The first inspiration for The Angel of Losses was a book: Melmoth the Wanderer, a 19th-century gothic novel that I read in college. Melmoth makes a deal with the devil in exchange for immortality, and when the story begins, he’s stalking his descendants on the Irish coast. He—or rather, his archetype, the Wandering Jew—also followed me. For almost 10 years, I wrote fiction destined to sit mostly unread on the floor of my office closet. I knew, somehow, that the Wandering Jew story would be my story, and I wasn’t ready yet—mature enough, skilled enough—to write it. I also knew that my version of the Wandering Jew would be different from his misleadingly named forebears. The Wandering Jews of European literature and legend were pagans who rejected Christ. My wanderer would actually be Jewish.
But this was all I knew when I finally sat down to search for Melmoth’s analogues in Jewish tradition. I was drawn to rabbis who wandered between worlds, attempting to breach Paradise or fool the Angel of Death, as well as Jewish scribes who documented their travels across Europe, North Africa, and the Orient. Many of the latter were in search of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which disappeared during Babylonian captivity five centuries before Christ; legend predicts they will return alongside the Messiah. Some of these tales—which straddle myth and history—clearly borrow from one another and all of them evince the pain of exile, the promise of worlds to come, and a faith akin desperate love.
I chased these men through folklore and history, but it was the stories I couldn’t follow that captivated me the most: a White Rebbe who discovered a magical path from a Polish cave to the Holy Land and Yode’a, the Angel of Losses, mentioned in passing by an 18th-century mystic. I could find nothing else on these two—at least, nothing else in English—and so I decided to reinvent them.
But first, I had to put my research aside and locate my story in the present. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would begin writing about another obsessive researcher. Marjorie, the narrator of The Angel of Losses, is absorbed in her dissertation on a centuries-old tale of the Wandering Jew. Her fixation is not purely academic: Marjorie needs distraction from her painful personal life. She’s still mourning her grandfather, Eli, who died several years before, and she’s estranged from her sister Holly, who has converted to Orthodox Judaism and is now expecting her first child. When a mysterious stranger begins stalking Marjorie, insisting that he knows Eli’s secrets and that Holly’s baby is in danger, she realizes that the truth about the White Rebbe—a mysterious fairy tale hero from Eli’s notebooks—is the only way to save her family.
I had started with such a grand idea: an old man preserved by magic traveling across the world, adventuring through impossible centuries. But the more I wrote, the more the story’s scope contracted. A grandfather and granddaughter, united by disposition and nature, separated by the vastly different worlds into which they were born. Sisters who no longer can—or no longer want to—understand each other’s choices. A woman who can master neither her history nor her worst impulses.
And then something else crept into my writing: a baby.
I didn’t have a baby, but soon Holly did. I wrote on and on about that baby—he’s a tiny infant, but he possesses a weight mighty enough to knock Marjorie’s family off its orbit and realign itself around him.
At first, I wrote mostly from fear: How does a baby change your relationships, and change you? How can anyone risk loving something so vulnerable? Midway through my writing, I had to put my fictional baby aside—temporarily—and care for my own. Returning to my computer, with my daughter bundled against my chest, I wrote to balance my characters’ feelings of loss. I wrote about love, optimism, and an investment in the future that transforms the past—however long, or however short—from something that haunts you to something that teaches you. A ghost that bequeaths strength and empathy, or, maybe, one that can finally be exorcised.
The Angel of Losses tells a very different story from the one I glimpsed all those years ago in the pages of a gothic novel. I had to follow my own path from one land to another—both in these pages, and in my life. In the end, I found the hunt for the mysterious White Rebbe and Angel of Losses; the pain of growing apart from the ones we love the most and the rewards of learning to love in new ways; and the enduring puzzle of being a good person in a complicated world. I’m proud to share my travels with you.