THE BOOK OF LIFE - When the Angels Left the Old Country
4:37AM Dec 26, +0000
Speakers:
Sheryl Stahl
Martha Simpson
Heidi Rabinowitz
Sacha Lamb
Keywords:
jewish
demon
angel
book
story
rabbi
people
character
goats
read
living
jewishness
important
queer
idea
love
fantasy
ash
relationship
uriel
[COLD OPEN] Trying to really center it in a Jewish worldview and taking for granted the Jewishness of the universe was really fun as an exercise. So there was a little spark of inspiration from Good Omens that set me off on this journey.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly, I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. When the Angels Left the Old Country is Sasha Lamb's debut novel. It's a young adult historical, queer fairy tale about an angel and a demon who immigrate together through Ellis Island to the Lower East Side of New York. From labor unions to dybbuks to a heist, this extremely Jewish tale has everything you need for a thoroughly satisfying adventure. Visit bookoflifepodcast.com for links to buy the book, to visit Sasha's website, and even to read some of their short stories for free online.
Sasha Lamb, welcome to The Book of Life!
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So glad to have you here. Tell us about When the Angels Left the Old Country.
This is my debut novel and it is an Ellis Island era immigrant fairy tale, starring an angel and a demon who have studied Talmud together in a little tiny village in Poland for a long time. And one of the girls in their village goes missing on her way to America. So they go after her to find out what happened. And America turns out to be a complicated place full of mystery and magic and a couple of murders. It was a labor of love. So it's amazing that other people are loving it too.
What was the inspiration for this story?
There were a couple of things that sort of came together in a perfect, almost alchemical kind of way. I had this idea of the chavruta relationship as having a lot of narrative energy in it. Because the way that chavruta relationships work, where you have argument and disagreement, but building towards something, rather than trying to tear each other down, you're trying to build each other up through arguments and disagreements. That relationship was very interesting to me. And it has a lot of dynamic force. And then you have famous chavrusas, like Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, who are kind of this odd couple, mismatched, the bandit and the scholar who end up having this really deep, really important relationship through being partners in Talmud study. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to see people who are supernaturally opposites, being partners both in Talmud study, but also as they move out of the study hall and into the world? How does this partnership work, and it sort of draws them forward, the push and pull and the tension between the angel's principles and the demon's principles and how each of them approaches the world. But at the same time, there's this deep, loving relationship at the heart that keeps them together, no matter how much they disagree. So it was really that Chevruta relationship between opposites that came to my mind. And then I thought that would be really fun to do as an immigrant story. I had just finished my history degree, and I had written a master's thesis on the National Council for Jewish Women's immigrant aid efforts in the 1920s. So I had read all of this background about immigration starting in the 1880s and up until the quotas in early 1920s. And so I had all of this research already kind of pre-loaded, and it was almost relaxing to write a story and be like, I'm going to take all of these things that are sort of core to American Jewish identity, this immigrant story, and bring in the fairy tale element and the chevruta relationship and it all came together really, really nicely. And I'm very proud of the results.
It sounds like kind of a perfect storm.
Yeah. It was really... the first draft took me about six weeks from start to finish. Then it took much much longer to edit and bring it to its finished form. But it was one of those books that just had its energy from the beginning of it and really brought itself to life.
That's amazing!
To have this be my debut was very, very exciting. Yeah, it's amazing.
I don't want to assume that all of our listeners know what "chavruta" means, so could you define it?
Yes. So chavruta is the traditional method of studying Talmud, where you study in partnership of two or in small groups, you sort of work through problems as a team. The Talmud is written almost in shorthand, the grammar is very, very spare. So there's a lot of room for interpretation. And there have been a couple of thousands of years of people wrestling with it. I've experienced this, it is a lot easier to stay engaged with such a difficult text when you have a partner. But also in the Talmud itself, you have these partnerships that are often defined by their disagreement, because the important thing that caused them to be written down is the fact that they have opposing views. And so Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish are one of the most famous pairs and their backstory is that Resh Lakish was a bandit, and Rabbi Yochanan is a very prominent scholar and he's also very, very beautiful and Resh Lakish sees him bathing in a river and thinks he's a beautiful woman, leaps into the river to sort of say, like, "Hey, what's up?" and, and Rabbi Yochanan is like, "you should become a scholar, and you can marry my sister who's just as attractive as I am." And so Resh Lakish marries Rabbi Yochanan's sister, and then they go on, the two rabbis, to have endless disagreements and arguments, and they show up again and again and again in the Talmud. Finally, Resh Lakish died of old age and Rabbi Yochanan was utterly heartbroken because no one could attack his arguments the way Resh Lakish used to do; he almost seems to have died of a broken heart because...
Aw!
...everyone who was left around him admired him too much to challenge him. The idea of a challenge that kind of keeps you going is very important, both to the idea of chavruta in general and to the story of When the Angels Left the Old Country.
It's an interesting answer. Your publisher, Levine Querido, describes your book as the queer love child of Sholom Aleichem and Philip Roth. Can you unpack that for us?
I'm less familiar with Philip Roth, but Sholom Aleichem was a very conscious influence. I wanted to have the feeling of a Yiddish classic. So I drew also on Isaac Bashevis Singer. He even has a very good story, it's about a demon who's the last survivor in his village after the Holocaust and he's reminiscing about being able to torment the rabbi, when there was a rabbi. And now there's no one left. And I sort of drew on that idea of a patron demon in setting up Little Ash and the angel as patrons of their own village. So along with a fairy tale, I was drawing on classics of Yiddish literature, or American Jewish literature, and the sort of collective memory of immigration. And I wanted to bring all those together, almost in a way like the Golem and the Jinni. I love that book. I love the way it brings together the immigrant story and the supernatural story. I wanted to do something like that, really paying homage to the history and the memory and the literature. But bringing myself into it, bringing that queer relationship to the heart of it, and there's angles of disability in there that were very important to me. So it's really gratifying that people have been responding to that feeling of being a classic, while also having the strong central queer relationships. That's very, very important to me. And it's one of the reasons that I knew that Arthur Levine was going to be the right editor was that his response immediately was, I want this to have the feel of a classic while still being modern and new.
I can't really imagine it with any other publisher, actually.
Yeah, it was a preempt from Levine Querido because they are so small, they can't really compete at auction. But when I heard the name, Arthur Levine, I was like, Yeah, I have no problem being preempted here.
Perfect.
And he worked personally on the book, which was really amazing for my first novel to work with someone as good at their job as Arthur is and the assistant editor Maddie was also great. Everyone at Levine Querido has been amazing.
Well, you all did a terrific job. A review in Kirkus says "queerness and gender fluidity thread through both the human and supernatural characters, clearly depicted without feeling anachronistic." So you talked about this a little bit but talk some more about the role of queer identity within the story.
I wanted to draw out the homoerotic or romantic possibility from the chavruta relationship, which you can certainly read Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish as a homoerotic relationship, if you're inclined to do so. In my own life, I also feel that my romantic relationships are very much defined by the feeling of teaching each other new things and exploring things together. So that's something that's very close to my heart, I wanted the human characters queer as well, so that you kind of get a sense of a cosmos or a universe of queerness. So we have the two central supernatural characters, Little Ash and the angel Uriel. The angel is genderless. And Little Ash has a certain amount of gender fluidity to him. Then there's the human characters. Rose, who is going through this experience that a lot of young gay people have where she has this really intense friendship, she suddenly finds that she's reacting to good news in her friend's life, "Oh, I've become engaged to the boy that I really like," She's reacting to that like it's a betrayal instead of feeling happy for her friend. And she doesn't quite know why she's reacting that way. That story of that reaction that you're like, what's wrong with me? That's an experience that I've had and that I think a lot of people have had. And I wanted to deal with that with a character who doesn't have the vocabulary to easily figure it out, but still giving her a happy ending where she finds the right person. Maybe she doesn't still have the vocabulary to know why that's the right person. But it was.
I read your short stories that are available online: Avi Cantor has Six Months to Live, and Epistolary. And they were both terrific. And they both had a great combination of Jewish identity and queer identity along with magical elements. So can you tell us a little bit about those stories, and also how they relate to the novel if they do in any way?
Avi Cantor was the first thing that I had published in 2017. That one really sort of taught me that I could do this, like it was like, I can really write a story. It has some elements that will be familiar to anyone who reads Angels, but about two trans boys in high school, and one of them has psychic visions, and the other one is just having a really hard time. And they meet this demon Lilith, who runs a little bakery cafe at the crossroads, and she helps them out with her demonic magic. It does explore some themes that are constant in my work. I think there's this theme of finding connection to other people and finding your place in the world and the question of what is a monster? And is a monster a bad thing to be? Those are questions that I definitely think that piece has in common with the novel. Epistolary was more of a fun little one. But it does have another thing that has been interesting to me, it's a relationship between two Jews who are at different levels of observance. They have different Jewish backgrounds. With Little Ash and Uriel, the angel in the novel, they both have very different approaches to their Jewishness, because an angel is very focused on positive mitzvot and being kind. And it has this idea of itself as a guide to people, but it actually doesn't connect to people very well, it has difficulty with actually interacting with people. And Little Ash is a demon. But he's very passionate about the fact that he's a Jewish demon. And he has approaches that are often like not following the rules, but in a way where he's like, I'm going to break this rule in service of my idea of my own Jewishness. So they have this different levels of observance, or different ways of approaching being Jewish. And I think that's one of the things that's really cool about being Jewish is that there are those different ways of approaching it. And we can, I don't want to say, pick and choose because that sounds a little, I don't know, it sounds a little shallow or something. But the idea that you have the freedom to connect in different ways and to interpret things in different ways depending on what's most meaningful to you, that's really important and powerful to me. And I wanted also to show with the historical setting, that that's always been true. Like we sort of have this idea that history is a little flatter than the present. It's like, oh, everyone in the shtetl was universally quote unquote, Orthodox, which also, the idea of orthodoxy wasn't really invented until there was a Reform for it to be in opposition to. So we have this idea that everyone was like at the same level of observance all the time. But if you think about it, you go back to the prophets, they're saying everyone's doing it wrong. So clearly, even back to the prophets' time, there were people doing Jewishness differently. So I wanted to play with that and be like, everyone has their own way of doing it. And the history is just as complicated as the present.
I love that. I'd like you to give a little more flavor about Epistolary. So you gave one important element of it, but just a little bit more, what it's about.
Yeah, it's about trans boy teenager, and he's earning himself pocket money by rehabilitating stuffed animals from Goodwill by giving them backstories where he pretends that they're haunted dolls, like there's this great little economy of haunted objects that gets sold on eBay and whatnot. And he's selling one that's a frog. And he gets an angry email from someone who says, "That's my frog. And I want him back. I didn't give him away, I lost him." And so they have this playfully antagonistic correspondence where they're working out like, "can you prove it's your frog? Like, what are his distinguishing marks, you have to ransom the frog back, I worked hard on writing this haunted story for your frog." And they get to be friends through this antagonistic email correspondence. The prospective character Leo is sort of secular humanist and Jewish. And then it turns out that the other person, Sivan, is non binary conservative. That's where the different levels of observance come in. But then they meet up and they realize that they really like each other.
What I especially enjoyed about that story... I mean, I enjoyed pretty much everything about it. But one of the things that I really thought was interesting and intriguing for me was that, because it's basically in two first person voices, because it's them exchanging messages, you never really have to think about what gender anybody is, like, you could not know the gender of anybody in this story. And it would make absolutely no difference. And yet, they're flirting and it's like a romance. And it's irrelevant what gender either of them is. And that's different from most of the rom com type stories I've ever read. So I thought that was really cool.
Yeah, I think probably more kids now are experiencing this, where you get to know people by their personality before you might know what they look like. You might not know what their pronouns are, you might not know where they live, you can have all of these interactions. And you can get to be very good friends and have really deep emotional experiences with people without knowing those outward qualities that once upon a time were really hard to avoid. And so that was definitely one of the things about writing an internet epistolary story that I found fun and meaningful. So I'm glad that you mentioned that. Yeah.
That's really interesting. So, to me, the partnership of the angel Uriel and the demon Little Ash was very reminiscent of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, which features a friendship between the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley. Was that an influence on you?
It was a sort of spark to the tinder because I had just finished a draft of a much more difficult novel. And I was feeling really emotionally worn down by that, and thinking I want to just write something fun. And then the Good Omens Amazon show came out and reminded me that Good Omens existed. And I thought given that Good Omens, takes place in a universe where the Christian Bible is true, presumably, it's a Christian apocalypse is taking place. It's hard to imagine, and a little bit uncomfortable to imagine, Jews existing in that universe. But I thought, I wonder what that kind of relationship would look like in a Jewish cosmos? And that was kind of the spark that set me to thinking, this goes well with the idea of this marriage of opposites Chavruta relationship, if you had an angel and a demon in that context, that would be really cool. And trying to really center it in a Jewish worldview and taking for granted the Jewishness of the universe was really fun as an exercise. So there was a little a spark of inspiration from Good Omens that set me off on this journey.
You were saying that the world of Good Omens is basically a Christian world. And in your book, you've created a Jewish world where the heroes and the villains and the humans and the supernatural beings are all Jewish. The one non Jewish character I particularly remember, is the Christian demon posing as a doctor on Ellis Island, and he is antisemitic. Tell us a little bit more about that character.
As they go through their journey to America, the characters do encounter a few Christians. There's only one supernatural Christian character, though, and that is a demon doctor at Ellis Island, and Little Ash runs afoul of him, and he's explicitly an antisemite, but he's also been targeting other Christian demons. That character of the demon doctor kind of represents a twisted institutional power, a kind of institutional power that harms even people who belong to its own community, as sort of patriarchal eugenicist creature inhabited in this sort of vampiric doctor character.
So the story is called When the Angels Left the Old Country, but really, it's one angel and one demon. So can you explain the title?
We have some stories in Jewish folklore, where the line between angel and demon gets a little bit blurry. For instance, there's the Angel of Death, who usually appears as a sinister figure, and often can be quite dangerous. It's not always a compassionate image of death. And sometimes the Angel of Death can be unjust. And there are stories of fooling it and getting one over on it, even though it's a natural source and like a necessary part of the universe. So there's the Angel of Death. And it's like, in what way is the Angel of Death unlike a demon, it's not entirely clear. And then there's another little folkloric joke that is kind of in the background of Uriel and Little Ash's existence is the idea of the Shabbat angels who follow you home on Friday night, and one of them is good, and one of them is evil. So what's an evil angel? And is an evil angel, perhaps a demon? So the idea with those two, they follow you home on Friday night, and if you're well prepared for Shabbat, the good angel will say, "may it be also thus on the following Shabbat" and the evil angel is compelled to say "amen." And vice versa, if you are not prepared, the evil angel says "may it be thus on the following Shabbat" at the good angel has to say "amen." So they're partners and they're opposites. And they're both called angels, but one of them is unequivocally evil. And one of them is good. So here's a couple of parts in the story where Little Ash refers to himself as the wicked angel. Again, this idea that it's not always so clear what the difference is between an angel and a demon. We also have stories, there's a couple in the Talmud of demons who are helpful or hanging out with the rabbis. There's this demon called Joseph who hangs out in the study hall. And his opinion on the law is cited at least once. One of the rabbis basically just says, "Joseph, the demon told me that it is thus" and it's like, what what is a demon doing in study hall? What does this mean? And there's another story where a demon basically possesses the daughter of some Roman official in order to get the Romans to tear up a decree against the Jews. So he's a helpful demon. His name is Ben Tamalion. And Little Ash in the story actually cites these cases to say like, "Yes, I'm a demon. And yeah I am a creature of wickedness. But also, I'm part of the Jewish community. This means a lot to me, don't you remember these other demons who are in your holy books who have served the Jewish community?" So you can be a wicked angel or a good demon.
So once the angel takes the human name of Uriel, it starts to experience life in a more human way, and it likes it. And this reminds me of like Data on Star Trek, or even Pinocchio, this drive for non human characters to embrace humanity. Do you think this trope is just our own human bias coming out? Or is there more to it than that?
It might be a bit of human bias. For me working with the character of Uriel, it's a little difficult to imagine as a human being who has always had some continuity of identity and I obviously, we move forward in time only. And we evolve as we move through time. So it's very difficult to imagine a creature that doesn't do that. Uriel's identity is not a perfect direct analogy to transgenderness. And I didn't want it to be a direct analogy, but it is about looking at a role that you have in the universe or in your life, and thinking, this doesn't quite fit, and there's something beyond it, or another layer on top of it, or something that I need to work out for myself in order to feel entirely myself. So the background of the angel character is the idea from folklore, that angels change their identities, they change their task, and they sort of can't hold two ideas in their head at one time. They change their nature and their identity according to what they're doing. The angel at the start of the story changes its name according to what it's feeling or what it's doing. As it's pushed out of the comfortable context that it has been in, it starts to realize, in order to hold on to the parts of itself, that it feels are important as an individual, it has to find a way to move past that angelic identity of changing tasks. And it might even have to reject the idea of doing what the universe wants it to do in order to continue to be itself. So maybe it is human bias. I don't know, it's really interesting. And I did give it a lot of thought about how would I write an angel that kept that fluid identity for the whole narrative? And I'm not sure that I know how to do that. I'm not sure I could.
Yeah, because of course, all the authors I've read are human! So you know...
I have not read any who weren't!
This this thing, this trope keeps coming up because of who's writing it, presumably. But you know, it also seems deeper than that.
Yeah.
This fantasy is also a historical novel. So you mentioned that you had done a lot of research as you did this research for your degree and/or for this book. Was there anything that surprised you? Or was there anything really interesting that you wanted to include, but you just in the end, you couldn't fit it into the book?
There was one little section near the start when the characters are in Warsaw that got cut out, where there was a family who were forgers, they were running an illegal printing press. And they were also sort of a whole family of queer people living together with falsified legal documents to allow them to live together. And that actually came from a real article from the interwar Warsaw Jewish press, which appears as an excerpt in two amazing resource books. One is Bad Rabbi by Eddy Portnoy, a collection of clippings from the interwar Jewish press in Eastern Europe. And it's all the like goofiest, true crimey-est, weirdest, most human Jewish news. And you get this amazingly three dimensional picture of Jewish life right before the Holocaust. And the other book that this source appears in is A Rainbow Thread, edited by Noam Sienna, and it is a source anthology of queer Jewish history. So the anecdote that appears in these two books is about an illegal printing operation that was busted in, I believe it's Warsaw, where they had been printing up false identity papers for Jewish young men for two purposes. One, so that people would be able to emigrate who weren't able to get legal papers to emigrate. And the other one was, they were printing new identity documents for men who were living a homosexual life and did not want their families to know about that. So they were living under new names in order for their families not to find out about their gay life. Unfortunately, we know this because the printers were arrested, but it's really cool that this existed and it gives you a sense of there was probably a much bigger queer life going on that didn't get busted. And so I was not able, in the end, to have the characters who were inspired by that story stay in the book because the momentum was not working. And sometimes you have to cut things out that you feel are very, very cool. So that's one of my favorite parts. Another story, which also appears in A Rainbow Thread was a young person who was living as a husband to another young person, they were both Jewish, they worked in the factories, and the one who was living as a husband died, and was discovered, quote, unquote, to have been female. We don't know if he was a trans man. Or maybe they were a lesbian, but living as a man to get better jobs and better wages. Died of tuberculosis, if I remember correctly, from working in bad factory conditions, and the same character who was inspired by the forgers was also a trans man inspired by that story and by the knowledge that such people definitely existed and definitely were part of Jewish communities.
Very interesting. I recently watched Enola Holmes 2 on Netflix. And it reminded me of When the Angels Left the Old Country in that it was a fun adventure taking place in the midst of the labor movement. What is it about the labor movement that interests you and what makes it a good setting for your book?
American immigrant Jewish secular culture is very focused around the memory of labor organizing and unions and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire disaster and all these kinds of things. That was something that felt very natural to include and have it as part of the setting since Jewish immigrants were so so involved in the labor movement and socialism around the time period that the book is set. It's also an area where young women were very active politically. Rose Schneiderman, who Rose in the book is named in honor of, was a teenager when she became a leader in the garment unions. I grew up reading historical fiction about girls who were involved in the garment trade and involved in unionizing. So it means a lot to me. And I just wanted to put in the book, because I wanted to put everything in the book that means the most to me, and I really enjoy reading about girls who are as young as 14, 16, 18 years old, and getting involved in these complex negotiations about their own rights as laborers and understanding their value as laborers and being able to unionize and push back against exploitation. Because, you know, teenage girls are vulnerable, but they're also strong, and put more than one teenage girl together in a team and you've got a lot of power there. You know, it's part of the story of the Jewish immigrant experience.
Just over a year ago, I interviewed Gavriel Savit about The Way Back, and we talked about how rare it was to find Jewish fantasy. And I think even just in the last year, I think it's starting to pick up. So what are your thoughts on the state of Jewish fantasy fiction?
I'm really very, very excited. I love The Way Back. It's on the shelf behind me as we speak. When I really started to get into children's literature, it was after I graduated from college, it was around 2014. And I was deliberately looking specifically looking for books with dybbuks in them. And I found a couple of things. There was a middle grade series by Chris Moriarty that never got finished. The first two books came out, but it should have been longer. There was the Golem and the Jinni. But they were few and far between. And people were saying, like, Jews don't write fantasy, for whatever reason. It's like somehow alien to Jewishness. But now we have The Way Back, which won a Jewish Book Award. We had The City Beautiful last year was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award...
...and the winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award.
Yes. And that book I love. I was really, really excited when it came out. And Aden Polydoros, the author of The City Beautiful, has a middle grade coming out that's also a Jewish fantasy. And there's Becca Podos with From Dust, A Flame. And in adult we have Ava Reid. We have Rena Rosner. So it's like this is now a genre. It's not just a book or two. So I feel very, very excited. And I love that I'm not the only one, like I'm going to be on the shelf in the bookstore next to others who are also doing this. And I really hope this continues and I hope that the success of Ashkenazi Jewish fantasies sort of open the field up so that we can get more fantasy from Sephardic or Mizrahi perspectives, other Jewish communities from all over the world.
Excellent. Yes, I think it's an exciting time. I understand that you are or have been a proud owner or coparent, I think I saw it listed as a herd of goats. And when I spoke to Sofiya Pasternack about her Jewish fantasy Anya and the Dragon, she also talked about her love of goats and her experience with goats. So is there some kind of connection between goats and fantasy writing?
I don't know if there is, but there actually, funnily enough, is a connection between goats and Yiddish culture. Did you know this? The little white goat is kind of a mascot of Yiddishism. And it's actually the mascot of the Yiddish Book Center, the little white goat. But I know Sofiya Pasternack, we have the same agent. And I was so delighted by the goat when I read Anya because the goat reminded me so much of a goat that I also know that I love. So my partner has a little flock of miniature goats, and also now miniature sheep. I love them. I have always really loved sheep and goats. They're my favorite animals and goats are so weird, and mischievous and goofy. They have those alien eyes. They're very compelling creatures. I don't know what it is about them. But yeah, I love when I see a goat in fiction.
So when you say miniature, how small are they?
They're like the size of a golden retriever.
Huh. Cute!
So full size goats can be like 100 pounds, these guys are like 30 or 40 pounds. They're liftable.
That's so cool. What are you working on next?
I am at the very, very early stages of another historical fantasy that would be set entirely in the pale of settlement. It would have dybbuks. And it would also have an angel in it, but a very different kind of angel. And I'm just starting working on that one. So we'll see how quickly it goes and where it goes. But I'm excited about it.
Okay, good. Looking forward to that. It's Tikkun Olam time. What action...
All right!
Yeah! What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
I was just reading a very interesting website and database about sundown towns. These are towns that historically and some still, at least in an unspoken way, have excluded black people. Some of them also excluded other groups, including Jews, at times, there is a website at justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns. Tougaloo, that's the historically black college in the South. This database has sundown towns listed from every state. So if you are anywhere in the United States, and you don't know if there are sundown towns near you, towns that have historically excluded black people from stopping there overnight or from living there, you can look at that, and I guarantee you will find one. And if you happen to ever have been told don't go to this town, it's dangerous. Or if you have any kind of research information about a town that is or has been a sundown town, they take comments, they will take evidence either to say this is or this is not a sundown town. And so if you have any information about that you can go and you can contribute and you can help build this resource. And I think that it's very important to keep in mind that racism is a problem that exists all over the United States. And it's often in these very hidden ways. And bringing it to light and sharing information, and keeping each other safe, is very, very important. So I would encourage everyone to check out that database, make any contribution that you might have or just learn from it.
That's really interesting. How did you come across it?
I was just on Twitter, reading people's stories of uncomfortable experiences they've had on road trips, basically. And someone helpfully dropped the link to the database in the thread and was like, send them your anecdote, like let them know. So it's really good to have these things be discussed in the open and for people to be able to share them. I'm glad I ran across that link because it was very informative about some of the towns nearby to me that never officially had a policy of exclusion but are very, very segregated. Where I live in the Boston area is still incredibly segregated. And there are a few towns, Brookline, which is also a big Jewish community center, might have had an unofficial policy of not allowing black people to reside there at some point. So it's important. And it's good to keep in mind the ways in which Jews who are pale of complexion and European of origin can sometimes skirt past these discriminatory systems that catch other Jews and catch other people of color and other groups who are marginalized. And it's very important for us to work together and communicate with each other in solidarity in order to thwart those systems.
Excellent. What was the easiest part of writing this book and what was the hardest part?
It was surprisingly easy to just get a draft out. The story sort of propelled itself. But what was very difficult was then going back and sort of reshuffling the puzzle pieces being like, Oh, these, this doesn't actually fit here. This doesn't actually fit here. And it was very, very challenging. But I actually found that I really liked it too, because there's something satisfying about almost like, ripping out knitting that you've missed some stitches, and you've messed up the pattern. There's something satisfying about ripping it out, and then going back and doing it perfectly. And that was kind of how editing felt. It took me a long time. But in the end, it just felt so good to think I created something and then I ripped it apart and made it something better. It's really cool to feel like I can do this. I've done it now. Moving from a story to a book. It's a big project. And it's something that I didn't quite know that I knew how to do. But having done it, like, that was amazing. I want to do it again!
Yes, please do it again! That's great. Sasha Lamb, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is Martha Simpson, chair of the 2023 Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to my husband John, who called out "More books for Martha!" every time we received another package of books, and he cooked dinner so I could have more time to read them all.
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through Bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!
[MUSIC, PROMO] Regina had her ticket. What she didn't have was permission to leave or settle elsewhere. Soviet citizens were the freest in the world. Maintaining this freedom necessitated their leaders knowing where each was at all times. This led to stability, the seedbed of liberty. Regina fled Moscow for the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, but instead of being the refuge she desired, it set her on a course of impossible decisions, which changed every aspect of her life. Join me for a conversation with Alina Adams about love, healing and life in the Soviet Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan at JewishLibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.