly start working in the 1890s if it had never really worked before?
So that's what the premise of the novel The Peculiarities come from ... the Peculiarities is this shift that's happening in the world, beginning around 10 years before the novel starts, which is an 1899, where magic actually seems to start working, and is much more effective and noticeable than before. And the world is literally changing around people, much as it had a century before with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that our main character is the son of a banking family guy named Thomas Thresher, who's kind of a lazy layabout. He's been raised to be that way. And when his father dies, he is forced to become a clerk in the Family Bank. And he around the same time two things happen to get the story rolling. One is that he discovers that his family bank has been buying up and hoarding debts from from practicing magicians, including an old friend of his and he wants to know why. And the other is that he is he has begun the slow process of turning into a tree. He is starting to grow leaves on his body. And he's certainly unusual in this regard, but not unique. He knows this is something that happens to other people. And over the course of years, he will eventually become an actual physical rooted in the ground tree. And so part of his interest in magic is personal. This old friend of his and part of it is another kind of personal he wants to see if he can use a knowledge of magic to prevent this metamorphosis that he's undergoing. Kind of a long set.
Well, you left out one detail
There's a lot going on. Please help me out
His older brother who's in charge of the bank after the death of their father is insisting that he marry this Jewish woman that the family is not Jewish in order to save the bank.
Correct.
He refuses to explain why this particular woman or how this will save the bank. He offers no words of explanation. And you've been criticized for anti semitism and we're gonna talk about that in a minute, but I just want to stick to the story. So he met this woman Esther, and they realize that they share one major thing in common and that is that they do not want to marry each other. She's as much in the dark about it as he is. Her father is insisting on it again, with no explanation or anything. And so they form a partnership in trying to figure out why their families insisting on this marriage and how that ties in with the bank, and then eventually figuring out it's tying in with all the magical stuff going on. So I actually loved that relationship, because it started with him being you know, I don't want to get married, let alone to a Jewish woman. But as they got to actually know each other, they really developed a strong bond, you know, and got to know each other as individuals, which I think is sort of a key thing in dealing with any ism, whether it's anti semitism, or racism or, or any of those. But I do want to mention that you were criticized for including that there was an anti semitic attitude at the time in England, which you responded to respond to, to very beautifully on the Jewish Book Council site. But do you want to comment on that?
Sure. I mean, there's, there's a couple of issues of one is the plot of the novel itself, and the other is reader response to it. So to go back a little bit to the plot of the novel, in this book is set in the late 1890s. And the main character is for the standards of his day, fairly open minded, He doesn't hate people who are non non British, non Anglican, so much as he regards them as "other" which is perfectly reasonable for his time. And he doesn't want to marry this woman who he doesn't know, in part because she's Jewish, certainly. And because of that, you know, why should he want to marry this woman he doesn't know has no interest in and whose marriage will bring social stigma for him. And he's also deeply perplexed why his brother would want to intermarry with with Jewish family, which will bring social stigma onto the family as a whole. So these are the things he's grappling with in the world. The novel is told primarily through his perspective, so we see inside his head, and we see how he thinks about things. And he, he certainly thinks about and recycles and rehearses various anti semitic stereotypes of his day without even necessarily recognizing that he's being anti semitic. And part of the his experience as he goes through the novel is to become more open minded not only toward Jews, but in terms of various other biases he has regarding regarding class regarding professions, regarding magic itself, regarding banking. So he's very close minded at the beginning of the novel, even though he doesn't recognize that about himself. And then as the course of the story, this is human human nature that as he gains more experience as his perspective changes, what shocked me about the response to this novel is people, a number of readers, a staggering number of readers, from my perspective, were outraged that I was articulating the cultural anti semitism of the Victorian Britain, as though somehow by setting this novel in this period, and including Jews, and therefore, including what people had to say about Jews, I was, in fact, myself being anti semitic. This shocked me for a number of reasons, the chief of which was, I've been writing a historical fiction about Jews for my entire career, which is now more than 20 years. And this was never an issue before. You simply cannot write about Jews in 19th century England, or 18th century England, or 17th century Amsterdam or any of the other historical places I've written about, and not write about anti semitism. And from my perspective, to do so is to do violence to the past is to do violence to the experiences of Jews who lived in those times and places and to race, the the lives that they lived and the hardships that they had to endure. So I was very, I don't want to say I was upset by these criticisms, I was I was angered by them, that there was a kind of silencing, you must, it is offensive for you to write about the history of your people. And I believe that, you know, writing about historical injustice for other ethnic groups would not have been met with the same kind of criticism. There's something very specific to the way people respond to Jewish history that was coming out in those reader responses in those reviews. And that was the reason why I wanted to write that piece that you referenced,
I don't remember if I mentioned when we first when I first contacted you that I'd actually picked up this book to take a break from Jewish literature that I thought I'd, you know, just read my other favorite genre, science fiction, and then I was delighted to find such a strong Jewish character. Do you think that that was part of the criticism is that when you're picking up a book about Jewish Historical fiction, you expect have that anti semitic atmosphere. But when you're wanting more escapism, when someone is rewriting part of the past that you expect that it would be rewritten in in a more idealized way?
This was part of what I talked about in my piece, which is, there is this movement in genre literature, and science fiction and fantasy right now to idealize the past in certain ways. So you will find, say, fantasy fiction that's based on fourth century China, or, you know, eighth century Arabia, or what have you, in which there's complete gender equity, or in which LGBTQ people are completely accepted. And in some ways, I think that's great. As, as I mentioned, in my piece, like it is the business of speculative fiction to speculate, and there's certainly no, there's no reason why we can't in fantasy, imagine the past without the injustices that were there. But I think it's also trained readers to expect this kind of idealized past. And, again, the fantasy that I'm writing is set in a world that was our world until about 1880. So the the cultural stereotypes, the prejudices, the biases, the assumptions don't simply vanish, and we can't sweep them away that this is it's simply a different branching off point. So I think some readers are trained not to expect this kind of thing. But at the same time, there's this effort that this this will toward white washing, that if this is not a book about anti semitism, then why should I have to deal with anti semitism? If this isn't a book about? If this isn't a book about trans people? Why should there be a trans character in it? Or if it's not a book about gay issues? Why should there be a gay character and you know, and so on, and to me, that's ridiculous - you should be able to populate your fiction with any kinds of characters you want and be able to write about them. Realistically. One of my one of the other hats I've worn over the years is, is I've written comics. And I remember I was doing a lot of work from Marvel around the time Marvel introduced the character, Miles Morales, who is a replacement for a replacement Spider Man character who's half black, half Latino. And there was this there is a small but vocal element among comics readers who don't want diversity. And one of the arguments that they would make is, I have no objection to to black people or Latino people in comics, if they serve a purpose. But otherwise, the assumption is that all characters should be white, unless something is served by them being not white. And I think that's the mindset you're referencing, which is that people reading this kind of novel want a kind of blankness, which in our culture is is whiteness, it's certainly not Jewishness in if they're not if they haven't signed on for that kind of book. And I think that's, that's ridiculous. And I'm going to write the kinds of books I want to write otherwise, I don't know why I would do this for a living if I'm not writing what I want to write. And certainly you're not under any obligation to read what I write or to enjoy what I write if you do read it. And you're certainly welcome to object to what I write for any reason you wish. But I can also respond to those objections. And my concern was not that somebody said something, but that a number of people were saying the same thing, which struck me as a problem in how people are reading and interpreting works of fiction and what they expect when it comes to representing Jewish people in fiction.
Yeah, I want to switch topics to the physical book. Did you have your hand in designing the book and the illustrations?
Absolutely not. I have I want to say I have zero visual art skills because that would be overselling, I have. My visual art ability is somewhere on the negative side. But I really love how the book looks. I think that my publisher Tachyon did an absolutely fantastic job, both with the cover, which I think is beautiful. And the the interior design, the book is also just quite quite lovely and incorporates a lot of elements of the Tarot deck in the in the cracks within the book. Yeah, so I'm glad you appreciate it, I appreciate it too. I, it's always, you know, it's one of the real highlights of being an author is to send this thing out, that's pure text and get this physical object back and see what other people have done with it. But they've taken away from it and what kinds of visual art they can make out of your words so far. Yeah.
Yeah, that just to explain at the beginning of each chapter, there is a picture of different magical symbols. And I could recognize some of the Hebrew but lots of other characters, some of it looked Qabalistic, you mentioned tarot influences. So I spent quite a bit of time trying to parse out the, the pictures in each chapter. And there was also this other delightful little thing, I'm trying to remember if it was the beginning of each chapter, that at the beginning, there was one leaf on the bottom of the page. And then there were two leaves, and then there were more leaves, and then it went down a little. And by the end of the book, there are more and more leaves appearing at the beginning of the chapter, you know, kind of following Thomas's transformation?
Yeah, no. Yeah, it is. It's really wonderful. And I should mention like, for listeners who don't know that Golden Dawn magic drew from a number of sources, one of which was Kabbalah. So you in their rituals in their, in their iconography, you know, a lot, there's a lot of Latin, but also a great deal of Hebrew. So Jewish magic is pretty deeply interwoven into Golden Dawn magic. And the other thing I'll say is the chapter titles themselves if they're, each of the chapters is named for a card in the Thoth tarot deck, which is a tarot deck created by Alistair Crowley, who is probably the best known practicing magician of all time, and who is a who's a character in the novel.
So I am a visual person. So I was so much looking at the the illustrations that I admit I didn't catch the chapter title. So I'm gonna have to go back and check it out
it's a deep cut. You have to you have to really know your occult to recognize that but it it seems like a fun organizing principle for me, so I just went with it.
Absolutely. I wanted to ask you about Thomas's last name "Thresher". A thresher is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff, from the stalk. And it seems like Thomas had to pick out the bits of magic and math that worked for him and discard the rest. Did you have a story behind this name?
Absolutely not. I don't do that kind of symbolism. When I write certainly not overtly, you know, things exist in the world and I have an unconscious so you know, things slip into my my writing without me intending them to, I don't choose pointed names for my characters. So much as I'll be writing and think this, this person needs a name, you know, what's what's a good name for this guy with the what's a good name for this woman. And I'll usually just grab something and keep going because I want to get back to the writing to the story. And I might say, now this name doesn't really work. It doesn't feel right to me, for whatever reason, then I'll cast about for something else. Or it might just stick with the first thing that pops into my head. And I'm pretty sure that thresher was just like, yeah, that'll do, that works. And then, you know, by the time I'd written a certain number of pages, it just felt like that was the character's name, and I stopped really thinking about it. So you know, I don't do a Dickensian thing where, you know, you know, you know, Mr. Tight barnacle, and, you know, have no, I'm not I'm not interested in that kind of overt symbolism.
All right, well, okay, that's a smidge disappointing.
It's not there. Like, as I said, I, I do have an unconscious bias. And I can put things in the book without meaning to and, you know, my background is in literary scholarship. And authorial intent is not a guide to interpreting literature. So if you see it and you make a case for it, then it is equally as valid as anything I have to say.
Okay, wonderful! I wanted to ask you another thing about the Peculiarities and the Elegants who are these creepy beings that appear? And they focus on people who have broken contracts? Why did you pick that as a criteria for for their attention and not focusing on violent people or other anti social behaviors?
Well, the Elegants began. So as you say, these are these are creatures, one of the one of the things that becomes clearer over the course of the novel is that what is causing these changes in society is our our world. In Golden Dawn magic. There's this belief that there are other planes of existence. And that magic in part functions by reaching into other other realities other other worlds and doing things there that affects our world here. So in the novel, things are seeping in from other realities. And one of the things that's happening is these, these creatures called the Elegant who are the sort of creepy skeletal well dressed figures who who prey on people and who murder and mutilate people. And it began as me thinking about the Jack the Ripper killings. And well, you know, what if that was the, what if there was a supernatural explanation for that? And what if they were the first of many such killings, and in the novel, that's what I suggest is like, fictionally, solve those crimes and pin the blame on the supernatural creatures, in terms of the contract breaking, I will be 100% honest and tell you that it was purely a plot device that that having that served as a plot function, and I just ran with it. It solves some problems. And I built a story around the fact that in the time of the peculiarities in this new world in which my my characters inhabit, it is a bad idea to break contracts to break a vow that you that you will suffer for things will happen to you. And it's not simply that the Elegants will get you ... but you will ... there are magical repercussions to breaking contracts, bad things will happen to you, it's essentially bad luck in a very real and physical way to the point that people are afraid to break their contracts.
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. And that's also a Jewish value, the importance of keeping vows, you know, so much so that at Yom Kippur ...
Kol Nidre
Kol Nidre, You know, say we please absolve us from vows that we did our best to fulfill but were unable to.
But no, it really was just, it's just the under the hood, nuts and bolts of storytelling. That's what Henry Henry James calls a donee givens. Like, there's just one of the realities of the world upon which you build a narrative and, and that's how it began for me. And of course, over the course of novel once it becomes a given, you can play with it and think about what are some of the other implications and how it will affect characters. But it really began as just like, oh, this would solve some plot problems I'm having in my face.
So I know that you've done a lot of research into all the time periods that you've written in. And I was wondering, what surprised you in your research about this time period?
I think this is probably not the kind of answer you're looking for. But this is the terms of historical fiction, I've written the most recent novel that in terms of modern, or proximity to modern times. And I was shocked at the existence of photographs of people and places that I was writing about that this was something you know, when you're writing about the early 18th century, or even the early 19th century, you just don't have that kind of evidence. But when I was doing research, and I could, I could look at photos of some of some of the real people I was writing about, or, you know, photos, and I was reading about the Golden Dawn, ISIS Urania temple, I could look at photographs of it. And so the existence of that kind of physical evidence felt like, that felt like magic to me. I'm just so used to not having that kind of technological artifact, in terms of the actual world itself. Now, I don't think too much surprised me, except how how modern it felt, especially when researching the nature of banking and the kind of financial shenanigans that that were going on. I'm always surprised because I've written about financial history before. And maybe at some point, it should stop surprising me, but I'm only surprised at the extent to which financial misdoings and crimes of the past are exactly the same as financial crimes and misdoings of the present. It's just that in the present, the scale and the speed are both much, much, you know, on a different level because of technology. But people still run the same kinds of scams and cheat in the exact same way. And it's, it's remarkable how little has changed.
What's the saying The more things change, the more they stay the same,
certainly in terms of, you know, financial crimes, but that does seem to be the case.
So are there any interesting tidbits that you found that did not make it into the book?
I'm sure there are, I'm struggling to think of any at the time, they're always they're always things that end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. In this case, I think I wanted to and originally intended to talk more, show more Golden Dawn magic in practice, but more rituals, more of what they believed more of which they what they did, but it just didn't really work out in terms of, of it being interesting because for me, story is always motivated by by character, and, and pausing to show 10 minutes of, you know, people dressing up in robes and, and engaging a lot of rigmarole. However interesting, I found it, the research just didn't work in terms of the story. And also, some of the actual history of the Golden Dawn really had to be abbreviated and curtailed. There's a lot of interesting stuff with possible,, and I would say almost certain forgeries that went on in creating the original documents of how much the organization was founded, in a lot of infighting among the senior musicians of the Golden Dawn, who are very competitive. And thinking about that stuff was really where the novel began for me. And, and a lot of it just never ended up in the book. Because once you have your main characters, and once you have your story, that's what matters and keeping the momentum and the energy there is what drives everything. Not, oh, I really wanted to write about this thing. But you know, it doesn't fit. So it has to go that happens all the time.
So do you have any magical or Tarot practices of your own?
No, I don't. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I had a friend who worked on African witchcraft, contemporary witchcraft in Africa. And she told me this line from from a scholarly essay that always stuck with me, where a man in Africa says, I don't believe in witches, but I fear them. And that's me and magic. I don't believe in it, but I'm not going anywhere near it.
I totally understand that. Is there anything you would like to answer that? I haven't thought to ask?
I'm sure the answer will be yes in 15 minutes, but I think you've been very comprehensive. You know, we talked about the magic itself, the historical context, we talked about the Jewish issues. We talked a little bit about Alistair Crowley, who I will just just say briefly, for reader for the listeners who don't know who he is, he is; in his lifetime, he was often referred to as the wickedest man alive. He was kind of an egoist, he believed he was the world's greatest living magician. He also considered himself the world's greatest mountaineer. He was the world's greatest a lot of things in his in his mind, and he's a character who really was like kind of a narcissist and self absorbed. But as I was writing the book, I, I found myself leaning more into and I originally intended for him to be kind of an unlikable, villainous character, but all the scenes he was in, I just really enjoyed writing him. And I ended up leaning more into his charismatic element because he was supposed to have been extremely charismatic. So he's a character who a lot of people think of as kind of just like, in real life, having been a bad guy. And he, in the book, he comes across as a much more likeable person is certainly a deeply flawed one. But he's deeply flawed, you know, in the right causes so. So I'll just say that he was he was a particularly enjoyable character for me to write.
So you also had a handful of other historical real life, people who are involved.
Yes,
that you showed were involved in the Golden Dawn. Were they actually involved?
So there was I was definitely having a little bit of fun like some of the people I mentioned, as having been Golden Dawn members. Were not that were there that are commonly mentioned, as people who were in the Golden Dawn but who really weren't, like I mentioned, Arthur Conan Doyle, who has a bit of a cameo in the book. He almost certainly was not. Bram Stoker almost certainly was not. But a number of other famous people, especially most notably, William Butler Yeats was, in fact, a very active member, one of the senior members of the Golden Dawn so there were a lot of literary figures of the time who were are the members or at least interested in what the Golden Dawn was up to. So it was it was a organization to be reckoned with. It was for a brief period of time, it was a very influential set of people.
So do you have any other works in progress that you would like to talk about?
Um, not that I want to talk about. I have my agent shopping something around, but I don't really want to talk about it until it finds a home. So but yes, I'm, I'm always doing something there's always another book in the works.
Do you have a favorite historical time period that you like to write about? Or do you like skipping around.
My background is I wrote my first novel, which is set in early 18th century England, I wrote that when I was in graduate school, doing a reading a dissertation on 18th century British literature. So 18th century England is kind of my my happy place. And it's sort of it's the period I know best. And I would argue that I find most interesting. And at this point, it's certainly the easiest for me to write about, because I don't have to do the kind of broad cultural research that I would have for writing, but any other period, I certainly have, you know, any anything I write in a period, I'll have to do some kind of specific research, but I won't, I won't have to cover the basics. So I don't at the moment have any plans to return to it. But I would certainly not be surprised if I do go back there. Because it is, you know, there's a lot of stories that have always interested me in that period. And I can easily see myself returning there.
great. So if someone used your book as a call for action for Tikun Olam, for repairing the world, what would it be?
You know, as as we record this today, I don't know when this podcast will, will be available. But today is the day after the congregation, Beth Israel in the Dallas Fort Worth area where they have the hostage crisis. And I was really struck by the number, the silence from the progressive community online over this issue, I tend to think of myself as progressive and I'm very active in progressive issues. But I don't feel like there's a lot of interest in Jewish issues in those circles. And I think my, you know, what my experience from reader to this book has really kind of left me in a place where I feel like Jews have to advocate for themselves, we do a lot of work as a certainly as a community and within my family of, of social justice and, and doing work for other groups. But I feel like we need to do more for ourselves, because we are allies to other people, but I don't feel like we really have a whole lot of allies for ourselves. Maybe a little more of a, you know, self centered Tikun Olam, but you know, I, you know, as Hillel said, "if I'm not for myself, who will be for me?" so I just really want to encourage, you know, Jews out there to you know, embrace their Jewish pride and embrace their Jewish identity and to stand up for who they are and what they believe.
Wonderful. Yeah, that's one of my favorite quotes. And I use different a different piece of it at different times in my life.
It's got three meaty parts.
Okay, go on ... "if I am not for myself, who will be for me ?"
I'm trying to remember off the top of my head if I'm only for myself, who am I? And if not, now, when?
Right! Exactly. You pass the quiz!
Thank you. I get an A.
So on that note, I want to thank you so much for spending the time speaking with me about your book and world.
Thank you for having me. It was great talking to you.
Great. Good luck on your next project. I look forward to reading it.
Thank you.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to Dee Yan Kee for use of their fraleich which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries. And you can find more about it at www.Jewish Libraries.org/niceJewishbooks. I would like to thank AJL and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz. Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi, this is Tyler Feder, author of dance again for pity party.
This is Joanne Libby, author of sorry for your loss. And this is Emily Barth Eisler, author of aftermath. We'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast. And we'd like to dedicate our episode to anyone struggling with loss.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlit. Join me in February 2022. To hear my conversation with Tyler Feder, Emily Barth Eisler and Joanne lovey at Book of Life podcast.com
