Another Get Lit author
Here are some excerpts from an email conversation with
Tova Mirvis, who lives in Newton Centre and is the author of two novels about Orthodox Jewish society. She's also appearing at the Get Lit 2008 event.
On Thursday, she'll discuss the "liberating" effect of reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in high school -- here's a preview:
"But for me, reading it as a student in
a tiny Orthodox Jewish school in Memphis, steeped in religious rules and texts,
the book had a huge impact on me.
Somewhere during one of those high school
years, I read The Scarlet Letter. Here was blustery New England; here were other
people’s rules which were so strict that they made my own seem giddily
free-spirited. The distance from that world to mine: here was escape. Suddenly I
could be here and yet not here. It didn’t matter, at least not quite as much,
that I was in a school of eighteen girls, six in my class, most of whom I’d
known since nursery school; it didn’t matter as much that I was already feeling
an exhilarating, terrifying restlessness that I tried to hide as best I
could. But I have to think that I loved this book not just for its
distance to my world but also for its proximity. Hester Prynne, I
felt like I knew her. Here, finally, was the experience of someone living inside
such strict laws, bound by them, marked by them, yet oddly sustained by them.
Nothing was stripped away, nothing made nice for the sake of restoring the
semblance of piety. Here was sin, but also belief, doubt, compassion and
vengeance."
I also asked her what she thinks authors get right (or wrong) in their characterizations of Jewish women.
"I think that authors get it right when they stop thinking
about the fact that they are writing about Jewish women, (or any member of an
ethnic group,) and think about the individual. The pitfalls in writing about a
member of an ethnic group are to exoticize, to see them as other, to focus
solely on membership to the group, rather than the individual who lives inside
that group. Underneath any semblance of sameness, inside tights systems of
shared beliefs and lifestyle, there are individuals lurking, with the usual mix
of doubt, fear, passion, ambivalence and contradiction. Sometimes people who’ve
read my work will say, “are you saying that all Jewish women do this?” And I
just laugh. Of course not. There’s never an “All Jewish women,” just as there is
never an “all women.” What I love about writing fiction is that my job isn’t to
write about what everyone does. It’s to hew one character from the larger mass
and to make them as specific and as real and as alive as I can."
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