I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish Books. Today, I am pleased to host Janice Weizman, author of Our Little Histories. Welcome, Janice.
Hi.
So can you please tell me about your book?
Sure. So it's a novel called Our Little Histories. And it basically starts today, and in seven long chapters, follows the history of a single Jewish family going back in time, so that the first chapter starts ticket today, and it ends up in 1850, in Belarus. And in through that story, we are sort of queueing into the story of the Eastern Jewish community and what happened to it, Eastern European Jewish community and what happened to it over the last 150 years.
So there are a few things that tie everything together. One is that the people are related. It's a family, although, in the present day, we're at maybe fourth or fifth cousins.
That's right.
And I appreciate that you put a family tree in front of in the front of the book to keep track of everyone.
Yeah, it gets to be a lot of people
. And there's also a mysterious poem that has mostly lost its meaning at the beginning of the book and the current day, but we find out as we go backward in time, where it was from and what it meant. And so we can kind of talk about in each of the sections. Yeah. So the first chapter, you said starts contemporary times in, in Chicago. It's an American, Jennifer, who has been invited to Belarus, and she is a museum curator known for putting on living exhibits,
yeah, living installations,
living installations, excuse me. So, you know, kind of along the lines of Colonial Williamsburg, although the people don't seem to interact with the people in the installation don't seem to interact with the people watching it with the observers.
Yeah, the idea is that she curates these exhibits where you have live people enacting cultural rituals from various time periods. So it feels real, rather than looking at the artifacts you're experiencing, you know, being part of that culture.
Right. So she's invited to Belarus to a small town. I don't remember the name. But someone wants to have a living installation of what Jewish life was like someone found out that he actually has Jewish heritage. And so he's interested in knowing what Jewish life was like for his grandparents or great grandparents. Yeah.
I mean, he's a Belarusian tycoon, he has a lot of money. And as you mentioned, he realizes that he knows that way back, he has a Jewish ancestor. And this has made him very curious about Judaism and Jewish observance and Jewish people. And so he reaches out to her with this proposal that she put on a living installation. But with with a catch that it's going to not not just be a few rituals, and not just be you come to the museum and go home, but it's going to be 24/7, basically, so that people come in watch this family, a Jewish family and acting life as it would have been 150 years ago. And they, they're like observing them as if it's reality. That's his proposal,
which is a kind of bizarre one. But she goes along with it. She's intrigued by the idea. And she contacts some distant cousins of hers who are observant Jews living in Israel, and they agree to come and be the family that is living in this installation in this cabin. The son is preparing for his bar mitzvah. So although see him studying, and it seems like the daughter and the mother spend most of their time cooking and cleaning as Jewish woman once did, and maybe still. So and Jennifer ends up bringing her own teenage daughter, whose summer plans fell through to end to kind of keep Per away from an a not so good influence. And Jennifer is rather proud of raising her daughter in an atheist environment. She's Jewish, she identifies as Jewish, but they do nothing that is Jewish. So this is all a research project for her as well trying to figure out what are the Jewish customs, people who would have lived then. And she also brings along a journal to use as a prop in this in this installation, the Nayer yidisher. Horizont.
Yeah, that we will later learn has this poem by their ancestor in it. But she doesn't read Hebrew, she doesn't read Yiddish. It's just basically a prop to her something that she's had sitting around the house. But then her cousin recognizes it that their family had this also.
Yeah, I think I wanted some sort of object that was going to be passed from generation to generation in some way. And that object is actually a Yiddish poem, written by the original ancestor from 1850, which neither of these two modern people, not the American, not the Israeli even know. And they can't know her. And I just thought, it's really interesting the way your objects move from generation to generation from place to place. And but I think there was also sort of the idea of the larger idea of language and what happens to language because of course, it's in Yiddish. And we all know what happened to the Yiddish speakers. They're very few of them now. And just this whole idea of the language that both of their ancestors once spoke not that long ago, has been practically obliterated so that their descendants don't can't read it can understand it. I just thought that was interesting. So yeah, I don't know, as you say, it appears in each story.
Right. And that comes up in the next chapter that I want to talk about. But another thing that happens is that Jennifer's daughter gets to know these cousins. And she's intrigued by the Jewish observance, that she's never known and starts participating in the installation as well, much to her mother's dismay.
Yeah, I mean, I obviously this book was written before October 7. And I think all of our concerns were very different. You know, there's before, and there's after. And, in the time, when I was writing it, I was thinking about more of the subject of like, alienation and alienation from our roots, whether it's cultural or religious, and how many American Jews today, you know, not everybody, obviously, and it varies, but there are many who are, are kind of alienated from those roots. And, and yet, when given an opportunity to make that connection, it can be so intriguing. And so, such an amazing experience in a way to reconnect with with what has been lost. And in that story, this teenage girl who I mean, she's half Asian, you know, she's the product of intermarriage. And still, there's room for her to look back and to relate to her Jewish ancestors, on the level of, of an acting, Judaism in a way. So like this, the chapter is called reality. And I think the whole time you can sort of wonder, well, where does this living installation, stop being an exhibit and start being real life? And I think that that kind of that that move sort of demonstrates how this teenage girl moves from the feeling that this is just an exhibit and it's fake, to an actual experience, which is reality for her.
So the next chapter jumps back. Well, quite a ways to 1968 in Tel Aviv, where it's another cousin meet up. Well, their mother's
interestingly enough, right, Jennifer's mother, and my dad's mother, who are I guess, third cousins? Yeah. Yeah, they meet up in that chapter, of course, which is 40-50 years earlier than the previous.
So the cousin Nancy is coming from the United States in 1968 to visit Yardena and her husband Emile and Nancy is full blown, hippie The snick anti war, loud brash says what's ever on her mind, dresses and, you know, bright clothing. And Yardena and her husband are serious, sensible people, they, you know, they enjoy intellectual discussions. And they're really taken aback by, by this younger cousin. And they've also, this is in the aftermath of the Six Day War. So, you know, they just can't comprehend that there's a total total lack of understanding between them about the feelings about war. So Janice hurt, I'm Sorry, Nancy is protesting the Vietnam War, a war somewhere far away that United States is getting involved in someone else's business, while Yardena and Emil are living in a country which has been attacked, so obviously, they have very different ideas of what the correct response is.
I mean, I think that chapter shows a real contrast of where the lives of American Jews and the lives of Israeli Jews started to go off in very different directions. You know, one of the ways that I sort of think about this book is with the analogy of a tree. So with the tree, you see what's on the surface, but beneath the surface is this very deep, and sometimes very complicated network of roots, which is feeding the tree. So what's happening in the book is The roots are getting the trees getting further and further away from from those roots. And in you see that in the 1968 chapter, which is, I mean, these are people whose grandparents were first cousins. And yet, they're these grandchildren have turned out to be, you know, just completely different and living, not just different in personality, but living in very different realities. And their Jewish identity is completely different. And it's just, I think it's, you know, I moved to Israel 40 years ago from Canada. And I am always experiencing this sort of very, very interesting sort of give and take relationship between the Jews abroad and Jews in Israel. And as I said, I think I think it's changed a lot after October 7, I think there's been a real real sea change, which is going to continue to evolve. But, you know, that would be a chapter that that I didn't write. It's a long chain, and that's a link in the chain going back.
Obviously, Yardena and Emile are Hebrew speakers, and they don't speak Yiddish at all and Yardena's mother, Tamar did not speak Yiddish at all. And when Yardena's mother arrived in Israel, she said, That's it. I'm starting a new life in the Jewish homeland. I'm speaking Hebrew. And she had that copy of the journal, the Yiddish journal, and she donated it to a little Yiddish library. And Nancy is just shocked that they're not keeping hold of not only this precious item, but the language and the culture that you could just separate yourself like that. And at first Yardena is like, you know, we're a new people, we're reinventing ourselves. But then Yardena says, but looking at Nancy's puzzled expression, she muses for the first time that perhaps it is a little odd, such a total negation of one's mother tongue and the time when one spoke it
well, yes, I mean, that's absolutely historical. It's well known that the the pioneers in the Zionists to settled Israel in the early days, basically outlawed Yiddish, the whole idea was to create a, quote, new Jew, who spoke Hebrew. And Yiddish was a language that belonged to the diaspora. And along with that language came a lot of baggage which they didn't want they they absolutely wanted to separate themselves from. And, and it's true that it was, it was really forbidden almost to speak Yiddish in some social circles. And particularly in the kibbutz scene, particularly where they were living a life that was very ideological, that you know, we are going to be new Jews, and we're gonna live completely differently than the lives that we left in Eastern Europe. And that involves just cutting ties with Yiddish. So yeah, I mean, I didn't make that up that It's a historical reality.
I believe you. Yeah. But it was just interesting that Yardena was able to step back from that and say, Oh, maybe that is a little weird. Well, cool. Yeah. You know that that had been the accepted thing that that's what everyone did were about reinvention. And then
I think that, you know, there's many Israelis here who, you know, already have 2,3,4 generations in Israel at this point. And I think that, you know, Zionism is evolved. And the children of those, you know, first those pioneers that first came, you know, there's always a reevaluation of things that once seemed essential. And I guess that sort of hints in that direction where you can sort of reexamine return and re examine that decision and say, Okay, what was gained, but what was lost? I mean, I don't I don't think that there are a lot of Israelis who regret that we don't speak Yiddish, Israel, or that it's not a very dominant language here. But there you go. I mean, it's a fact. And as I said, it's the idea of totally abandoning languages is pretty monumental, really.
In the United States, in the past decade, maybe a little more, there's been a resurgence of interest in Yiddish. And there's academic programs, and people are starting to write again in Yiddish and to, you know, Rediscover older works. So is there not a similar movement in Israel?
I would say less so. There might be individuals, and there's definitely Yiddish courses, various places for whoever wants, but I don't think it's like a trend. No, no, I wouldn't say that.
It's interesting.
Yes, it is. Okay, so
let's step back in time a little bit more. So, now we're in 1946. And Yardena's mother. Tamar is engulfed in Kibbutz life, with her husband Shimon. And she's trying to get relatives to join her. And she ends up involved with another man, Otto or Avner, in ... I forgot to make a note, which underground movement were they?
I actually don't think I mentioned, maybe maybe the Haganah, I guess, yeah, probably the Haggadah, or the Palma? Yeah.
So she gets involved in this underground movement. And can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an amazing period of Israeli history, those pre war years in which that story plays out. For one thing, there was no state of Israel yet. And it wasn't a sure thing that there would be until it actually happened. In the years leading up, it was the opposite the community was under a very real threat of Nazi invasion. And nobody knew how the war was going to evolve or turn out. And there was actually an in in 1941 42, with the Nazis fighting in North Africa, there was a very real threat that they could come into Israel and, you know, do what they were doing in Eastern Europe. So at the time, I, we know, obviously, that there were underground movements, working against the British with, you know, if they were different ideologically, some, supported a more violent confrontation, others didn't want to have a confrontation with the British, but they realized that they needed to develop some sort of proto army, and they needed weapons, and they needed to train people. And in and they were right, because in 1948, a few years after the story takes place, of course, was the War of Independence, and the ones who, who actually had to defend the Jewish communities in Israel were these underground groups with with these weapons, which which were illegal at the time. Yeah, so it's a piece of history, and I kind of wanted to capture it. You know, I think today, Israel looks pretty strong and pretty solid. And, you know, even now, it's not under an existential threat. But at the time before the state was created, that that wasn't the case. And I think it's important to remember that I don't I think that many people today aren't quite aware of, of the struggles involved in in creating the country working towards independence. And, but it's such a it's such an interesting moment, because, as I said, these are descendants of people who came from these little impoverished SBT settles and, you know, they had no background in defense or, or state building or institution building. It was all done over a short few years by some very, very devoted and dedicated people. The end that's that's why we have the State of Israel today, thanks to them.
All right, well, well, let's get back to Vilna in 1939. We're Gavril, who's a tomorrow's cousin is a teacher. And tomorrow, you know, well, not again. But since we're going back in time, but his writing all her cousins saying, please come to Israel. You know, I see what's going on. In Europe. You need to get out of there, you know, come here.
Yeah, it was it was Palestine.
They get letters and just laugh it off. That's Tamar again.
Well listen, I mean, it's exactly it's it's easy to in, in retrospect, to say, you know, just go do what she's saying. But I was really trying in that story to get into the mindset of somebody living in Eastern Europe in 1939. And, of course, you know, nobody knew what was coming. Even with the threat of the Nazis, even seeing the anti semitism in Germany and hearing Hitler's speeches. Nobody would have ever predicted what was going to happen. And I think that, that, that's what interested me to get into that mindset. You know, there's so many novels coming out, you know, about about the Holocaust, and from so many different aspects. And those books are really important. But what I was after was the mindset of the community, before that happens. And it's an ironic story, because the the chapter is called tragedy, but if you read the story, it's not just the tragedy of what we know will happen to Gabriel and his family. There's other tragedies there, which are not. It's just, it's on many levels. It's tragic on many levels. And the Holocaust is only one of them's
one of them is that Gabriel meets a brilliant young writer. And he really wants to encourage this young man and ends up visiting him and seeing just the absolute, abject poverty that he's living in, you know, everyone's poor, that he's the poorest of the poor, and, you know, supporting a sick mother and younger siblings, and he just can't devote time to writing, you know, he has to support this family. Yeah. You know, I think that was one of the tragedies.
Well, yeah, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I think I was hinting at that also. Because in the book, because at the time of the story, Gabriel, and everywhere, there don't know they're going to be the subject of a tremendous tragedy. And he's thinks that the fact that this young man will is not going to be able to realize his potential is a tragedy. One of the things that really struck me in my research was just how often, you know, writers living at the time, and afterwards would talk about the poverty of Jews, do they just in economic terms, there were so many poor people in those communities, the economies of Poland and Lithuania at the time, were in terrible shape. The situation after the First World War in those countries, it just ravaged them and ravaged their economies. And they could not keep up with Western Europe. And it was very, very hard to find work, and it was hard to find work that paid a decent wage and in poverty was rampant. And so that's also, I think, a historical fact that, you know, we've lost touch with that. I mean, if you think that story plays out in 1939, well, that wasn't even 100 years ago. It wasn't that long ago, that our ancestors, our descendants or families were living in terrible conditions. And that's why of course many of them left. Right, of course, in America.
So then you go just one year further back to Chicago in 1938. Where Nat?, Nate?, that is, you know, an up and coming young man. He's educated His, his mother is still barely speaks English she speaks Yiddish. She's very old school and he's trying to be very American. He's dating a very assimilated woman named Sally, who's, you know, again, very modern and very disdainful of those old world Jews who've been coming in her family came over, you know, years before in the wave of German immigration. And so he's dating her knowing that, but he doesn't want her to meet his mother, knowing that there will be a conflict. So when his mother gets theater tickets to the Yiddish theater, he kind of flips out. And instead of taking his girlfriend, Sally, he takes Frida, who's a young woman who works in his office, who is also a new immigrant with Polish German background. And she and the mother instantly connect. They love this, the theatre production of the dibasic they laugh, they cry together. So it's very much about the different waves of immigration and how they connect or rather, don't connect.
Yeah, I mean, I think in that story, you see the tension around the whole idea of, of immigration and trying to assimilate into American society, which is something I mean, I read a lot in my research about, you know, immigrant stories, and how hard these immigrants from Eastern Europe worked to become Americans speak English and blend into society, and in many cases, lose a lot of their Jewishness, whatever that meant. And I think that now we're sort of at the level of say, our grandparents, our great grandparents and the things they went through, and I think those are, that's where you feel reverberations up to our day, especially now, that was also interesting, because I think again, before October 7, American Jews felt entirely assimilated. You know, the whole question of like, are Jews White was, it was it was a question. That's the extent to which Jews were considered just total mainstream America. And but it wasn't always like that. And there was definitely a generation that had to adjust and pay the price and live as immigrants and in society was not maybe in some ways less kind than it is today. About, you know, in terms of difference in terms of hierarchies, in time in terms of accepting people from other cultures, it was it was kind of brutal, and everybody just struggled to become American to assimilate.
So we'll skip back another 40-45 years, in separation to Propoisk, Belarus, where we meet Yoyna, who's the son of one of the three brothers, the triplets, who had been separated. And one of the brothers, Itzhik, wants a reunion of the brothers. And for each of them to bring the little scrap of paper that their mother had written the poem on she'd given each of them one verse, And Yoyna's. Father is too ill to travel. So he sends Joyna to Vilna, to meet his two uncles and cousins and to reunite the poems together. So it's interesting because your chapter is called separation, but it's about the reunion of the family.
Yeah, were you wondering about that as a little bit?
Well, actually,
there's something else going on in that chapter. In terms of the actual story, you have this young man recently married in an arranged marriage. And he doesn't know very much about the wider world, outside of his shtetl of Propoisk. And for the first time, he takes a journey to the big city of Minsk, that's the big city. And he's exposed to the wider world and he's religious, he's very observant. He's lived a life, you know, which is around the synagogue, and it's in a little bit of Torah and Talmud study. And all of a sudden he's exposed to, as I said, like life in the larger world. And Yoyna has a secret that it keeps from his parents. And the secret is that he reads the secular Jewish newspapers, which they would be very upset about. And the whole idea about the separation is it's His beginning, it's the beginning of a process which many, many Jewish families underwent, which involves leaving the orthodoxy leaving a life based on and rooted in religion and starting to think about assimilating into the wider world in various ways. Yeah, and then there's there's that there's other aspects of separation in the in the story as well.
Okay, make sense. And then finally, the last chapter three fathers we is we meet Raisel in 1850, again, Propoisk Belarus, who has three sons, and has terrible choices to make. And we finally learn about how and why the brothers get separated. So I'm gonna let you talk about this chapter. So I don't get into the spoiler, territory.
So yeah, I mean, this is sort of the ground zero of the story, you have a young mother who has triplets, little boys, eight years old. And at the time in Russia, another historical fact, every Jewish community had to fulfill a quota of boys to send to the Russian army for a period of 25 years. And this went on, I'm not sure if it's 50, or 40, or 30 years, for a very long period of time, every year, the community would have to hand over a certain amount of boys. And the minimum legal age for this was 12 year olds. But when a community had difficulty getting enough boys together to fill the quota, they would look at younger boys. So that in this story, her there's a very real risk to these three boys that one or two of them will be drafted against everybody's will. And it's intolerable, obviously, as entitled intolerable as it sounds, it was a reality. And people have told me since that this happened to in their families, even though it's, you know, it's been, as I say, decades and decades, but the memory of it, it was absolute trauma. So that's what she's contending with. And she has to figure out a way to, to prevent this terrible fate.
And there are generally two ways to avoid it. One is to bribe the man in charge of collecting the kids. But she has no resources to do that. And the other is if it's, if you only have one son, yeah, they won't take the last son.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, this is these are the guidelines. And yeah, so that's what she has to work with. And the story develops from there, because what you have are these three boys grow up to, you know, Father, these families in which each one goes ultimately in a different direction. One family as, as is clear from what we've been talking about goes to America, one goes to Israel to Palestine, and the other perishes in the Shoah. And I think that this story is extremely typical of anyone with Eastern European descent, you know, any family will have all three of these things happening in their family in the past 150 years.
Absolutely.
Almost a prototype. So but I thought it would be interesting to look at this story, a in in fiction with fictional characters where I could sort of shape the destinies and the connections and the themes. And also just to be able for the reader to be able to hold the stories in their head at once, so that they can see a line stretching from today, back to Eastern Europe, when everything we know about our lives today had not yet happened. Right. But that's where we come from.
So why did you decide to tell the story kind of backwards going backward in time? So yeah,
I mean, that sort of relates back to this tree analogy, where I start with what you can see today, and when you read the story of Jennifer, it's true, it's a little bit weird, in a way I mean, I think I was aiming for something that's a little edgy, a little indicative of our times where technology and post modernism and art installations which you know, are very cutting edge are part of our lives. But basically, I think that Jennifer and her husband and her daughter, a very recognizable people for us. But as you go back in time, the characters become less people we can identify with. So that I think even by the time that you're around the three Holocaust era stories, a, they're in very different times they have very different consciousness, their worlds are very, very different from ours. I wanted to take the reader back to those worlds to put them in those worlds, with this idea of starting from what we know, and we can see, and it's familiar, and then moving back to things that we have lost touch with. And we can no longer access or barely access. So that was how I designed it.
So working in so many different places and time periods. It seems like that must have been a massive amount of research.
Yeah, well, absolutely. Each chapter was like writing a new book, you know, new characters, New place, new issues. And to help me I would read, I like to read literature of the period. So in the back of the book, there's a list of all kinds of sources I used to sort of help get me into the mindset of the people in each particular time. And, interestingly, one of the time periods that was very hard for me to research was the villainous story. Because there's so there is stuff out there, where you can see maybe how religious people lived. But there isn't that much about secular families. And Gabriel's family is, you know, obviously, they're still very Jewish, and they're very connected. But they're not living an orthodox lifestyle. And it was hard to sort of find sources, or even stories that depict that kind of life, I found I mean, there are you can find it. And a good example is Bashevis singer, who wrote both about secular Jews in Poland and religious Jews in Poland, he knew both sides quite well. But it wasn't easy to find. Right?
Well, glad you were able to find something. So do you have anything you would like to talk about on your book that I haven't thought to ask about?
Well, I think, again, in the wake of October 7, what has surprised me a little bit, is I feel there's a renewed interest among many people regarding questions about their Jewish identity, about their the roots of their Jewish families. And also, I think for especially for younger people, on questions about Israel, and why Jews even live there. Why, why, what are we doing here? How did we get here? Who are these crazy people who decided to live here? And why was it even Why did anybody even think it was necessary? Because like, you know, if their ancestors went to America, and it worked out more or less, why would anyone go to Israel? For what? So I think that the book, kind of shed some light on those questions in a way that might be interesting for people who never really thought about it, or were sort of disconnected from the whole idea of, of Israel and why, you know, what it means in the life of Jewish people in the history of Jewish people. I think it kind of, you know, again, through fiction, which I think is a really interesting way of showing people things, you know, it's not a lecture, it's not an essay. It's, it's a story, and you can read it as just a story, but I think it can work on you in really interesting ways.
Yeah, absolutely give you a jumping off point for lots of different discussions. So I know that there were a lot of Jewish literary journals at the time, and, and still, but was the one you mentioned an actual journal.
Yeah, no, I made it up. Okay.
I know that your first novel, the Wayward Moon will be reissued this year with Toby press, which is very exciting. But I was wondering if you have any new projects in the works that you would like to talk about?
Well, I'll mention that I, I know what it is to put out a novel with a small press. It's it's very, very difficult. Anyone who writes knows this. And in order to sort of help the community, I have a small website where I review Jewish literature that has come out with small presses. And I often invite another writer to review all to also review a work of Jewish literature. It's called Reading Jewish fiction. I've been doing it for a few years now. So that's like a pet project.
I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Well, if someone were to use your book as a call to action for Tikun Olam, or something not based on your book something for repairing the world? What would it be? Well,
this might sound a little funny, I guess you get all kinds of interesting responses. But I think that it's really important for people to support Jewish literature. And for not only Jewish people, but but especially for Jewish people to read books that are coming out on Jewish themes, whether it's fiction, or nonfiction, or poetry, and use that as a way of engaging with what's happening in our Jewish community worldwide at the moment. So I would encourage them to try to read books on Jewish themes and make a point of doing that. And then supporting the authors, whether it's, you know, buying the books, whether it's writing reviews in places where people will see that, whether it's, you know, passing the books on to friends, recommending them. It's a small thing, but culture is culture. And if we don't keep it up, it just won't exist.
Absolutely.
So we all have a part to play in that. Right.
Well, Janice Weizman, thank you so much for speaking to me about your book, Our Little Histories. I really enjoyed the talk.
Thank you so much for hosting me, it's been fun.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite origins brick or online bookstore, or at your local library. Thanks to de Yong ki for use of his fraleigh 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 dot Jewish Library's dot org slash nice Jewish books. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz. Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
