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. So it is the middle of the holiday season and the one year anniversary of the massacre on October 7. So I am especially grateful that Gila Green made time to speak with me in these crazy times. So we're going to be speaking about her latest book With a Good Eye. Welcome Gila.
It's really a pleasure to be here.
Thank you. So would you please tell me about your book?
So With a Good Eye is, I would say it's older, YA. I guess if you have to give it a category, I would recommend it for 16 and up or just a regular adult book, but I think 16 and up could handle this novel, and it's a family drama that centers around my heroine, Luna Levi who has an extremely challenging family. She has to deal with a lot of dysfunction and mental illness in her family, and she's just, they just kind of leap from crisis to crisis, and then at a certain point, her mother, who is a stage actress, attaches herself to such a negative element that even for Luna, it's just too much, and she has to, we sort of go along with her for the ride as she manages that and and hopefully comes out the other side in an inspiring way for readers.
All right, great. So well, there are a lot of things I loved about your book, but one thing that I loved about it is that it takes place in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and I'm not sure I've ever read a Jewish book based there. Can you tell me why you decided that for your setting and what the Jewish community is like there.
Well, first of all, thank you that you said there were so many things you enjoyed about the book. For me, location is basically a character in a novel. It's really important to me that you treat the location the same way you would treat a character, I want it to be really alive for the reader, which, on one hand, a lot of people say that's really great and admirable. On the other hand, that means you have to choose locations that you can make come alive, unless they're completely fictional, locations, like futuristic or science fiction, but if you're staying in the realism drama. So on one hand, that's great. On the other hand, it can be limiting. If you notice, the book takes place in 1980 so that would be a time when I would really have known Ottawa. I grew up in Ottawa. I can't really speak firsthand about the community today. I can't speak firsthand. I do still have a lot of family there, but I haven't actually lived there since 1994 so I wouldn't speak for them at the moment, but I could speak to what it was like growing up, which is just also demographically vastly different from today. Ottawa is the capital of Canada, as you probably know, and therefore it's a very civil servant town. Civil Servant towns don't tend to attract immigrants. You know, immigrants are usually attracted to industry and business. You know, most likely, if you immigrate from another country, you're not immigrating so that you can become a civil servant in a in a government department. So it was quite homogenous at that time, there weren't too many people of color. It was what we used to call probably not even allowed to say this today, I don't know, so forgive me, but we used to call it a WASP town. I don't know if you're allowed to say that today, but that's pretty much what it was like at that time. Now, of course, it's vastly different with huge immigrant population, but that's what I was portraying. It at that town, kind of a capital, but it has a very small town, provincial feel to it. It's very, very spread out. I don't know if you've got that feeling in the novel. It's a very spread out town. Even today, it's very spread out over, you know, Canada obviously has a lot of land. It's a it's a physically large country.
Well, one impression I got was it had a good bus system, which me living in the Los Angeles area, wishes I had. It's also very spread out, but it's really hard to get from here to there.
Yeah, growing up, I definitely, I definitely, relied heavily on the busses, yes, especially in that kind of cold. So you need a good bus system. There's only so long you can wait in the minus, minus weather for a bus, right?
So another thing that was really intriguing is that a lot of Jewish stories, or the stereotypical Jewish story is, is either about someone who's comfortably well off or wealthy or somewhere on the rags to riches journey this family is not at all, as you said, there, both parents are dealing with mental illness. The mother wants to be a stage actress and is involved in lots of different community theater in the region, but it means she'll just suddenly up and leave the house for a month or six weeks, and does a lot of benefits for hospitals and different social service organizations, and meanwhile, none of the bills at home are getting paid, and her father is Luna's father is suffering from PTSD after being a soldier in the Israeli army, and he goes around stealing canned goods from stores and redistributing them to the poor, but he's not really able to be at home taking care of the kids either. So you have both these people who are, on one hand, wanting to be helpers and generous and giving of their time and energy, but neither one is actually taking care of their own house and children.
Yes, absolutely. Well, it's actually interesting your first comment, because one of my original beta readers, like this particular novel, took me a long time. I'd had novels that I'd written in, you know, quick as two months, and ones that was long as a year, and other ones that were years. And this was definitely even though it's not a long novel, and people tell me it's quite fast paced. It took me a long time to write this novel, I would stop and start and stop and start. So it's a very big personal accomplishment for me. But one of my first feedback that I had from a I had non Jewish BETA readers as well. Of course, someone in the US and I, you know, I'm sure she didn't mean it in a negative way. But one of her first comment to me after she read it. I'm not sure which version she read, definitely not this final, final polished version, but whatever version she read, and she said to me, Oh, this is the first time I've read a story about Jewish people who aren't rich. Aren't they all rich? Now I'm sure they didn't mean the way that comes across. And, you know, it was an innocent comment, but, um, yes, I definitely growing up, I was a very big reader, obviously being Jewish, and going to a, you know, a Jewish school, I would gravitate to Jewish literature first, and maybe Jewish Canadian literature second. And, you know, maybe Canadian literature third until you sort of develop your own taste when you get a little older. But that's where the schools direct you. And I did find it very frustrating this sort of very narrow view of Jewish people, whether it was their socioeconomic state, whether it was their sort of high functioning or low functioning state, their backgrounds, obviously, they didn't have too wide a variety of backgrounds, and I used to find that really frustrating. And one of my goals with the novel is to actually open that up and like, that's okay. It's okay to go to a Jewish event and not say, Yeah, my dad is a lawyer at this firm, and my mom is a doctor at this hospital. I mean, I'm being really cliche now, but you know, it's okay to have variety in background, which, which, which, when I was growing up, it actually wasn't so particularly Okay, certainly not publicly and definitely not, not anything that I could find in culture in general, whether it was television or these books.
And that's something that Luna is really sensitive about. And she opens herself a lot to her best friend, Aiden, but doesn't tell her the whole truth of how bad their situation actually is correct?
Well, I did want to tackle that issue of shame. I think shame is just an issue that many people who grow up with it for whatever reason, the plethora of different reasons why people might grow up with shame, whether for themselves, someone in their family, a sibling, etc, and it's something that very often stays with you your whole entire life, you know, even after you have children and grandchildren. And I really wanted to put that in the table, but I didn't want to, I still wanted to write an exciting novel, The whole, I don't use the word trick, but the whole what I was trying to do with this novel, it was to write an interesting, engaging, fast paced level that dealt with a whole smattering of issues, but yet wasn't sort of all heavy about these issues. Things were still constantly happening, and you were rooting for this one and rooting for that one. I wanted people to sort of be on that emotional roller coaster with me. There weren't good guys and bad guys. As you said, the parents have various dysfunctions. On the other hand, they have very good intentions. These are not black and white characters. That's one of the reasons the novel took me so long to write, is because in the first drafts, I would get that kind of feedback. You know, these are two cartoonish they're too you know, they're not three dimensional. They're not complex enough. Because that's the truth. The truth is that human beings are just endlessly complex. And so I was trying to portray that.
So one thing you did in terms of showing the diversity of the Jewish experience is that Luna's mother is Ashkenazi. Her father is Israeli, but from Yemen. And then her best friend and this person who will be end up being her boyfriend, are from Moroccan heritage. And one thing that she and Ian the boyfriend kind of laugh about together, is their exasperation with people lumping all non Ashkenazi Jews together, even though Morocco and Yemen are on different continents, about 4000 miles apart,
right? I'm trying to actually normalize these kind of backgrounds, you know, just as a parallel example that sometimes happens in Israel, right? You live in Israel. I've lived here for many, many, many years. My husband is South African. And a lot, to certain extent, certain Israelis will just say, well, you're just "Americayim", I know. And you cannot tell somebody from Johannesburg, you know, Texas, Americans, or someone from London or from Australia, and that's kind of a parallel sometimes, you know, you can get that dismissal here, like, oh, all English speakers are the same. Now, obviously someone from Scotland is not somebody from Los Angeles, etc, but you can just kind of as a parallel example, you sometimes get that kind of dismissiveness. You're like, oh, you all sound the thing to me, You know what I mean. And obviously that's clearly ridiculous. So that's sort of a similar, a similar thing that I was trying to get across, yes,
One thing that they all bonded about, too, was trying each other's foods and having favorites, you know, so Did you have fun with all the cooking bits and talking about the different flavors?
I'll tell you the truth, I didn't know how much I had food in my novels. There's an interviewer. His name is Dave Pezza. He has a podcast, and he interviewed me for a few of my novels. He's a great guy. He's Italian. He's not Jewish at all. And in the first one, he said to me, or the second one, he was like, you know, every time I read one of your novels, I'm starving, so hungry. He's like, What is with you and food? It's like, I always end up writing things down, going to Google things, saying, I gotta try this, I gotta try that. And, you know, I wasn't even aware that I did this. It was actually sometimes, right? Someone reads your work and they point out something that you didn't even know was there. I don't know if you've had other authors say that. I'm sure it must happen. And I really had no idea it's just like all Green novels make me hungry, so I have to eat before the novel or something. So I guess that's just how I am. I guess I just like, so yes, I guess I just, I just like food, and I guess it's a big part of my day to day life, like, What are we eating? So I guess it just comes out in my work, and if people get new recipes out of it. So that's great.
It's definitely a fun aspect of it. So Luna and then her brother, Ronan, who's one year older, one year, about a year, are obviously being raised the same way, but they react really differently. So Luna is trying so hard to be the super responsible one, and Ronan is more about why aren't you supporting our mother? She's, you know, she's trying one well, Luna says one scheme after another. You know, her mother would say one opportunity after another. So why do you think there's such a difference there?
Well, so that was again, in the in the first draft, I kept debating. There were three siblings. There were four siblings. There were all these different characters. And I guess it was becoming too unwieldy because I was finding it, for me, the most challenging thing was to try to portray people who who were. I mean, I think every family is dysfunctional, and it's a question to how far, how far is it? Function, right? Is it? You know, are you managing? Are you not managing? There's no such thing as 100% functioning family where there are just no where everyone is perfectly balanced, like that. Obviously doesn't exist. So I was trying very hard to portray these out of balance, for lack of a better word, parents, and that was making it too difficult for me to have all these different characters as well. So I kind of distilled, I distilled the characters into two, Luna and her brother, Roman, and then I purposely gave them these opposite reactions, just to try to reflect that. You know, how would a teenager perhaps react to this type of situation? People are not going to react the same. They'll react differently depending on if they're, you know, the oldest or the youngest, depending on how they look physically, who they identify. The fact that she learned Hebrew enables Luna to react differently to her father than her brother, who's very resistant to learning the language. So I was trying to distill sort of these two strong reactions, because that's a bit what you have to do in a novel, right? A novel, sort of, to quote, you know, Flannery O'Connor, you kind of have to hold a microscope and enlarge things in order for people to really be able to see them. So they do. They're kind of foils for each other. But I wanted them to be, you know, friends again, this kind of roller coaster, you know, he he disappoints her, but he comes through for her as well. This kind of, there aren't black and white characters or black and white reactions and then, and somehow that still has to hold together for the demands of the novel, right where you have to satisfy the reader and have your plot. So that was one of the ways I managed, was to, was to get rid of everybody else and just have this family of four.
So is it too spoilery, or can we talk about the ending?
Well, I mean, you can, I think it's okay to talk about maybe what the ending means. Um, the ending was definitely not in the original draft. It came from some feedback. At that time, I had an agent who sent it out to a few publishers. And sometimes you can get really lucky where a publisher might not take your book, but they're intrigued enough, would it actually sit down and write you, you know, a few pages of feedback. That's actually really lucky to get that sort of free feedback from someone who's publishing out in the field. Usually, obviously, you know, you don't you get a standard rejection, but it does happen sometimes, and this editor had, sort of, he had seen the book, and actually, this her definition. She called it feminist horror, which, of course, I never saw it as a horror, horror book. I remember one of my kids was looking over my shoulder, and he saw that note, and my son, and he was like, Emma, you're writing horror books. I'm like, no, no, not writing horror. It's not horror. But she she had kind of that was sort of this very, I don't know if it's a new definition or a super broad definition, but this kind of definition, if anything, the closest I could have come to that was maybe what they used to call I don't even know if they use this term anymore, but they used to call it domestic Noir. I don't know if they still use the term domestic noir, but maybe that's the closest. But I think today it's really just family drama, especially with everything we're all going through. So it's family drama. And she had suggested that I had sort of that that was one of the elements that had intrigued her throughout, but yet I had lost it at the end, because it had actually originally ended one chapter back, and I really thought about that like the second last chapter was pretty much the end. I mean, I'm sure there were, you know, a few edits there, but it was pretty much, and I really appreciate, I appreciate anyone who sits down and gives me that kind of feedback, even if they're not accepting the book, because that's really rare, and it was very thoughtful feedback. And so I really thought about that, and I really thought, yeah, maybe I kind of cheated Luna. Like, did I cheat Luna by letting that thread go? Because I was more intrigued at the time of sort of this Mary Gaitskill, I had taken a workshop with her years ago in Montreal, this kind of concept of justice and levels of justice that you have to have in a novel, whether it's physical justice, spiritual justice, material justice, some kind of Justice has to be served sort of to satisfy your reader. Because you're not just writing yourself. You're writing for your audience, right? They're investing. They took the time of spending time with you. You want to give them a story and something to think about. So I thought about it, and then I thought, you know, maybe she's right. Maybe I let that thread go in this interest of having Luna receive some justice. So maybe I'll just tweak that. And the result was that even though it was only a few pages, that last chapter is short, there was actually a lot of thought, How can I not let that go? If she thought it was so sort of "haval" [a shame], like, oh, this, this was such a good thread. And, like, where did it go? Where did that lack of better, what she called feminist horror, go? So I, I hope I did both. I got the sort of justice that I had wanted, and I kept that thread, but that was definitely, you know, sometimes that's what's so important about feedback. This is just, can make it so much better.
You really kind of left us hanging a little bit because she had been so super responsible, or wanting to be and then. But she's never had a model of how to actually do it. The only model she's ever had were these schemes. And so it's, it's not really clear, is she going to make a break and have a quote, unquote, normal, typical life, or is she going to fall into the same cycle that her mother had been in?
Well, that that's one of the questions on the back of the book. Like, can we ever leave home? Do any of us ever leave home, or do we just take it with us, which, of course, is not a yes or no question. I mean, all of us take something with us, and the question is, what do we take with us, and how much of it do we take with us? Can we transform what we took with us, etc, etc? And you know, in my mind, she just, she just wasn't old enough to know that result. I mean, if you're 19 turning 20, it's just not tested enough, is it? And how much of your home you you take with you. So that was very much. If you look at the back, there's sort of the description, and then there's that question, do any of us ever really leave home? That's the question that I'm asking people, I want them to ask themselves, does Luna leave home? Can she leave home? Like you said, Can you, can you reproduce something if you don't have a model to do it? If she says it's sort of going to be, it's a one off, you know? Is it a one off? It's, it's, yeah, it's too simplistic to me, to sort of announce what 20 year olds can or or cannot do with their with their sort of first family experience. But I hear what you're saying. Hear what you're saying, but that's definitely a question for the audience.
So would you tell me about the name of your book "With a Good Eye."
Yeah, with a good eye. On a personal level, it's kind of me myself, reclaiming a little bit. I grew up in a absolutely 150% Ashkenazi environment. Those are the only grandparents I knew. That was the only school I knew. That was the only synagogue I knew. Those were the only foods I knew. I didn't know anything else. Ottawa doesn't have a large Jewish community to this to this day, and at a lot of lot of the people who are there, who are Jewish, are not necessarily even affiliated. So it's quite small. There was one little school, and everybody went to that school, and you were sort of with the same 20 people. From three years old till 13, you had the exact same people in your class every year, boys and girls, you know, together, and everybody was there. So I never claimed any sort of non Ashkenazi part of my background. So one of the things was just personal that I wanted a hamsa on the cover, and I specifically asked the publisher to make it a Jewish Hamsa, because a lot of Hamsa don't have the Star of David and in the middle, because, as you know, it's not only a Jewish symbol, but there are specifically Jewish Hamsa. I didn't know at the time that having a Star of David on your on the cover was going to be quite, quite as, I guess, provocative, as as at the time, but it shouldn't be. And as you could say, I have other novels at the star David on the cover. So part of it was personal. I wanted to claim that a little bit sort of this idea of a good eye. And the other idea was that element, you see, that Aiden has that all the time. She talks about it, how her best friend's always talking about luck and stars and communing with the above. And that tends to be, I'm not saying it's not Ashkenazi at all, but it tends to be a more predominantly party cultural habit of of constantly referring to these kind of more spiritual elements all around all the time. They have a lot of, you know, customs around that, you know, I don't know if you're familiar, but you know, shoes have to all be pointing the same way. And if you'd like, you cannot walk into your house and, like, kick one shoe and it lands upside down, and you kick another one and it lands in another direction. That's, you know, that's not on. They're going to immediately, you know, put them both forward, obviously, not every single person, but those are the, a lot of the customs. So I wanted to reclaim that a little bit for myself and put in that element. Because, like you just mentioned, there's this idea of what we take from our house, what role. Models we have, but there's a certain element of fortune and luck too. Not everything is in the power of your parent. There is a certain amount of luck and fortune that you can have. And we shouldn't just think that, you know, our parents or our environment control everything. You know, A, A to Z. So I wanted that fortune element in there.
Did you have to do any research for your book?
I definitely had to do a lot of research about Ottawa in 1980 I had to remember, you know, how it would be the directions. It's very specific there, the direction of where that corner store was. I remember having to look up, you know, what would, what would a liter of milk have been at that time in the store? I had to look up prices. What were teenagers up to at that time? If you look at what they were doing there with them, you know, aspirin and coke and that kind of thing, that's not something that I don't think you would see anything like that today, and I think teenagers are playing with some kind of drugs. Definitely no can be aspirin. So I had to look up those kind of urban myths. Obviously, it was video games, really just anything related to the setting prices, the weather, direction, just making sure people were and I've been very gratified by the response to that, that people who, who aren't, you know, from Canada at all, but who grew up in smaller places, that it was just so nice to read a novel that wasn't, it's not New York, it's not LA, not everyone is from a big, exciting city. And so art, art should reflect that?
Yeah, definitely. So is there anything you would like to mention about the book that I haven't thought to ask about?
I would love to mention that it's my first audiobook, and that just came out, that just came out yesterday. I've never done an audiobook before, and it was finally released. So I would love to mention that,
did you narrate it?
I did. I did. And I know that's a controversial subject. I've seen those threads on social media where people are like, Oh, that's terrible. Authors shouldn't narrate the book, and other people saying, What do you mean? I love hearing the author's actual voice. So I know it's like everything else, and everybody has opinions. But I felt like I could do it. I hope so. I mean, they it wouldn't approve bad quality, right? So that's what the sound engineer told me. They said they would reject it if it wasn't. Because I'm bit nervous about how that came out. So I don't mind criticism, but I don't mind criticism, but Be nice. Be nice. I you know, I tried something new.
I was gonna say my first response would be, oh, then you pronounce the the Hebrew words correctly, because that's one thing. When they have a narrator who's not Jewish or not the author, sometimes they just totally mangle the words, and it completely takes me out of the story.
Oh, I really appreciate that point. Thank you, right? And there's a bit of French, right? Because it's Canada, and there's a bit of Hebrew and that. So yes, I very much appreciate that point. I'm going to say that, if you don't mind. And, yeah, I personally do enjoy hearing the authors read. So, you know, I'm hoping I'll get good feedback and do another one.
Great. So if someone were to use your book as a call to action for tikkun olam, for repairing the world, or really anything you would like to talk about, what would it be?
Well, unfortunately, right now, just putting the book out seems like a bit of a bit of a rebellious thing to do. Have a book out with such Jewish characters and a star of David on the cover, that's really sad to say. I would say that if they were going to use my book as a tikkun olam, it would be, you know, to read it and to realize that there are people who are going around ashamed of things, you know, with different issues that they're not comfortable thinking about. You really don't know what's going on inside people's houses or how they grew up and and they should, you know, not make assumptions about people, and it could be that people are sensitive about things or react to things because of things that happened in their past that are not processed, etc. So I hope that the book, first of all, I hope the book is obviously entertaining and intriguing and raises questions, but on that issue that you mentioned. I do hope that that prompts people to consider that, you know, usually what people's reactions are much more about them than they are about you. Maybe they should just take a breath and think about it before they respond.
Wonderful. Thank you. So if someone wants to contact you. What is the best way,
The best way to contact me. The only thing I can really keep up with is my website. I have another book coming out in March, the audiobook this book. So I really, I wish I could say I was this big social medium maven. I honestly think I'm the last person who ever joined Facebook. I try. So I really do. I the best thing is, galagreenwrites.com I try to keep that really updated. People can contact me to the site. I am on Facebook. You know, I have this very symbolic presence on other social media. I can't say that. I get to keep up with it, but I do check them so people can certainly still reach me through there, definitely or just email me through my site.
Okay, and it's Gila G, i, l, a green, and then you said, writes. Gila green, writes So no h on your note. No, great. Well. Thank you so much. Gila green for speaking with me about With a Good Eye.
Thank you. It was a real, real pleasure, and I think so important that we're all speaking, especially at this unbelievably tense time for everybody. It's just, I feel like I'm getting so much support from people overseas right now,
if you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite bordened brick or online bookstore or at your local library, thanks to diyanki for use of his Freilich, 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.jewishlibraries.org/nice Jewish books. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi. This
is Erica Lyons, and this is Christina Moula,
and we're the co authors of mixed up moon cakes.
We'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast, we'd like to dedicate this episode to the Hong Kong chapter of SCBWI, the Society of Book Writers and Illustrators, a wonderful supportive group through whom we met amazing writer friends, including each other.
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 to hear my conversation with Erica Lyons and Christina Matula about mixed up moon cakes at bookoflifepodcast com.
