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THE BOOK OF LIFE - July Throwback: The Inquisitor's Tale | Otter.ai

THE BOOK OF LIFE - July Throwback: The Inquisitor's Tale

AJL Holly Zimmerman24min

Heidi Rabinowitz

00:00

[INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. As a follow up to my recent interview with Adam Gidwitz, and in honor of my 20th year of podcasting on The Book of Life, I'm bringing you an episode from the archives, from January 2017. I met Adam Gidwitz at an author speed dating event at the American Library Association conference, where he was promoting his middle grade fantasy The Inquisitor's Tale, which later went on to win a Sydney Taylor Book Award, a Newbery Honor, and a lot of other awards. If you enjoy this blast from the past, please check out other past episodes of The Book of Life from any time in the past two decades. Go to bookoflifepodcast.com and click on Archive in the sidebar, or just go to the episode list on your podcast player and keep on scrolling down, down, down.

Adam Gidwitz

00:53

[COLD OPEN] I haven't been interviewed about this book yet, actually, so...

Heidi Rabinowitz

00:53

Oh wow! This is the first interview?

Adam Gidwitz

00:57

Yeah, I think this is really the first interview. And there's quite a lot of territory that I've never covered or talked about. So we've got some serious original material here.

Heidi Rabinowitz

01:04

That's so exciting, I'm honored!

Heidi Rabinowitz

01:13

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. I met Adam Gidwitz at a kidlit speed dating event held at the American Library Association convention in June 2016 and I was thrilled to learn that his medieval magical buddy road trip adventure novel had a strong Jewish component. When I got my copy of The Inquisitor's Tale, I devoured it, right down to the absolutely must-read Author's Note at the back. I'm not alone in loving this book. It won the 2017 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish children's literature in the older readers category, and it was a National Jewish Book Award finalist in the children's literature category. I talked to Adam before he won anything, so that's not part of our conversation. Here's Adam on Skype from his home in Brooklyn. Be aware that the interview does contain plot spoilers, so if that bothers you, listen to it after you read the book. [END MUSIC]

Heidi Rabinowitz

02:17

Adam, let's start with a brief description of The Inquisitor's Tale.

Adam Gidwitz

02:20

So The Inquisitor's Tale is set in 1242 in France, like most popular books for young people [LAUGHTER] -- just kidding. And it stars three children: a peasant girl named Jean, a young Jewish boy named Jacob, and a young monk in training named William. William's mother is an African Muslim who was living in Spain when he was conceived, so William has half African heritage. There is also, I should mention, a dog, Guinefort, who may be a holy dog, a holy greyhound. The three of them set off across France, pursued by knights and by monks and ultimately by the king himself. The climax of the book surrounds a real historical event in 1242: something like 20,000, volumes of Talmud were brought into the center of Paris by King Louis the ninth and his mother, Blanche of Castile and burned, and Jean, Jacob, and William try to stop this event, and if they fail to do that, at least to save as many books as they possibly can.

Adam Gidwitz

02:20

What was your inspiration for this unusual book?

Adam Gidwitz

02:39

Well, my wife has been studying the Middle Ages for the last 13 years. We met in college, and her senior thesis was about the stained glass in York, England, and we took a trip there to help her do research. And ever since, we've been traveling to Europe every summer. One year, we spent a year there for her to do research. She got her PhD in medieval history, and she is now a professor of medieval history at Brooklyn College in New York. So one half of my life has been as a teacher and then as a children's book writer. The other half of my life has been following my wife around Europe, investigating museums and monasteries and graveyards, garbage dumps, all sorts of crazy places, ancient forests and learning about the Middle Ages. And I started as sort of a reluctant sidekick, and then I became an enthusiastic sidekick. And pretty soon I realized that the Middle Ages, far from being the sort of homogeneous, boring time -- they were, in fact, an incredibly rich, diverse, dynamic time with lots of incredible and beautiful things and a lot of horrible things as well. And as I learned the stories of the Middle Ages, I became more and more convinced that maybe I could write a book about them. Now, I always write for young people. I kind of think of myself as a 10 year old boy in 34 year old man clothing. I thought that the stories of the Middle Ages lent themselves to intense and exciting and adventurous events and stories and also really challenging, provocative topics for young people and for adults.

Heidi Rabinowitz

05:22

In your author's note, you say that we shouldn't call this period the Dark Ages. So can you explain why not?

Adam Gidwitz

05:29

Sure. The Dark Ages as a term is still used occasionally for the period between about 400 and about 700, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne. And the reason you might call that period the Dark Ages is because governments were so weak that there was a great deal of violence, and there was very little record keeping. And so it is dark in that we don't know a lot about what happened during that period. We know a fair amount, but the records from that period are particularly sparse. The Middle Ages themselves weren't dark at all, any more than our current age is dark. Yes, there was the Black Death at one point, and yes, there were wars of religious violence, which we still have today. But the invention of the university happened at that time. There were all sorts of scientific advances, musical, artistic advances, social advances. It was a rich and beautiful time. So to call it the Dark Ages is really to underestimate the variety and the exploration and the dynamism that the Middle Ages possessed.

Heidi Rabinowitz

06:38

Okay, so speaking of your author's note: you've got this really thorough author's note at the back of the book that readers should definitely check out. It's fascinating, and you talk about some of the historical bases for the characters and some of the events in the book. So can you explain a little bit about that?

Adam Gidwitz

06:58

Sure, the first story that I tell is a story that comes to us from a real inquisitor's memoir about being summoned to a small village in France where the peasants were venerating a dog as a saint, and holy dogs were not okay with the Catholic church at that time. So that's a cool story. And so I took that one and I put it in my pocket. And then there's another story about Guillaume d'Orange, William of Orange, we would translate that, but it's not the William of Orange who became king of England much later. This was a ninth century Paul Bunyan like figure. There are these hilarious and very bloody stories about him. There's one in which these guys are trying to kill him, and he takes their heads and he smashes them together and the heads explode, which sounds like something out of...

Heidi Rabinowitz

07:43

Ew!

Adam Gidwitz

07:43

Yeah, so like something out of an over the top horror film from today, but they thought that was funny even in the ninth century. So then I took that and put that in my pocket too, and that became the basis of the character, William. I felt like it was really important to try to give the reader a sense of what I made up and what I stole, and what I stole from the historical record and from the literary record were ideas, the germs of stories. What I created was the adventure, the journey, the characters, their emotional worlds, what they care about, and then the thematic conversations in the book, but all of that stuff is hanging on the scaffolding of either real historical events. For example, when King Louis the ninth loses the holy nail that was supposedly one of the nails that kept Jesus on the cross, and he loses it, that really happened. So that's in the book.

Heidi Rabinowitz

08:39

When he, when he loses the nail, and then when he loses... what you said, "he loses it." You meant when he has a meltdown.

Adam Gidwitz

08:45

He does! And there is a historical manuscript written by one of his companions, who is also in the book, Jean de Joinville. And he describes King Louis falling on the ground and crying and smacking his hands and beating his head against the stones. He has a tantrum. He throws a tantrum when he loses the holy nail. So how do you not have that in the book?? But to have it in the book, you need to have rich characters. King Louis needs to be imagined in a rich way, and Joinville, who's with him and the children. So I take the scaffolding of real historical events or legendary stories from the Middle Ages, and then try to hang a rich world around it, and that rich world comes from my experience helping my wife do her research over the last decade and a half.

Heidi Rabinowitz

09:27

Was there anything interesting you learned that didn't make it into the book?

Adam Gidwitz

09:31

So many interesting things. Every time I got an idea for a scene, I would run it by my wife before I wrote it, because she's the scholar, and she would say, Oh, before you write that scene, you have to read these three books. And she would get them from the library, and I would have to read them. So I would read them, or I would skim them, or I would make sure that I'd gotten the relevant information out of them. I processed and digested a lot of books over the last six years. The writing process really took me about six years to write The Inquisitor's Tale. So in the course of all of that reading, there were so many things that did not make it into the book. One of my favorites, and I'm really sad it didn't make it; there is a funerary statue in the Cloisters museum in New York, and there is a tomb sculpture of a knight lying on top of his own tomb. He has a lion at his feet to show courage. We know that he went to the Crusades, I think, because of his shield, but also because of his sword. His sword is fascinating. It does not look like a typical European sword at all. It doesn't even look like a Middle Eastern sword. It is, in fact, a Chinese sword. And this knight would have gotten the sword while he was on the Crusades, that would have come across the Silk Road from China to the Middle East. He would have gotten it there and then taken it back to France and where he came from. The Crusades were horrible for many, many reasons. They were the first large scale religious wars, at least perpetrated by Christians. But one of the cool things about the Crusades is that they really accelerated global trade. And a lot of scholars tie the beginning of the Renaissance to the global influences that were brought through the Crusades, the rediscovery of classical texts through Muslim scholarship, goods from the Far East. So, yeah, so this knight has a Chinese sword, and I had one of my Knights have a Chinese sword and tell a whole story about how he got it, but it didn't really have anything to do with the plot. And there was so much already in the book that my editor and I tried to prune away some things that even though I loved them, just weren't going to fit in these pages.

Heidi Rabinowitz

11:41

Yeah, that's too bad, but I'm glad to hear about it. So historical fiction sometimes imposes modern attitudes on characters who are living in the past. And your three protagonists, not counting the dog, are from different backgrounds, and they're living in a time when diversity is not celebrated, to say the least, but they become friends. So talk about how you avoided the trap of having medieval characters who think like modern people.

Adam Gidwitz

12:10

It's a great question, and it was one of the things I worked at the hardest. The kids don't like each other at first. They're scared of each other for various reasons. Jean the peasant girl is scared of Jacob the Jewish boy because she doesn't know any Jews. And she's certainly scared of the monk because she's had a bad experience with monks in the past, sort of coming down hard on peasants for their more old fashioned, you might say, paganistic rituals that have survived into their Christianity. So she's scared of those two. Jacob, the Jewish boy, is terrified. He's with two Christians, and his village was just burned down by some rowdy Christian adolescents, and that's why he's on the run. William is fascinated to meet a Jew in person. He's read Jewish texts, but he's never met one, and he is terrified of being in the forest with a "daughter of Eve," as he calls it, a girl. You know, Eve, in some medieval theology, brought sin into the world, and women are how sin continues to go into the world, according to that theology. So they're terrified of each other.

Adam Gidwitz

13:13

But I have this belief that children are children. I have been lucky enough as an author to travel all over the world. I have spent a week in Laredo, Texas, I spent a week in Tokyo. I spent time in Rome and in Paris, speaking to children in all of these places, and I find that children are remarkably similar, no matter where I go. The adults are very, very different. And the middle schoolers, like the 13 year olds, they are often pretty different from each other, but the 9, 10, 11 year olds, they laugh at the same jokes. They laugh at the same rate. They often answer questions I pose in the same order. You know, I get the same three answers in Rome and in Laredo. It's insane. And so while, on the one hand, I wanted these three kids to bring all of the biases and prejudices that their world and their respective worlds would have had, I also wanted them to reflect the reality of kids, which is that if you're alone in a forest with two other kids, and they, like, one of them, makes a joke and it's actually kind of funny, you laugh, and you kind of want to be their friend. If they express care about how you're doing, then that matters. We are all humans, and they are particularly, kids. So that's the balance I tried to strike. I hope, I hope that worked for you.

Heidi Rabinowitz

14:27

Yes, it did for me.

Adam Gidwitz

14:29

Good.

Heidi Rabinowitz

14:30

The line between being a good guy and a bad guy is not stable in this story. There are bad guys with motives that they think are good. There are good guys who become bad guys, but then they regret it. The kids are seen as good by some people and bad by others. So as a storyteller, how do you see the whole good guy, bad guy concept?

Adam Gidwitz

14:49

It's a really astute observation. The book I wrote before The Inquisitor's Tale was Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, So You Want to Be a Jedi. Okay, and so I was dealing specifically in black and white, you know, the Dark Side, versus the Jedi Force. This book, which I started writing before the Star Wars book (even though the Star Wars book came out first), I didn't want to do that. I was trying to write a realistic historical fiction novel with magic and legendary elements. One of the themes of the book is that human beings are complex and complicated, and nobody is evil. There are characters who do very, very evil things, and yet I try to pull the curtain back on them just a little bit so you hear their wry joke to their son in the case of Blanche of Castile. Or you understand their motivation in the case of the abbot. It's a tough thing to do for kids, but I'm not trying to teach kids about it. I just wanted that world to be that way, and kids could feel it as deeply as they're capable of feeling it. There are two inscriptions at the front of the book, and one of them is from W.H. Auden poem. "As I Walked Out One Evening," and the inscription reads, "You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart." And if there were a modern day commandment, I mean, I'm still cool with the biblical commandments, but if we needed a new one, I would say that would be it. All of us have crooked hearts, and we must love our crooked neighbors with them, as crooked as we and they both may be.

Heidi Rabinowitz

16:30

Excellent. You are Jewish yourself. Is that right?

Adam Gidwitz

16:33

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

16:34

So in writing this story about Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, how did your own identity affect the project? Do you think you would have written the book differently if you were not Jewish?

Adam Gidwitz

16:46

Yes. I didn't know I was going to have a Jewish character for a while. I was sketching out the book with Jean, with William. But when I was in France with my wife on one of these many trips, we went to the Museum of Jewish Culture and History, I think it's called, in Paris, in the Marais, which is the historical Jewish district of Paris. Looking at the various exhibits, and we came to a small plaque, and the plaque read, "We have no Jewish medieval manuscripts, because in 1242 King Louis, also known as St Louis, collected 20,000 of them and burned them in the center of Paris." And when I read that just tiny plaque amid this otherwise large and inspiring museum, it was like being punched in the gut and the face at the same time. I was staggered. I went home and I just couldn't get out of my head, because think about the context: books in the Middle Ages were not printed, right? There were no printing presses. Every book not only was written out by hand, but they didn't have paper, they used parchment in the Middle Ages in Europe, so an animal had to be killed, the hide had to be tanned. The tanned hide had to be cut. It had to be bound together. The ink had to be made by hand, and then it had to be written out. Even the copying out of the book would have taken two or three years. The entire process would have taken more years than that. And so a single book was years and years of work. 20,000 books, Talmuds, mostly, is inconceivable, the amount of work, the amount of love, the amount of resources that were just burned. So, yeah. I mean, I think any human would respond to that. I think my particular history being raised Jewish, learning about the persecution of Jews throughout history, feeling personally attacked by that. I mean, I make books. I'm a Jew who makes books, so I feel doubly personally attacked by that act.

Adam Gidwitz

18:51

Led me to infuse myself into the character of Jacob, and I think I often wrote him as if I were walking around in the Middle Ages. For the first draft that my editor saw, that was a problem. She said Jacob was not very well defined, and it was because I was just seeing the world through his eyes. There's a technique I use in the book where each chapter is narrated by a different character who's not one of the main characters, and part of the reason I did that was to get out of Jacob's head. And I identified most with Jacob because he was a Jewish boy living in a scary world.

Heidi Rabinowitz

19:26

The reviewer Betsy Bird calls The Inquisitor's Tale "game changing" in the review she wrote on her blog at the School Library Journal website. So what do you think of that? And what game would it change?

Adam Gidwitz

19:41

Well, Betsy Bird is a very, very smart lady, so I'm not going to question anything she says. I think something else she said in that review, because, yeah, occasionally I do read my own reviews. She said "religion is the last taboo in children's literature." You know, there are plenty of books about the Holocaust, there are books in which a family is religious, but to take on religious belief, to have three children, each of them a protagonist, each of them with a different view on what God is, with their own answers to the problem of evil... one of the things that the kids really deal with in the last third of the book is, why do bad things happen to good people? To take that on in a kid's book, it doesn't happen very often, that's for sure. I tried to do it in a way that allowed the reader to make his or her own conclusions. The kids don't even agree with each other by the end, and so the reader won't necessarily come to one conclusion. So if the game is children's literature, maybe we've changed it by introducing a more honest, forthright and thorough debate of different religious perspectives.

Heidi Rabinowitz

20:54

Okay. And actually, I would recommend that people read that review. I'll link to it in the show notes, because it was a really interesting discussion of the book.

Adam Gidwitz

21:03

She's a smart person.

Heidi Rabinowitz

21:04

Yeah. Are you working on anything else?

Adam Gidwitz

21:07

Yes, I have a series of books for younger kids, sort of 7 to 10 year olds, coming out in about a year. Couldn't be more different in that it is light and fun. It's called The Unicorn Rescue Society. It takes on some interesting cultural issues, but mostly it's just a lot of fun.

Heidi Rabinowitz

21:25

Okay, cool. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to talk about?

Adam Gidwitz

21:29

Food! Because I love talking about food. Époisses is a real cheese. It makes an appearance in the book, and Jean eats it, and it does smell as disgusting as I, you know, describe it in the book. We once bought some Époisses when we were living in Normandy, even though it's from Burgundy. And we went out to get some fresh bread to eat with it, and we came back and we were convinced that an animal had died in our apartment. We were sure of it because we used to have mice dying in that apartment. And so we were looking all around for the dead mouse, and then we realized it was just the cheese that we had purchased and which we then devoured, because it is delicious once you get past the fact that it smells like you're being punched in the face.

Heidi Rabinowitz

21:48

Wow. [LAUGHTER]

Adam Gidwitz

21:58

So try it. Époisses.

Heidi Rabinowitz

22:12

Okay. Well, on that note... [LAUGHTER] Adam Gidwitz, thanks so much for speaking with me.

Adam Gidwitz

22:18

Thank you so much.

Heidi Rabinowitz

22:19

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Books have dedication pages, and libraries have dedication plaques. The Book of Life Podcast has dedications too. Here's a dedication for our next episode.

Leslie Kimmelman

22:32

Hello.This is Leslie Kimmelman, the author of Everybody Says Shalom. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to my family, especially my daughter, Natalie, who had just recently returned from a trip to Israel when I began writing. A special shout out too to my wonderful illustrator, Talitha Shipman.

Heidi Rabinowitz

22:54

[MUSIC, OUTRO] If you enjoy The Book of Life Podcast, please become a patron at patreon.com/bookoflife. Past podcast guest, April Halprin Wayland is a patron. Thank you very much, April. You can also help us by leaving a review on iTunes or a comment on our blog at BookofLifepodcast.com. Keep in touch by liking our page at facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast, follow us on twitter.com/bookoflifepod, email us at bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com, or leave us a voicemail at 561-206-2473. The Book of Life is a podcast service of the Feldman Library at Congregation B'nai Israel in Boca, Raton Florida at CBIboca.org and is supported in part by the Association of Jewish Libraries at jewishlibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading. [END MUSIC]

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