Q. Readers will be fascinated by the four short stories within your novel THE ANGEL OF LOSSES, written by your absent character Eli Burke, your heroines’ grandfather. How did you decide to write short stories within a novel? Like jewel boxes within a larger jewel box?
In my research, I immersed myself in Jewish folktales and legends, and that idiom felt natural to me when I began writing. I was also thinking a lot about the historian Yosef Yerushalmi’s theory of Jewish historical memory. He argues that Jews traditionally have described their history with semi-fictionalized stories instead of dates, names, and facts. Meaning is valued above historical accuracy, and that meaning often lies in how stories refer to and differ from one another. For Eli, fairy tales are a way of telling a history that he’s unable to communicate—or even personally confront—head-on.
Q. How much of your novel is based on history and the writings of real Jewish scribes and mystics, and how much did you make up for the purpose of fiction? How did you do your research?
I began by searching for “wandering Jews” in Jewish folklore and history. I read collections of folktales and biographies of medieval Jewish travelers; eventually, these led me to Kabbalistic philosophy and accounts of Jewish Eastern Europe, contemporary Jewish sects, and scientific and political arguments about Jewish identity.
The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses, their characters and particular concerns, are fictional (though their names appear in other Jewish texts). The Lost Tribes and their home beyond the Sabbath River, however, are mostly grounded in Jewish tradition, and the White Rebbe’s brother is based on the mystics Joseph della Reina and Abraham Berukhim. As a whole, I think of the White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses as my invention, while their world is built from Jewish legend and history.
Q. Talk a little bit about the concept of the Sabbath River and how crossing it would bring one to the land where the lost tribes of Israel now reside – how does it link up with the Jewish idea of the Messiah?
The story of the Jewish messiahs—there will be two—is complicated. What is most important to me is not the men themselves, but the paradise that they herald. Exile is a key Jewish concept: exile from the Garden of Eden, exile from God, exile from a physical homeland. The Messiah brings the end of exile, which is often associated with the return of the Lost Tribes to Israel.
The spiritual and political implications are all layers in the book, but at the heart of it is the universal feeling that drives Marjorie, Holly, Nathan, and Eli: a pervading sense of loss. They’re trying to make sense of it, and correct it, in their own ways—and learning to respect one another’s struggles.
Q. When, historically, did the tribes get separated and where did they probably end up?
In the 8th century before Christ, the Assyrians invaded Israel and took 10 of the 12 tribes captive. These Israelites were resettled in other parts of the Middle East—or so goes the story. Historians are divided on how much of the population went into exile, but tend to agree that their fate was assimilation with their new neighbors.
The tribes’ disappearance has always been associated with the greater Jewish exile, and their return with the coming of the Messiah, or redemption of the world. Even in modern times, there remains a keen interest in identifying their descendants, whether that means locating strains of Jewish practice among ethnic groups in northern India or genetic markers in the blood of southern African tribes. (The Lost Tribes also play a large part in Mormon theology and history, but that’s another book.)
There are many fascinating stories about the contemporary hunt for the Lost Tribes, but I’m most interested in two aspects. First, what drives the people—not all Jewish—conducting this search? Certainly, some of them are invested in the apocalyptic promise of such a find—the 21st-century Joseph della Reinas, going off to find the Messiah. Second, what makes a person Jewish? (Or, for that matter, American or Italian or Japanese?) One could nominate genetics, language, culture, history, and place as defining factors in our identities. There may not be an answer but the interrogation itself is so important.
Q. The Angel of Losses is such a fascinating construct – is it based on the Angel of Death or the Devil one makes a deal with (Faustian bargain, Dorian Grey, etc.)? How so?
My initial inspiration was the eponymous immortal of Charles Maturin’s 18th-century novel Melmoth the Wanderer, who has made a deal with the devil in exchange for eternal life, and is now haunting his descendants, looking for someone to relieve him of his curse. Like many of the Wandering Jew figures in British literature of that time, he’s modeled after Faust.
Jewish angelology is wide-ranging and contradictory, especially when you consider beliefs that evolved in vastly different parts of the world, and that gave me the freedom to create my own creature. To return to the British gothic, my Angel of Losses is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of Jewish angels.
Q. Who does the White Rebbe represent? Is he emblematic of a real Rabbi? What does his little black dog mean?
I found the White Rebbe in a Polish-Jewish folktale. He sends a goat into a cave, and when the animal disappears, he determines that the cave hides a secret path to the Holy Land. The White Rebbe follows and is never seen again. That story struck me and I borrowed the name. The little black dog comes from a Joseph della Reina legend; his punishment is transformation into a dog.
My White Rebbe isn’t based on any particular rabbi, and though his roots are very old, he’s a fairly modern person. He’s struggling with what it means to be his father’s son, what it means to be a member of a nation or tribe, what he owes his loved ones, and what he owes himself. If he’s emblematic of anything, it’s these eternal questions that plague Marjorie and the other characters, and how our pasts inform our responses to them.
Q. Your heroine Marjorie is doing her doctorate on the Wandering Jew at Columbia University (where you went to school). Most of us have a preconceived idea about the legend and think it represents the Jews in Exile, but that’s not the full story. How did this legend come about?
I always assumed that the Wandering Jew was a Jewish creation, a metaphor for the diaspora. In college, I learned that the Wandering Jew is in fact a Christian legend: a man (sometimes a Roman soldier, sometimes a shoemaker) who taunted Jesus as he carried the cross, and was punished with immortality, to “tarry” on earth until Jesus’ return. Immortality, not wandering, is his essential defining characteristic; the German-language term translates to the “Immortal Jew.” There are different iterations of the Wandering Jew, and a thousand-year-long history of the legend in Christian Europe. In my studies, which were focused on 18th-century British literature, he mostly appears as a sinister wizard or Faust figure.
I was absorbed in these 200-year-old English ghost stories, their thrills but also how they tackled family, gender, and nation. I realized pretty quickly that I could write my own gothic novel by rewriting the Wandering Jew using Jewish tradition.
First, I read folklore for sorcerers and wonder-workers. The more research I did, however, the more I discovered real Wandering Jews. There are false messiahs like Abraham Abulafia in the 13th century and Shlomo Molkho and David Reubeni in the 16th. There’s Benjamin of Tudela, a 13th-century Spanish Jew and precursor of Marco Polo, who wrote a fantastic narrative of his travels through Europe and the Orient. And then, of course, there are social scientists and geneticists tracking the Jewish diaspora today.
These stories of adventure inspired the digital map that my character Simon is building. It collects all of these Wandering Jews, historical and legendary and somewhere in between.
Q. There are two sets of brothers in THE ANGEL OF LOSSES – Solomon and Manasseh, Eli and Josef. Are your two sisters Marjorie and Holly playing out a similar story? Are these Cain and Abel stories?
As Marjorie learns more about the White Rebbe and Eli, she does come to see her own life as another version of their stories—or perhaps, a chance to get right what they got wrong. This is a nod to the Jewish tradition of interpreting historical events by comparing them to Biblical tales and legend, as well as the Gothic notions of fate and inherited burdens.
Cain and Abel are the original brothers—the original story of a family or people turning against each other—but maybe the strongest link to my story is Cain’s punishment: going into exile from his family and people, cursed to become a wanderer, and branded with a holy mark or sign.
Q. One of the characters in your book is Nathan, Marjorie’s brother-in-law and Holly’s deeply religious husband. He is a member of a sect called Berukhim which has one of its missions to travel the world and locate people who could have been separated from the original 12 tribes of Israel, in China, India, Latin America, etc. They have some very specific kinds of traditions around prayer. How did you learn about this sect and what did you decide to write about them?
The Berukhim Fellowship is fictional though it’s named after a real person: Abraham Berukhim, a mystic who lived in 16th-century Israel. I incorporated contemporary Hasidic practice along with details about Berukhim and his time, particularly the tradition of using the names of angels to perform magic. There are individuals today engaged in the search for remnants of the Lost Tribes, but I don’t believe it’s the mission of any one order.
The Berukhim Fellowship evolved with Nathan the character. Their belief system responds to Nathan’s needs, and the more Marjorie learns about their theology, the more she learns about Nathan the man.
Q. Ultimately, what do you want readers to take away from reading your book?
I want readers to enjoy the world of THE ANGEL OF LOSSES, its magic and mystery, but I also want them to see something familiar in the characters: Marjorie and Holly and Nathan and Eli, and the White Rebbe too. Ultimately they’re struggling with things we’re all struggling with: family, belonging, loyalty, duty, when to sacrifice and when to walk away. I want readers to sympathize and argue with them. They’re all good—if flawed—people who are trying to do the right thing. That’s the kind of story I like to read and like to tell.