Interviewed by Anne Barngrover
Margot Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement , winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The North American Review, The Sun, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Carter Prize for the Essay, and an honorable mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway Award. She currently teaches at Denison University, where she holds the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship, and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio.
Author photo © Tim DeGenero
Q: It seems to me that the form of interlinked short stories remains still somewhat of a rarity in terms of writing and publishing fiction these days. What was your process in settling on this form? What compelled you not to transfer The Pale of Settlement into a novel, novella or a more traditional short story collection? In addition, was there anything that seemed particularly constraining or liberating about writing in this form?
A: I didn’t set out to write a collection of linked stories; I set out to write a story, and then the next one, and then the one after that, and the linkages emerged along the way. (I had written several stories before I saw that they all involved the same main character who, at that point, had several different names.) An agent who read the collection early on suggested I rewrite it “as a novel,” but honestly, I didn’t know how to do that. Since then, many readers have said they did, in fact, read the book as a novel, or a fragmented novel, and at the end of the day the distinction seems pretty meaningless to me. For me, the form of any narrative is organic to the material and a product of the writing process. I just don’t know how you can separate those things.Q: The Pale of Settlement ends its title story, as well as the entire collection, with these lines: “She [Susan] thought about how Hebrew had no word for fiction. A novel was simply a sippur, a story. A form of narrative. The closest term for fiction was bidayon, from the word b’daya, a falsehood or a lie. You never could tell which parts of stories people had made up, Susan knew. People told you what they needed to believe.” How strongly do you identify with the collection’s main character, Susan? Where do you blur the lines between fiction and creative nonfiction in this book, or otherwise in your writing and storytelling in general?
A: I guess I could say that Susan is “me” as I might have been if many things in my life had turned out very differently. I started out writing stories that were very much grounded in my own life, or at least in certain emotional cruxes in my life, and found that the momentum of the narrative pulled the book in its own direction. Like Susan, I had grandparents who immigrated to Haifa from Europe in 1939 and I visited them in the summers when I was growing up. Like Susan, I have Israeli cousins and speak only limited Hebrew. But unlike Susan, my mom is not Israeli, I have no archaeologist uncles, and I’m happily married and live in Ohio and have two kids.
Having said that, I’m very interested in narratives that “blur the line,” as you put it, between fiction and nonfiction. I’m interested in the intersection between storytelling and history and myth. I think in many places my writing in this book is a collage: little bits of things that really happened but not in the same context or time or place, combined with other bits of things that are products of the imagination, or research. Most realistic fiction is constructed this way, isn’t it? Realism is an odd form, when you think about it: everything is based in fact except the characters, who are more or less made up. I believe that, as Joan Didion once put it, we tell stories in order to live. We construct ourselves in story. And those stories are never totally “the truth.”
Q: Historically, “The Pale of Settlement” was established by Catherine the Great in 1791 as a place for Russian Jews to live. Susan herself describes this land of her mother’s stories as already “vanished into a pink blotch that spread across the top of the map that pulled down over the blackboard in [her] classroom like a window shade…. You couldn’t go to those parts of the world any longer. They were gone.” Especially because much of this collection deals with an Israeli landscape that is at once volatile, heartbreaking and lovely, how do you feel that The Pale of Settlement speaks to more modern issues of travel, place and home?
A: People often ask why I chose the title, since the stories are not set in the physical Pale but in Israel. The word “Pale” comes from the Latin palus, which means stake (as in the word “impale”), denoting a staked-off boundary line. Thinking about the title, it struck me that the stories were very much about boundaries, about border crossings of various kinds. Susan’s struggle for self is all about her inability to figure out where she belongs. She’s not fully American, but she’s not Israeli either. This is an old issue for the wandering Jew, but it also seems to be a common condition of our modern world, this feeling of homelessness, of plurality, of hybridity. Take Barack Obama—the place he comes from (Kenya? Kansas? Hawaii?) doesn’t really exist either.
Q: The Pale of Settlement spans decades and oceans to tell the stories of three generations of Jewish women living in either Israel or America, or both. How do you feel that this book fits into the ongoing Jewish and, more specifically, Israeli-American literary dialogue?
A: There hasn’t been that much written by Americans that takes an insider’s perspective, if you will, on Israel. Much recent Jewish-American writing takes a more religious perspective than the one I bring, or comes at Israel from a predominantly American point of view. One of the most gratifying things about writing this book has been hearing from readers who really know Israel (expatriates, or children of expatriates like myself) who have told me, “You really get it.” Most American Jews don’t get Israel at all.
The period I’m writing about—from the early 1980s to the present—has been a time of intense soul-searching and change for Israelis. The 1982 war in Lebanon marked the first time there were any conscientious objectors in the IDF. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the intifadas, the radicalization of Hamas and Hezbollah—all these factors have eroded the purchase of the early Zionist myths. It’s also a time during which America’s role in the Middle East, and relationship to Israel, has dramatically changed. Most Americans don’t know much about any of this; it’s a terribly complicated, and dire, mess. I hope my book helps, in its small way, to give American readers some idea of this complexity—the buried layers, the competing narratives and points of view.
Q: What projects are you working on right now? Do you see a future for yourself in the interlinked short story, or are you currently working with something else? Do you find that your writing/creative processes change depending on the form?
I’m currently writing short stories, creative nonfiction essays, and am wrestling with the beginnings of a novel. I’m not planning to write another collection of linked stories, but there’s always the possibility, I suppose, that the stories will begin to link up in unforeseen ways. I’m just taking it one step at a time, writing my way in. I’m always looking for patterns, connections that might open out into a larger work. For me, the material is never separate from the form.
