I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books. Today. I am so excited to welcome Leah Hagar Cohen. Hi, Leah.
Hi, Sheryl.
So I usually start by asking the author to describe their book, not because I can't, but just to get the conversation going. But in this case, I really, your book is so intriguing. I'm really not sure how to explain it. So would you please do the honors?
I will try. Yeah, this book surprised me as I was writing it. In terms of form and content and style. It really surprised me in every way. And what I found, when I was about halfway through the writing, I found that the book seemed to want to be told in two different stories that would actually meet in the middle, you know, I began to have this, what seemed to me at the time, a crazy idea that the book would be printed so that you would start one story from one end of the book. And when you got to the middle, and that story ended, you would flip the book over, open it up from from the other side, and read the other story through. And I, at that time, I wasn't sure anyone would ever want to publish a book that way. But I felt as if the characters who are both both protagonists are young girls, sort of on the cusp of adolescence, I felt as if their journeys as I was learning more about them by writing, I felt almost as if, you know, they were teaching me how their stories were meant to intersect.
So I don't know if this was cheating or not. But I found myself reading for about, you know, a half hour on one side, and then flipped it over and read about a half hour on the other and kind of went back and forth.
I don't, I don't consider that cheating at all. And I will confess to you that that's really how the writing happened. I didn't write when girls narrative straight through and then begin the other, I kept having to go back and forth between them.
So let's talk about the girls. There's Anamea who lives in Manhattan. And she has a brother Danny, and her mother is a linguist. And she also spends time with her Nana. And then the other girl Ani, your book says lives in a parable. So that's already an intriguing hook.
Right.
And both of them spend a lot of time either thinking about or going on a journey. And it seems to get to the question of what is important. Is it the journey? Or is it the destination that both girls kind of struggle with? Could you reflect on that?
Yeah. So I really love how you phrased that. And when being that this is a Jewish space, this podcast, I just want to mention that that so beautifully, echoes something that we talk about at my shul. And I think it's a tradition in, you know, throughout Judaism, that walking to shul, if you walk to the show that's farther from your home, that that is a form of davening sort of the farther you have to go. And, and to be engaged with the journey is a form of, of, you know, devotion. So, yes, getting back to this idea of when a girl lives in parable. I, that's the part of the book I started writing first, it's the section called "To". And the protagonist for a long time didn't have a name it that part of the book is told in the first person I voice. And and what I found myself doing was I had been inspired by a Kafka parable, a very short parable, where he talks about someone who hears a sound, some kind of music that nobody else around him seems to be able to hear. And so he sets off on a journey. And the servant asks him, you know, where what's your destination speaking of that word, destination, and, and he says, it's away from here. You The only answer he can give is that my destination is away from here. And so for some reason, I really am sort of amused at myself because this was not like a, an intellectual sort of plan. I just found myself writing in the voice of a third person, someone who's not in the Kafka parable. But as if there had been a girl listening in on this conversation, who decides she needs to go off after this person who's whose ominous, mysterious journey who hears this music, no one else can hear. She needs to go after him and bring provisions. And that's that's how the narrative that is to began. And I and I really felt that I was out of my depth and had really no idea what I was doing. But there was something about this journey, this sort of journey into the unknown, that was compelling to me.
Okay, so I want to give like three follow ups. So I did love all the Jewish content. And on the "Fro" side, is, you have a quote from Pirke Avot, "turn it in, turn it for all is there" in referring, of course, to the Torah. But it kind of refers to the structure of the book and the things that link one side to the other, and each girl's journey. And at some point, Annamae wondered, why is it that some things can be communicated outright while others had to be in code? So I was wondering if this sound that the captain, the person she was following heard, was kind of a code also that only he heard at that point.
Yeah, so this book plays with the idea that there might be messages, encoded information, symbols, offering us the kinds of wisdom or, or arrows, you know, like signposts with arrows pointing us in a certain direction, it plays with the idea that we might be constantly surrounded by such sort of encoded messages. And most of the time, perhaps, don't notice them, we're blind to them, we don't know how to decode them. And that, that line from Pirke Avot, turn it and turn it for all is there. And it also speaks to my sense that a lot of my efforts toward meaning making can't be undertaken in a linear fashion. And so this idea of, you know, just as in tourists study, we come back and we read the same texts, year after year, the same week of the year, and yet they're different, right? They're different every time we encounter the weekly parsha. Because we are different or right. So it's so that that's another instance where I'm I'm interested in how, you know, if we think not so much of going in circles, but going in spirals, and how as we journey through time, and through space, we might revisit some of the same ideas that are always going to be different, they're always going to yield new new kinds of information or inspiration,
I definitely want to talk about the Jewish content. On one hand, we don't see Annamae and her family, practicing Judaism so much, but on the other hand, they have a close relationship with Rabbi Harriet, who plays a really important role in the families and especially Annamae's life. And to go backwards, a little, Annamae's a bright kid, she does well in school, and she thinks a lot about stories and fictional characters. And when she gets the assignment to create fictional characters, she refuses to do it, because she felt that she'd be creating something real, that had no self determination, that it could only do what she told it to do, or you know, described it doing it. Am I getting that right? Because it was very confusing.
Oh, I am feeling so like overwhelmed with gratitude to you in this moment. Then, because that is a part of the book that some readers just had a lot of trouble getting. And I feel like you you've praised it beautifully. That is, that is a good way to describe what's going on there for Annamae.
I'm glad I got that, right. So she basically refuses to do the assignment. So this, you know, up to this point, excellent student is failing English because she's refusing to do this assignment. So after seeing a couple different therapists who have no idea what to do with her and start diagnosing her with all these bizarre conditions, she ends up seeing the rabbi who really makes the effort to to hear her as Annamae is really struggling to explain what's going on. And they go off typical rabbinic tradition on lots of different tangents so that when you can't get at something directly, you know, sometimes coming, you come around from a different direction. And Rav Harriet really helped her to be able to explain what was going on with herself and just treated her so respectfully when saying, You know what, I didn't understand what you were saying. But I really want you know, and not you're full of nonsense, you're whatever. Okay, I'm not sure which of that I want you to respond to.
Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, that's just such a great like feast of ideas to respond to. And I absolutely so that there Rav Harriet character. She does seem to have a beautiful knack for not being unnerved by that which within Annamae she doesn't automatically understand. And I think that Annamae's experience throughout the book is so often feeling alone and lonely with her difference. And Rav Harriet even though as you say, she doesn't necessarily think the exact same things are the exact same way. But, but that doesn't trouble her and she has a beautiful ability to say, that makes me think of a question or that makes me think of a story. And so there's this sense of together, they can they can go on a journey together of wandering, without needing to find sort of solutions are fixed the problem or find an answer.
So one, we started out talking about a journey. And Annamae as a younger child would write letters to a "fairy man". Which thinking FAI ry type of fairy and she would put the letters in the radiator that that was how she mailed them. And she wanted the ferry man to take her somewhere. And then a bar opens on their street. That's the F E R ry, ferry man. And she thinks that somehow destiny that the fairy the fairy man, there will take her away.
Yes. Yeah, I think the the fairy man who you know, because as you say she's pre lingual, when she or at least pre written language, right? She doesn't know how to spell or read or write yet when she first starts fantasizing about the fairy man. And so there's this funny ambiguity, you know, is it? Is it a fairy with wings? Or is it someone who, you know, conveys a boat back and forth across a river. And, but But I love that I mean, for me that sort of ambiguity and an pinnable down nature of this imaginary being in her mind, that feels so right and so true, because so much of, of the book, both to and fro is about sort of sensing something ineffable, something that can't be pinned down in language. So I think for Anna Mae, the fairy man, who's like this presence in her in her mind or her spirit from the time she's little, it's like having an imaginary friend. And then later in life, you know, when she later in life, you know, when she's all of maybe 10 years old, when she encounters this, this new bar that opened on the corner, the ferry man, and she has this excitement, this sense of recognition, like, almost as if she He's getting drawing closer to something spiritually important, but impossible to articulate, that she is sensed and carried around with her from early childhood.
Another link that's common to both stories is a journal. So in Annamae's case, it's her own journal or diary with a lot of pictures and writings. And in Ani's case, it's the captain's journal that he had, or much of as a journal or notebook that he had always had with him, but didn't take when he just decided all of a sudden, oh, I need to leave now and didn't have it on him. Can you talk about the importance of that?
Yeah, and thank you also, because I'm realizing I don't think we've even been explicit about the fact that there are items or characters or phrases that crop up conspicuously in both of the tales, even though Ani and Anname live in different worlds, you know, and, I mean, when is living in what we might call a, you know, realistic world and the other in parable. There's this way in which we sense that there might be a conduit or a common thread between the two girls in their two worlds. And so yes, this book this, this journal, or notebook, or, in the case of Ani's story, you know, that the Captain's log, there are clues in both of the strands of, of this book, of to and fro, that it's that it's either the same book, or, or pretty darn near identical book, because we get lots of physical descriptions of the book and, and every physical description, in both to and fro, you know, they are consistent with each other, and a nice character that the girl living in parable, she can't read. That's, that's sort of something that, you know, dogs her and frustrates her throughout the narrative. Maybe if she were living in our world, she'd be diagnosed as dyslexic. But all we know from her and her world is that, although she's been taught the letters, she she struggles to put them together and struggles to perceive meaning in letters. And so she's always like showing, you know, she carries the book around, she shows it to different people. She's hopeful that someone else might be able to read it and make meaning of it, but no one no one really can. And so that book itself becomes like, a cipher or another, another vessel of the of, you know, a container of this idea that there may be coded messages in the universe, that that we may never fully be able to decipher.
And that was one thing that was a little heartbreaking for Annamae that she had kept this journal for so many years. But then when she went back to read the earlier entries, she couldn't understand what her younger self had written.
Yeah, and I feel like that's an experience maybe that we all have, that even though we are the same person that we were at birth and in childhood, and in young adulthood. There's a way in which we're also not, you know, we are at once the same person and someone else. And so looking back through time, can be, it can carry that sort of bittersweet feeling of dislocation and almost, almost this the kind of loneliness that comes from not being able to fully recall or understand our younger selves.
There's a lot of word play in your book, and a few of them were kind of laugh out loud, funny. So the book is called to and fro. And in Annie's world, she's walking and she comes to a place called to and fro. T.o.w.a.n. F.r. O.u.g.h. it's just, I laughed at leastly I'm still laughing
Oh, that's so nice. I yeah, it seemed I mean, okay, right. So there's a lot of emphasis on language and words and wordplay and letters, and playing around with letters having personalities and you know, this almost like this besotted with language experience in the book, you know, in one go I got the mother who's a linguist, and the other girl who's who's motherless by the time we meet her, you know, can't even read. And yet for both of them, I get Yeah. I mean, you've really put your finger on it. There's this, this sense that there is meaning to be had, and also this sense that there is maybe an unbridgeable gap between us and full understanding. And sure, like, uh, you know, I think that the fact that we, you know, we have the ability to create puns or to miss hear words to misunderstand how they're spelled based on just auditory input, you know, just makes it that much more sort of rich and complicated, and, and yields even more possibilities, right, I might speak a word one way, and you might hear it in a completely different way. So there is, again, that sort of poignant gap in understanding between two human beings, but there's a richness to that gap and all of this sort of play, imaginative play that can happen in that space.
You have Rav Harriet saying there was a tradition that the letters of the alphabet have a life beyond pencil and paper, a life beyond language even.
Yeah, you know, I loved learning about that. I only learned fairly recently about that kind of thinking that describes personalities, and of course, numeric values, you know, in the gematria. The letters of the alphabet all have numeric values. But in some schools of thinking, they also have attributes, characters, or personalities assigned to them as well. And then there's that story that Rav Harriet shares, this tradition, or this Midrash, about how God creating the universe with the sort of building blocks of the signs and wonders, which is another way of understanding the letters of the alphabet.
So Annamae's mother, as we mentioned, was a linguist. And so this is especially funny and sad when they had problems communicating with each other. And there was especially at one point when Annamae's trying to explain something, and her mother's trying to read her journal. And then we learn that the journal is about something about children in linguistics and language learning.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I'm so glad that you got that you were there too, because they're out there having this like, quite fraught, angry moment. And then and, and Annamae sort of resents the fact that her mum keeps going back to her, you know, professional reading. And then when Annamae asks, What are you reading? And her mother, you know, tells her it's like, yeah, the the Journal of like child, you know, the Linguistics of childhood, basically. Annamae's like, well, I guess, you know, they don't really know what they're talking about, if you can't even understand your own daughter, and, and it dissolves the tension. And they're both. Yeah, they're both laughing.
So, did did you have to do research into any aspect of the book?
Yeah, I definitely did little bits of research into into linguistics, and specifically, the the mother's field, which is, she's particularly interested in how infants acquire language, and how parents or primary caregivers interact with infants and how that builds language. And she, you know, for instance, one of the things I had never heard of, and I found, and I put in the book was this wonderful word, Motherise, which is a word that linguists use to talk about this special, you know, the, the way that mothers who are primary caregivers have of any gender, often unconsciously slipped into speaking in certain cadences and pitches, because that's what appeals to the baby. So yeah, I had a lot of fun, you know, here and there. Throughout the book, there were all kinds of moments where I would say, I need to go look that up, you know, and I spend half a day researching some little esoteric idea or subject.
Yeah, I love that. That's one of my interests at linguistics is one of my interests. And I do remember when my kids were very young, I read a lot of articles and language acquisition and what can I do to help my kids?
That's also a little bit of a theme is that in Annamae's life, most of the people in her world seem to really prize science, scientific analysis and understanding and knowledge and anime as this kid who feels a deep, deep connection to something that can never be quantified, or, you know, pins down through data collection. She's She's sort of always railing against this. The valuing of science among among her family and friends and people she knows, you know, I think she's frustrated because something she feels so powerfully is what you know, Rav Harriet finally can sort of speak that language with her. And of course, it's hugely echoed I think throughout to the to portion of the Book, the parable portion, in which there's more of a looseness around, you know, what does it mean to know something? And what are the ways of knowing and that that's something I was interested in exploring through both narratives?
Is there anything you would like to talk about or bring up in your book that I haven't thought to ask?
That's such a lovely question. Maybe I'll just say something I've been thinking about more recently, which is, you know, a book that centers to female protagonists, both of whom, you know, at least for the majority of the their stories are around 12 years old. At some point, I realized, eventually that it was almost weird. Not to, they never encountered any threat of violence. There's never any, like, sense of danger or predation. And I feel like that's, that's, it's so standard, when we're looking at, you know, pre pubescent or adolescent girls, you know, like, a standard part of that story has to be how they're, they come into awareness of how dangerous it is to inhabit a female body, in our culture, you know, etc. And so at one point, I thought, you know, is this a problem? Am I is this avoidance? Am I, you know, am I being irresponsible to write these stories? And have both girls, you know, never come to any harm? Or am I being sentimental or, or, you know, sort of sanitizing? And then I realized, no, like, I, I'm not sure why I did it. It wasn't intentional. But I began to feel that there's something very powerful about having a book and which, you know, we're focused the entire time on these two girls kind of out in the world, encountering stuff where, where that kind of danger or threat of danger is just not a part of the narrative. And that it leaves both girls, I think, free to spend their energies engaged in, you know, much more interesting questions and adventures. So, yeah, that that was something that occurred to me only really after I finished writing.
Right, I didn't catch that as I was reading. But now that you say it, that is a wonderful aspect of it. And you're right, there's way too many books that focus on violence against girls and women, that there has to be a balance that it does exist in the world, but not, not always, not every minute of every day for every female. So it's wonderful. Are there any projects in the works that you would like to mention?
I'm in the early stages of of a new novel. This one has one, one young female protagonist, rather than two. I'm about 100 pages in and I'm finding myself interested in, through her story, encountering questions of what it means to live in community with others, especially around the issue of care, our our desire to be taken care of, but also the desire to be a caretaker, to be one who administers care to others, and what does that look like at different stages of our lives?
Sounds wonderful. I look forward to just seeing it. I'll try to give everyone a moment to either stand on their soapbox and talk about anything or to use their book as a platform for tikkun olam for repairing the world. So this won't be airing until April or May. But right now, it's the beginning of February. So we're four months after October 7. And I know that that's a lot on my mind and on everyone's mind these days. So didn't mean to just seed your thought on that. But what would you I'd like to use as your call for Tikun Olam.
Yeah, thank you. And I, you know, it may come as no surprise to you that I was thinking of this question in the context of October 7 And, and the aftermath. And I can say that for me right now it feels more important than ever to keep showing up in spaces. With people who think differently from me, then it's really, really hard. You know, I find it personally really, really challenging. And I'm, it's so so it has to be something that I choose, with a great deal of intention, a great deal of kavanah to continue showing up in such spaces and not even necessarily, you know, it's not about showing up in such spaces in order to make my perspectives heard. Sometimes it's showing up in spaces to be quiet and listen and learn more. Why? Why do you know these people have such different beliefs and perspectives on the issue from me? But I'm that's, that's a large commitment I'm making these days as painful as it sometimes is. I really want I want to personally and I believe in societally, that we we need to figure out how to keep engaging with one another, even when it's really painful. And we're coming together across great differences.
That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. So if someone would like to get in touch with you, what would be the best way
it would be to visit my website, which is Lea Hager cohen.com. And there is contact information there where folks could could email me directly?
I just thought of one other question is to and fro the name of one book? Or is it the name of two books? One is "To " and the other is "Fro", which is kind of how it's set up?
That? I feel like that is such a great and Jewish question. Because I don't know that there's like an answer to that. I feel like if we were sitting around the Torah study table, or if like, you know, if we were to put this question to the, to the sages, you know, they they get when you know when Rabbi could make an argument for it's one book and another for it's two books. And then of course, the third rabbi would be like, you're both right, of course. Maybe it's best to leave it in the hands of readers to decide. Excellent.
Well, Leah Hager Cohen, thank you so much for talking with me about your book or books to and fro.
It's such a pleasure. Thank you Sheryl.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite origins brick or online bookstore, or at your local library. Thanks to de Yong ki for use of his fraleigh which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries. And you can find more about it at WWW dot Jewish libraries.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
this is Ruth Bihar, author of across so many sees. I'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to the same people to whom I dedicate my book in memory of my paternal grandmother abuela and her ood and to my granddaughters. Meilan Colette with love and hope.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish bucks. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlet. Join me to hear my conversation with Ruth Bihar, about across so many C's at BookofLifepodcast.com
