Interviewed by Wil Oakes
Eileen Pollack graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in physics, later earning a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic: And Other Stories, a novel, Paradise, New York, and a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which won a 2003 WILLA finalist award. Pollack’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many periodicals; her innovative textbook and anthology, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings, was recently released. In 2008, her collection of stories and novellas, In the Mouth, was named the winner of the annual Edward Lewis Wallant Award, for its creative significance for the American Jew. In the Mouth was also shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature, and it won a silver medal in ForeWord Magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year Awards.
Q: Most of the stories in this collection feature characters grappling with Jewish identity to one degree or another. Sometimes it’s a big, overarching concern like it is for Marcus and his father in “The Bris,” and at other times just one among many things—sex, aging, parenthood, to name a few—plaguing a character. How do you figure out the right balance of issues to give your characters? Do you conceive of your characters ahead of time, or do they reveal themselves to you as the story progresses and you see them in action?
A: Funny, but I don’t see my characters as grappling with their identities as Jews (except Marcus, briefly, when he finds out his father is technically a Christian—that would shake anyone, at least for a few minutes). Like me, most of these people are so thoroughly Jewish that their Jewishness is the one aspect of their lives they never question. Certainly, none of them are considering converting! (Even Marcus’s dad knows he’s a Jew, in his heart, if not at the tip of his uncircumcised penis.)
What the characters in “The Bris” don’t know is how much they are willing to sacrifice for the people they love, how generous they are or aren’t. That’s the question at the story’s center, the question that unites everything else and governs my decisions as to what aspects of each character I need to highight and develop.
As usually happens, “The Bris” started with a situation. My partner and I were joking about how passionately a non-Jewish man would need to love a woman to be willing to undergo a circumcision for her sake. That struck me as a promising premise for a story, but it seemed too obvious to make the main character a young man who was deciding whether to convert to marry a Jew, so I came up with the idea of an old man needing to be circumcised before he dies to qualify to be buried with his wife. But I couldn’t make the old man the main character because he would lack agency by that point, and I didn’t want the story to revolve around a man’s lack of physical courage as regards allowing a doctor to hack off part of his penis. That would be in terrible taste. Ditto for a daughter trying to get her aged dad circumcised before he died. Even I have limits as regards bad taste!
Once I had the dynamic of a dying father asking his son to do him this huge and screwy favor, I knew I had the plot. But why would anyone care about such a lunatic premise? In general, once I have a story, I try to figure out why I care about that story, care about that main character confronting that particular conflict. And I try to phrase that concern as a question: What don’t I understand about a person in this situation? Once I knew I was interested in what a person might or might not be willing to do to grant the wish of someone he truly loves, I simply highlighted this question as it pertained to each of the major characters … what Marcus’s dad did or didn’t have the courage and generosity to do for his late wife, what Marcus will or won’t be able to bring him to do for his father and for his fiance. In other words, once I figure out my central thematic question, I go back and develop my characters in ways that will allow me to explore that question (though not necessarily to answer it). That’s pretty much true for each of the stories in In the Mouth.
Q: The city of Boca Raton makes a number of appearances in the book, either as an actual setting or as a sort of spectre that hovers over Jewish characters as retirement gets closer. Could you comment a little on the place and why it features so heavily in these stories—even being alluded to in the title?
A: This one is easy: after my parents left the Catskills, they retired to Boca Raton, along with the parents of nearly every other Jew in New England (and much of the Midwest). At first, I hated spending time there. I couldn’t see any possibilities in writing about my parents’ condo development or the people who lived there until I read Philip Roth’s deeply moving and funny memoir Patrimony, about caring for his dying father, who lived in a similar development in Florida. When I saw what respect and love Roth had for his father and his father’s friends, I was ashamed that I hadn’t seen the same humanity in my parents and their friends.
Then Jerry Seinfeld started setting some of his episodes in Boca, and I didn’t want to let him get all the glory. I love writing about places that are insular, enclosed cultural worlds, with their own weird set of rules and behaviors, foods, vocabulary, costumes, values, jokes … When a setting has insiders and outsiders, when some people belong and some people don’t, you have an instant source for conflict … and comedy. Hence, Boca. (I already knew that the stories in my collection would be united by the idea of mouths, both real and metaphoric, so I couldn’t resist pointing out that Boca Raton means Mouth of the Rat, or Mouth of the Mouse, depending on whom you ask … )
Q: The jokes in this book seem to run the full gamut from the subtle to the truly absurd—the undertaker named Mortimer Bury comes to mind. What are your thoughts on how humor functions in stories about very serious things? Do you have a particular philosophy you follow on how to use humor effectively in this sort of story?
A: Basically, I don’t try to be funny. I grew up in the Borscht Belt; my humor is genetic and reflexive. And the humor I grew up with wasn’t subtle. Think Don Rickles. Think Jerry Lewis. Think Buddy Hackett. But my relatives and neighbors used humor as a way to soften tragedy. If something terrible happens to you and you tell the story straight, you’re complaining. If you can turn the catastrophe into a funny story, you can have it both ways … your audience laughs, and because you don’t seem to be begging for sympathy or anger or heartbreak in response, you often get those too. So I tend to use humor only when I’m describing events that would otherwise be very sad or disturbing. And vice versa.
Q: I think my favorite of the short stories in the collection is “Milk.” It seems to stand out in a number of ways—the setting, the kinds of characters we encounter—though it’s still concerned with many of the same ideas that run through all the pieces. I was particularly interested in hearing what inspired you to create the relationship between Bea and Coreen. With the racial and social issues at play, the feeling I get through a lot of the story is one of uncomfortable awkwardness, but the feeling I carry away at the end is different. It’s a terribly sad and moving story. How did it come to be?
A: “Milk” is the most autobiographical of all my stories. When I gave birth to my son, I had a roommate who went through most of what Bea goes through in the story. In fact, I was lying in bed trying to nurse my son with one arm and taking notes about what was happening on the other side of that blue curtain with the other hand. Everything up to the point where the narrator leaves the hospital is pretty much true to life, except that the racism my roommate encountered in real life was even worse than in my story. At first, I wrote the story almost as nonfiction and no one believed it. Everyone kept saying: “Come on, Eileen, doctors and nurses at hospitals in Boston don’t act this way! They would never say something this racist!” So I kept toning down the dialogue, toning down the scenes, until I reached a point at which my readers didn’t object too strongly.
Also, I don’t know that my roommate’s baby actually died—I very much hope he didn’t. In real life, once the doctors finally figured out how sick the baby was and transferred him to Children’s, he disappeared from my life. I said goodbye to my roommate, left her my fruit basket, but never called to see how she was doing, never went to Dorchester to visit her. I thought of going, but I didn’t actually go. That said, the very last passage of the story did happen. My milk wouldn’t come in for my own son, but as I lay listening to my roommate’s baby cry and cry, my milk began to flow for him. That’s why I wrote that story.
Q: Sex, naturally, seems to be on most everyone’s mind in these stories. The way it manifests itself, however, varies wildly, sometimes associated with guilt, sometimes with creativity, sometimes with anxiety, and sometimes with health (or lack thereof), just to name a few. Sex is a topic, of course, that’s interesting to just about everybody, but what draws you to focus so much on characters’ understandings of themselves as sexual beings?
A: As you say, most people think about sex all the time. If I’m less inhibited than most women in writing about sex, that’s probably because I grew up in the Catskills. (For your younger readers, let me just say that the hotel on which the resort in Dirty Dancing is based was less than a mile from my house.) I remember reading Philip Roth, Leonard Michaels, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow and thinking that I loved their writing but not their portrayals of women. I wanted to be the female Roth, the female Michaels, the female Malamud, the female Bellow. I wanted to do for Jewish women what those writers had done for Jewish men—tell the truth about their lives. Of course, when I finally found Grace Paley, I realized that I’d already been beaten to the punch. But then, Grace was the mother of us all.
Q: You’re writing a lot in these stories about parent-child relationships, but you come at the topic from all angles— mothers, sons, fathers, daughters. We see the relationship between a mother and a newborn, but we also spend a lot of time looking at that of an aging father and his grown daughter. What is it about this category of human relationship and its various incarnations that draws your interest again and again?
A: Years ago, in my twenties, I was completely uninterested in domestic concerns—love, romance, marriage, family relationships. I had majored in physics in college. I’d taken a lot of courses in philosophy. All I cared about were grand ideas. Then I had a child, and suddenly all I cared about was the love between mothers and their children. The earliest stories in In the Mouth were written when my son was very young; I wrote another third of the stories while he was growing up. And then my father got old, and I realized he would die, and I couldn’t imagine how I would survive that loss. So I wrote the two Milt and Moose stories, and then “The Bris,” to imagine how I would survive, to prepare myself for the pain. Suddenly, I saw myself through my father’s eyes, and I became fascinated by the love between fathers and daughters. As I tell my students, if you just pay attention to your obsessions, to the questions that bug you in your daily life, you’ll end up with a group of stories that are unified by these questions and obsessions. When I had enough stories and novellas for a book, I looked back and realized that some of the stories involved parents wondering about their relationships to their children, and the rest involved children wondering about their relationships to their parents. More specifically, the stories and novellas turned out to be centered on the question of what you can and can’t know about the people you love the best, the people to whom you’re closest. My son thinks that he knows his mother, but none of us know our parents. He wouldn’t want to. And vice versa.
Q: I enjoyed getting to read a novella, “Beached in Boca,” to close out this collection. It’s not a form that seems to get much attention these days. When you started writing this one, did you have the sense that that was what it wanted to be, or was it one of those situations where you sat down to write a short story but found it just wanted to keep expanding?
A: No, right from the start, I knew that “Beached in Boca” needed to be a novella. I had two major plotlines going - Wendy trying to get her father to accept treatment for his AIDS, and Adam coming to terms with the revelation that his father was a murderer. No way I was going to be able to bring in those two plot lines in 25 pages! In fact, if I had it to do over again, I would go in the other direction and make “Beached in Boca” a novel.
Q: That novella also revisits some characters from the earlier story “Milt and Moose.” Are there certain characters that just keep begging to be written about? When I started reading “Beached” and realized that I was seeing Milt later in life, after he’s already lost Greta, I felt so much sympathy for him, and reading about him in a second story really sharpened my appreciation for the first. Do you find that details from earlier stories strike you differently after you explore the characters from those stories again at different times in their lives?
A: Yes, you put this better than I could have put it. I did the same thing in my first collection, Rabbi in the Attic. I wrote one story (“Hwang’s Missing Hand”) about a certain set of characters, but I couldn’t say everything I wanted to say about them, so I brought those same characters back for a second story (“Neversink”). Even if you use the same characters, the stories will be very different because they will be centered on different questions. That’s true even if the two stories take place during the same time period, let alone if the second story takes place at a later date.
There’s also the sheer joy of discovering that a character from one story or novel has wandered into another. When the police at the end of the novel I just finished writing needed to send for a dead character’s dental records, I took great delight in realizing that the records weren’t going to arrive right away because the dead man’s dentist, Milt Rothstein, had recently retired to Florida.
Q: When can we expect to read something new from you? What are you working on currently?
A: The novel I just mentioned, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, is a literary murder mystery set in Vegas and the Catskills, in the same darkly comic vein as “The Bris.” And I’m gearing up to work on a memoir-y thing about being the first woman to major in physics at Yale … and why I ended up studying parents and children instead of black holes and stars.
