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. In January, the Association of Jewish libraries announced their Jewish fiction awards. I had the pleasure of interviewing award winner Omer Friedlander and honor winner Rachel Berenbaum about the respective books, the man who sold air in the Holy Land and atomic Anna. At the time, I was unable to connect with the other Honor winner, GemmaRose Nethercott about her book Thistlefoot. The good news is that she was able to participate in a session with the other winners at the most recent ajl conference. I'm happy to play the portion of the session in which she was interviewed by fiction award committee member Hannah Srour-Zackor At the end of the interview, you'll hear the voices of the other participants in the question and answer section. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to present Gemma rose Nethercott with Hannah Srour-Zackor.
First, I just want to welcome Jenna rose. I'm so excited to meet you and you know, put a face and let's just dive right into it. So first off, could you tell us about your journey to this book?
Yeah, absolutely. Hi, Hannah. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My journey to this book is there's like literal and figurative journeys, right where when I first started, I guess when I first found the seed of Thistlefoot. I was literally on a journey I my first book, The Lumberjack stub, which is a book length poem inspired by New England folklore had been selected for the National Poetry series, and it was kind of my big break and I wanted to do it up right. And for me, doing it up right meant going on an eight month long book tour with a puppet theater in the trunk of my car. I converted the trunk of my honda fit into a little camper. Yes on if it's a very small cars, but I'm five foot two. So like kind of worked out. The headroom left a little something to be desired. But I converted the back into a bed I had the puppet theater next to it. And then I was driving around the country for eight months in a new town every two days, performing over 100 of these puppet shows that animated the book that I had written. And so while I was traveling, I became kind of obsessed with Baba Yaga is hot on chicken legs, sort of aspirationally really, I was like, you know it would be better than the trunk of a Honda Fit. I have some chicken legs. And so I I always I'm a folklorist, in addition to being an author, and so I've been familiar with this particular piece of Slavic Eastern European folklore for a long time. And I always love moments where folklore that we think of as sort of antiquated or existing in the past chafes up against the present. It just kind of tickles me. And so I have this image in my head of Baba Yaga has hut on chicken legs. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Baba Yaga, or Baba Yaga is a character from Russian Slavic folklore. Who's this kind of crone witch figure that lives in the woods in a house on chicken legs? And yeah, so I had this image in my head of this hut, just hanging out in a Walgreens parking lot and like scratching at a candy bar wrapper. And I just thought that was very funny. And so like, funny enough that I was like, I'm gonna spend the next three years of my life obsessing over this one image. And that was essentially the first seed of the book. This will foot is the story of Isaac and Bellatine Yaga, who are two contemporary Jewish American siblings in their early to mid 20s. And they inherit this house on chicken legs. In the world of this story, it it blends this Slavic folklore with Jewish history and contemporary roadtrip stories. Isaac and Bellatine happened to be the descendants of Baba Yaga and they take in this house and sort of madness ensues but yeah, it it was almost a write what you know book which sounds insane if you've read the book, given that it's about like traveling puppeteers, who live in a in a chicken legged house, but a lot of the book was reflecting for one my own life at the time Isaac and Bellatine's kind of itinerant lifestyle is very much based on my own and those of members of my family. Unity. But then as they are traveling, they learn about the past and we slip into the past in which my version of Baba Yaga is a young Jewish mother living in a shtetl in 1919 in the months leading up to a pogrom, and that version of the story is based on my own family's immigration story. So the the shtetl in thistlefoot is called Getacroka, which is a fictional name of a shtetl, but it's based on a real one called Rokhastritka, which is where my own family came from. So everything that happens in Getacroka actually happened in Rokhastritka. So yeah, it's kind of a smorgasbord of my life, my ancestors lives, folklore, imagination, all kind of rolled up into one.
Wow, amazing. There's so much here. I want to you know, dive more into. But there's one particular thing I want to go right into. And you know, a good discuss. As you've said, this book is just packed with fantastical elements and so much folklore and magical realism. But there's one character I would like to ask about, in particular, which is Thistlefoot itself. How did you go about developing the character of and creating a living house?
Yeah, so this'll foot is what I named Baba Yaga's house on chicken legs. And for one, the name came from a really interesting place, which is, in the folklore, traditionally, it doesn't have like a title, like a name. It is referred to but usually just using words describing what it is, as opposed to being given a name. And I really wanted it to have a name as a character would have. And so I kind of started by just thinking, What words do I like, like, I'm gonna have to use this name a lot. So I may as well like the word I have to say over and over again. And one of the first words that came to mind I have this, like, Word document on my laptop of just like words, I think are pretty. And I open this document, and I'm looking through I'm like, Ooh, I don't know, plume, like as your it's a very cheesy document, but thistle is in this list. And I was like, Ooh, this is great. But wait a second, like, do they even have thistles in Russia, it wouldn't make any sense for me to name this house after a plant that didn't even exist as a native species in the place where the house was born, so to speak. So I looked it up. And it turns out, not only are there very much thistles in Russia, but the specific breed of the Russian thistle and if you've read Thistlefoot, you know this history because it's the prologue of the book. But the Russian thistle, actually accidentally had seeds mixed in with the supply of flax seeds that were being carried by a group of Russian immigrants to the United States. When these immigrants arrived in the United States, and they spread this flax seed around the Russian thistle seed accidentally propagated as well. It became a rapidly growing invasive species spread across the American West, and is known to this day by another name, which is Tumbleweed. So when I discovered that I lost my mind because I was like, this is an exact metaphor for the entire book that I plan to write. This foot is a story about, you know, a story about stories, I suppose it's a story about memory, and specifically, what of ourselves is our own, and what of ourselves our memories and histories and folktales that we may never even have been told. And so this, this history of the Russian thistle, which now we ubiquitously think of as such, an American symbol actually isn't American at all. And it is this diaspora plant coming from Russia. So that I got very excited about and was the seed no pun intended of fissile foods name. As for Thistlefoot character characterizing a living house. In my natural writing voice is a folktale voice. Like I said, I'm also a folklore ethnologist in addition to being an author, so I read a lot of folklore and when I naturally storyteller, it's kind of in a folklore tellers voice. So in certain ways, Thistlefoot is my own voice. It's a way to espouse my own philosophies on storytelling on memory and on lore, using a kind of separate mouthpiece, but I wanted this whole foot to be more Jewish, I guess, culturally than I am. I was raised pretty secular, even though my mother was raised in a very Jewish household. And I wanted Thistlefoot specifically who came of age came of, I don't know if houses come of age. Ah, but you know, whatever, in a shtetl to be very sort of rooted in that culture. So I read a lot of other Jewish writers who are writing in that same tradition. So Isaac Bashevis, Singer, Shalom Aleichem, these short story writers who are creating these kinds of rye shtetl stories, and Thistlefoot's voice is a blend of those writers, my own voice, folktale tellers, that kind of classic gather around the campfire. And I'll tell you a story of voice. And it's also just like, what, what if memory could speak? That sort of literal if these walls could speak situation,
says amazing what I'm finding so interesting hearing you talk now just how much of the the personal is woven into the fabric of this story? Which I think as a real other layer to this fantastic book. I know thinking back to when you were writing this book, did you encounter any challenges in this process? Surprises? And was there any particular part of the writing that really stood out to you?
So if anyone's ever heard any interview with me ever, I famously hate writing, I would really rather be doing anything else with my time at all. Just any, like, truly anything. So in terms of challenging, yeah, no, it sucked. This book was very hard, and I was very miserable. But I'm very proud of it. And I'm very glad I did it. And I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna just keep doing it again. So, yeah, there was there was one particular chapter that stands out, which was labeled. I don't know if I shouldn't swear in this wholesome context, but it was labeled like, this effing chapter that was like the name of the document on my computer. And it was a chapter I just could not get right, I wrote it again. And again, and again, I like masticated this chapter to death. And it wasn't a chapter that was important. Or it was important only and that it was a chapter that certain characters had to just tell some information to some other characters. And because of that, it was really hard for me to make it interesting, because it was just passing information along. And it was like, That's not fun to read, or it's not engaging. And now, I don't think a reader would be able to pick this out of the lineup, essentially as being a more challenging chapter than any other. And I still thought it was a failure of a chapter. My editor, though, was like, Look, when you're looking at this chapter, you're not actually seeing what it is, you're seeing all of the past versions of this chapter layered on top of it, and all the struggle that you have spent on this chapter are layered on top of it, you're not actually seeing the chapter as it is. And I thought that was such good advice just for writing in general, and drafting and editing. And just, is that the book that I read, when I read this book is a very different book than what I what exists on the page, because I'm seeing it layered with everything that came before and everything that it was, and like we were talking about with atomic and everything that was cut and left out, you know, for better or for worse, you're seeing all this richness there that may not have made it onto the page. But I'm also seeing all of these failures there that didn't make it onto the page either. So yeah, Writing is hard, but it's worth it.
So that actually building off this question, was there any folkloric tales or elements that lived in the back of your mind that didn't make it to the pages?
Oh, that's a good question. Um, so in terms of the folklore, I mean, there's so much there's so much folklore here. And I tried to do a blend of both my own invented kind of folk lore for lack of a better word, inspired by the tone and shape of these old folktales mixed with actual folklore, both from Slavic history and from Jewish mythology. And so yeah, there's certain elements that didn't make it on that. I mean, that were chosen though to not make it in like for example, with Baba Yaga folklore, there are many elements of Baba Yaga is a character that I chose to not include, because it didn't necessarily fit with the story I was trying to tell. And the philosophies I was trying to tease out. So for example, she famously rides in a mortar and pestle like she sits in a mortar and she like steers with a pestle. And that's a big thing. And Baba Yaga folklore. I didn't need her riding around in a mortar and pestle, that wasn't necessary for me. So that's not in the story. There were certain other elements that I considered including like for example, in some Baba Yaga lore, there are three Baba Yaga and their three sisters who live in different parts of the woods and so for a while, I considered my It's a story about three sisters, and then decided no, distill it down and keep it more contained. Also, just in terms of the general mythology of the world that I built, the book is more magical realism than high fantasy, I really don't consider it to be a fantasy novel, even though that is how it is often advertised. For me, it's very much a magical realism novel in that it is just our own world with the volume knob turned slightly up. And what I mean by that is the only tangible difference between our world and the world that ficil foot inhabits, is that in the world of Thistlefoot trauma can physically alter a space or a body. And one of the ways that sufferings can alter a space is that a house can come alive. Thistlefoot is not the only living house in this world. There are mentions of houses in New Orleans having sprouted gills during Hurricane Katrina, or houses on the West Coast, filtering air during forest fires, different ways that these homes have adapted in order to help the survival of their residents. And so something that I had wanted to make it into the book but ultimately didn't fit and I had written full chapters of that were cut were stories in which the characters encountered other living houses during their travels. That had more for other reasons. So yeah, that was kind of a mythology that would have been fun to explore more, but ultimately didn't serve the story I was trying to tell.
So I can see there's been some excitement in the chat about the puppet show that you mentioned. So I would love to jump back to that. And I'd love for you to tell us more about this puppet show that you bring along with you in doing readings of your novel.
Yeah, so in addition to the lumberjack stealth puppet show that I mentioned that I was traveling with when I first came up with this whole foot. I also travel with a puppet show in service of this'll foot. This will foot the main character is Isaac and Bella teen they were raised in a puppeteering family, they are puppeteers and ultimately, they transform the house into a mobile puppetry Theater, which they travel across the United States performance from I personally was raised as a touring professional child clown, which is just a whole you know, other bag of worms for another time. And I so yeah, I grew up traveling with my dad with this is not a punchline to a joke. This is like my real life. My dad is a clown, and my mom is a therapist, and I am what you get, I guess when you put those things together. And so I really grew up touring, I grew up on the road I grew up performing, and I really really love it. So whenever I have a book come out, I'm most excited moment. You know, as much as I hate the writing or the drafting process. I love the touring process. And I love when a story becomes a vehicle for connecting with the outside world and connecting with people I've never met. So what I do with this whole foot is I actually have this puppet show that I created in collaboration with a couple artists friends of mine, where there is what's called a "cranky" Have you ever seen a cranky? No? No. So cranky is this box and it has two cranks on the top. And it contains a panoramic scroll, the big scroll that sits in the box and when you turn a crank the scroll pans across the screen showing all this panning imagery. So I have multiple scrolls that animate chapters of the novel. I also have handheld puppets that interact with those scrolls. The Scrolls are bat backlit. So it's a sort of shadow puppetry thing. And they sit in a puppet theater that looks like a house on chicken legs. The structure of the book for those who haven't read it primarily follows Isaac and Bella Chien on their travels. But it also slips into the past. And you hear stories of their ancestor, Baba Yaga living in this shtetl, and the way that you hear these stories are in the form of folktales told by the house itself. So it is these folktales that are transformed into these puppet shows. I just I think did my 50th performance of this puppet show this week. I got back yesterday from a two week tour of the whole state of Nevada where I did 11 shows in seven days. I feel very insane right now. And so Hello to you all with whatever energy is wafting off of my body. But yeah, it's a really cool show. I worked with one actually one collaborator that was really exciting that I worked with is someone named Shoshana Bass who is the daughter of especially she's the heiress to a puppet empire. Her parents, Eric and Inez. started this amazing Jewish German puppet company called Sandglass Theatre in the 1980s. She recently inherited it. What was really exciting for me about collaborating on this was, if you've read the novel, Isaac and Bellatine Tour with a show called the Drowning Fool, which was their parents, sort of most famous puppet show that now they're performing. The drowning fool is very loosely inspired by or at least the puppets in the drowning fool are inspired by puppets from a production called autumn portraits, which was a Sandglass theatre production from I think, the 80s and 90s. Created by Eric bass, and Shoshana, their daughter has been performing those pieces recently. So when it came time to build puppets based on thistle foot, I went to Shoshana to build them. So it was this kind of full circle moment where the puppets in the book are inspired by Sandglass leader puppets. And now the puppets I tour with are also built by Sandglass. Leader. Yeah, and I also collaborated with an amazing artist named Maria Cognetti, whose artist moniker is Willie Mar. Willie, like the sheep Mar, I'll type both into the chat. So that if anyone wants to, like follow them on Instagram, or whatever, they both do amazing work. Maria is also a great DJ, also my roommate, and they're all just really talented. And yeah, so I travel all over the country. I kind of go wherever people pay me to go, honestly, if my flights are covered, and my hotel is covered, like, all show up, wherever you want me.
Well, thank you so much. This was amazing. I think we're gonna go now to spotlight all our authors at once and open up the floor to questions. So thank you so much. And like I said, I think for everyone, I can see the chat. Everyone is putting a saying in the chat, come to my city, come to my city with your puppet show.
And it's worth noting that on my website, it's not updated right now. I'll update it soon. All my tour dates are, are always up there. So I do travel around a lot. I saw there was a New York request where I will be in New York during my puppet show on July 25, which is the day that the fiscal foot paperback comes out. And I don't have any Texas gigs lined up right now. But yeah, I'm popping around. I'll be in Columbus, Ohio soon. I'll be in at bookstores in Woodstock, Vermont this weekend. And yeah, anyway, can check my listings for puppet madness.
And I think a couple of folks have put links to videos of your puppet shows in the chat. I also think it found some on your Instagram, is that right?
And yeah, there's some short clips and also in service of the paperback coming out in July, we're going to release some like formally filmed really nicely edited versions of the puppet show. So if you can't make it in person, those ones will actually be like captured will capture it nicely. And I assume they'll probably come out within the next few weeks.
Oh, excellent. Excellent. So July 25. Everybody write that deep down? So while we look through for some of the questions that are in the chat, did the three of you have anything you wanted to ask each other? I promised you guys would have first crack at had questions.
I mean, I always love to ask other writers for advice. I always love to ask them. What advice do you have for new writers or, you know, writers trying to get to be better writers. Give me wisdom.
I feel like my trick whenever I'm stuck is just like gentle plagiarism. I mean, it's kind of old cheesy advice. But like, the more you read, the better you are at writing. But I think that you can take that to like a more direct level where, for example, if I'm trying to figure out how to pace something, if I'm like, When should I introduce this piece of information, sometimes I'll go to a favorite book of mine, find the exact page where they introduced a similar piece of information and say, Okay, I'm going to introduce this piece of information in my book on exactly the same page. And it's, I think, coming from poetry, it feels to me like following a form. Like if I was writing a Sistina, it's like it's more of a skeleton or a framework. And there's something about restriction of a framework that allows for more imaginative freedom. So wherever you can always find those frameworks and other books, and then kind of snatch a framework and use it to restrict yourself, which then kind of paradoxically expands yourself.
Yeah, I really like that. I guess I have a kind of follow up more on the macro level. If you if you both use a kind of model of a of a book when you're writing your your novels, not only on the sentence level, but as a kind of structurally or something kind of on the bigger scale.
Thank you both. So if you a few things first, generous. Laura mentioned in the chat that the audio she read, she listened to the book on audio and the readers really brought it to life and did you Did you have any say in the narrator?
I think? Yes. Okay, so the narrator I cannot recommend the fiscal foot audio book highly enough. The narrator January logoi, did an incredible job. She's been my favorite audio book reader for years. And I basically grovelled to try and get her to read fiscal foot. I yeah, I originally found her and this is actually kind of addressing Omar's question as well, which is, you know, I come from poetry. So I felt very comfortable and natural in terms of like on a sentence level working. But structurally, I went for, like, I had some books that I referred to on a structural level, to figure out how to like pace a plot, because as a poet, I never had to pay supply and I was also a short story writer, again, you don't really need to pace the plot in the same way as a novel. And so I was listening to January Lagoi reading this YA series I really love called The Diviners by Libba Bray. I really think that if you want to learn how to pace a plot in an engaging way, why a is an incredible resource, because a why a book has to have an engaging in a plot to keep a teenager's attention. And so the plot is going to have to be airtight. And so yeah, I was listening to January Lagoi Read the Diviners and was using that both destructured Thistlefoot, but also just becoming obsessed with January Logoi. So when it came time to do this, but I specifically requested her, and she ended up actually being nominated for Best Female Narrator In the audio Awards, which are kind of the audiobook equivalent to the Oscars. She nailed it. It's a beautiful audiobook, and I highly recommend listening to it if you're an audio book person.
Thanks, AC Rachel so that atomic Anna was also a fabulous listen with multiple narrators. So let's see. Hi, um, has a question for all three of you. Do you see the ending of the book when you when you start your writing?
Yes, I do. I see the ending. And then it changes, right. So I know that I want to start here. And I want to go right to here to this other place. And I say actually have a quote embedded in the stars where Baba Ethel says something like just because you know, the start, and the end doesn't mean you know what's in the middle. And I feel like that middle right always takes me to a different ending. But if I don't start by writing towards something, I'm completely lost.
Anyone else want to jump in with that? I don't really know. But I don't know if I'm doing it right. I think I kind of it feels more exploratory. In then I kind of figure out where I'm going. And I think that works for stories. And with the novel, maybe I'll have to kind of use Rachel's approach.
And I, I tried to know the ending with fiscal foot, the ending was the very first thing that I knew. And it had to be the momentum toward which everything moves. For short fiction, a process I really like, which I guess also doubles as writing advice is, I first try to identify what feeling I want the reader to feel when the story ends, then from there, I think backwards do what ending would have to happen in order to create that emotion that I want them to feel. And then from there, think backwards again, to what actions would have to happen in order to get to that ending in order to get to that emotion. And theoretically, you can work your way all the way backwards through the book using that method.
Great, thank you. And then here's a question for Omer from Linda. See, she says stories need multiple endings? Did you choose the more difficult genre on purpose?
I don't know. I mean, I think I started writing the stories because it felt like a good a good could finish a story more quickly than a novel. And I think it was important kind of early on to be able to finish something in terms of my writing. With a novel I think in kind of four years, it can be sort of in progress, but with a story if you can actually finish it and you can see the whole architecture of it and kind of I think your it taught kind of, I guess taught me something. And also I loved I loved reading short stories. I think that's mostly why I started reading them.
And again, I'll Marina wants to know, can you speak about the characters in the Sephardi survivor and the Millea you placed them in?
Yeah, it's kind of I mean, it kind of an absurdist story, but it's about these two kids who are Sephardi and they're jealous of their classmates who are Ashkenazi and have relatives that are survivors of the Shah. And they decide to kidnap this old man and pretend he's, he's their grandfather and He's a survivor. So it's a kind of absurd story. And it started with. I was with some friends in Brooklyn and Israelis in one guy whose family's from Iraq, I think he doesn't have any family that are survivors from from Europe. And he, he said he was always jealous of his classmates. And I thought that was kind of strange. But also it made sense. And there's this kind of social cachet to it, I guess, and the kind of absurd way. And so I was interested in writing about it. But I knew I think it's a subject that's very difficult to write about directly. And, and I needed to kind of find a way to do it. And I think humor is actually a way to sometimes tackle subjects which are difficult like that, and the character of the kind of theirs, they have a nemesis in their school, who's his grandfather's like a big Holocaust historian, and they call him like the Elvis of the Holocaust. And he was kind of based on my grandfather, who was a Holocaust historian and he's someone made a joke that he's kind of like the Elvis of the Holocaust. And so I kind of found a way of, I guess, writing about these things in a kind of absurdist way. And that was the only way I could kind of address it. That makes sense. Thank you.
Rachel says that this party survivor reminded her a little of an Edgar Edgar carrot story, but not as weird. Any last questions before we wrap up here? I don't see any left in the chat. No. Well, I really want to thank you all. Omer, Rachel, GemmaRose for joining us today for such a great conversation. Everybody go out, read the books if you haven't done so already. Get them for your libraries. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Congratulations again on your awards. We all look forward to seeing what comes next. Thank you to the amazing members of the 2023 AGL Jewish fiction committee. Rena Citron Sarah Feldman, Laura Schwartzman. Hannah's rose Zach on, thanks to Dina Herbert, who's our incoming member. Thanks again to Dan Wyman books for their generous support. And thanks to all of you for participating in ajl digital conference, a world of possibilities.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite physical or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to Der Yan Kee for use of their frailach which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find it at Jewish libraries.org/nice Jewish books. If you would like to support this podcast, please click on the donate button in the top left corner of the podcast page, or the link in the show notes. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode of our sister podcast, the book of life, a show about Jewish kidlet Mostly.
Hi, I'm Arthur Levine, the founder and publisher of Levine Kirito. I'm looking forward to talking to you on the Book of Life Podcast coming up soon. I'd like to dedicate this episode to the fight against book banning.
Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host Heidi Rabinowitz and my podcast about Jewish kidlet. Join me to hear my July 2023 conversation with Arthur Levine about Levine carrito
