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Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins with a description of the main characters, Leora and Bill
Landsmann, as "tourists." What makes them tourists, besides their travels?
Can one ever stop being a tourist in this sense?
2. Several characters in the novel intentionally change their identities,
some by embracing religion, others by rejecting it. What do the different
characters—Jason, Leah, and Nadav, among others—gain or lose through
these choices? When a person makes the choice to reject or embrace religion
at the beginning of the twentieth century, are they making the same choice as
a person faced with the same question one hundred years later?
3. While the characters move frequently between Europe and America, the novel
ends literally beneath the Statue of Liberty. What kind of picture of
America emerges from the novel, from sweatshops to Costco? What opportunities
does America offer the characters, and what burdens do those opportunities
bring with them?
4. This is a novel of modern Jewish history but, unlike so many novels on
this subject, it is emphatically not a novel about anti-Semitism, or even
about the Holocaust. Instead, the book's tragedies are tragic in the true
sense—the characters are generally not innocent victims, and they bring
disaster upon themselves. Does this make the book's many catastrophes easier
to understand, or harder? How does this approach change your view of Jewish
history?
5. A central theme of the book is the idea of reclamation: ritual objects
thrown overboard appear a century later in a junk shop, pieces of coal
resurface millennia later as diamonds, a primitive skull is discovered, a
neglected dollhouse is restored, and the novel's ending reveals a vast
underwater treasury of lost things. In Chapter 8's explanation of diamond
formation, we are told that "Nothing is ever really lost." But a Jewish new
year ceremony, enacted in the novel near the end of Chapter 7, consists of
symbolically casting one's sins away in order to start a new year. Does it
work? Can people be forgiven? If it is true that nothing is ever lost, is
that a blessing or a curse?
6. On page 124, Jake tells Leora that "just because life doesn't work the way
you want it to doesn't mean that what happens in the world is completely
random. The times when people really do interact with God are exactly those
times when life doesn't work out fairly." Is this observation borne out in
the novel? In reality?
7. Near the end of the biblical Book of Job, in answer to Job's questions
about why he has suffered so undeservedly, God responds by describing the
many unfathomable wonders of the world he has created, asking Job if he
knows, for example, where the storehouses of snow are kept, or how God sets
the boundaries of the sea (see Job chapters 38–41). In "The Book of
Hurricane Job" in the novel (Chapter 10), God responds to Bill Landsmann's
questions by recounting the private moments of the novel's many characters.
What kind of limitations of human understanding does this suggest? How much
do the characters in the novel really know about one another, and how much do
they miss? How much can people ever know about one another?
8. God concludes his words to Bill Landsmann by saying, "I created you in my
image. I am not created in yours!" (page 267). Much of the novel is devoted
to images and re-creations: museums figure prominently; paintings appear by
Vermeer and Rembrandt; Naomi Landsmann makes copies of famous works of art;
photographs take on large significance; miniature enthusiasts create exact
replicas of material life; and Bill Landsmann assembles a collection of
thousands of slides. When are these images successful, and when do they
fail? Are there limitations on human creativity?
9. Speaking of his father, Nadav Landsmann, on page 184, Bill Landsmann says,
"It is often said that we are shaped by our experiences, but I do not
believe that's true. . . . I think we are not shaped by our experiences, but
by what we do choose—by how we react to our experiences." Do you believe
him? For which of the characters in the novel might this be true?
10. On page 255, the novel borrows language from the story of Cain and Abel
to describe Isaac's death. Is Nadav actually responsible for Isaac's death?
Why does he consider himself to be? Is he responsible for his wife's fate?
Which affects him more: his actual experience or what he makes of it?
11. Besides the Book of Job, there are many references to the Hebrew bible
and to Jewish literature scattered throughout the novel. A few of many
examples: in the first chapter, the story of Leora and Bill Landsmann's
ascent up East Mountain borrows language from the biblical binding of Isaac
in Genesis 22; in Chapter 4, at the suicide of the aspiring singer Joe
Solovey (himself named after the character of a prodigy cantor in a Yiddish
novel by Sholem Aleichem), the novel quotes the Talmud by saying he "unable
to complete his work, but never free to desist from it" (page 100); and at
the beginning of Chapter 6, the story of the two countries where no one is
able to sleep is adapted from a mystical story by eighteenth-century rabbi
Nachman of Bratslav. Does one need to recognize these allusions, or others
like them, in order to appreciate the novel? For the modern reader, are these
references another example of how people misread one another? Or are they
another example of reclamation?
12. The novel begins with the words, "Accidents of fate are rarely fatal
accidents." Which ultimately dominates the novel: free will or fate?
A Conversation with Dara Horn
Is your family history comparable to the Landsmanns?
My family history is actually nothing like the Landsmann family history. I am
a fourth-generation American. My ancestors came to America from Eastern
Europe at the turn of the century (1900, that is!). If anything, my family's
experience is reflected in that of the character named Freydl/Frances, who
happily settles into life in New Jersey without looking back. I invented
this particular family history in part because I wanted to demonstrate the
difference America made in the lives of so many European Jews who were lucky
enough to come here as early as my family did, and the many ways in which
America, despite being older politically than most of the countries in Europe,
really remains a vast new world.
I wrote this book while living in England—I had won a scholarship from
Harvard to spend a year at Cambridge University, where I did a master's
degree—and I think it shows in the novel that I was a little homesick for
America while I was writing it. I specifically remember coming back to my
student residence there from a shopping trip to what I considered a rather
limited European-style supermarket in Cambridge and then sitting down to
write the scene that takes place in Costco, an American chain superstore that
carries every possible product you could ever dream of in absolutely absurd
quantities. (It is a real store, incidentally, a national chain that exists
from New York to Hawaii, and the description of it is true to life.)
Europeans tend to look at things like this as nothing but silly materialism,
but while I was living in England I missed the sheer exuberance of
it—not the idea that you could have anything you wanted, but the idea
that you could actually want anything you wanted, that no idea was too
unconventional or too absurd. I wanted to show America as a new world of
possibilities, where you can become whatever you want to become (as
characters like Jason/Yehudah and Freydl/Frances do), and what that choice
really means—both the exuberance and the burdens of that freedom.
I should say here that while the story of the Landsmann family is purely my
invention, the historical details are accurate down to the square footage of
the apartments (I'll get into this later). I should also say that even
though my family is thoroughly American, I have traveled a tremendous amount
(much like Bill Landsmann in the novel), to about forty or so countries
around the world. I don't have a slide collection, though.
Do you come from a family of believers?
My family is Jewish and ascribes to the American Conservative movement in
Judaism (which is right in the middle of the religious spectrum between
orthodox and reform). We are, as you put it, a "believing" family in that I
was raised to believe in God, to value the sanctity of life, and to take
seriously the teachings of the Torah—which involves both being educated
in and often wrestling with the tradition. While I can't claim to observe
every ritual, my religion is the path by which I reach my understanding of
the world.
Is the story of the tefillin in New York Harbor true?
The story of the tefillin at the bottom of New York Harbor is, as far as I
can tell, true. I first heard this story from a classmate at Harvard College,
who told of how his great-grandfather saw people throwing their tefillin
overboard on the ship that first brought him to New York. I was very struck
by this story and thought it was unique to my classmate's family. However,
I then mentioned it to others and soon found that among Jews of a certain
generation in America (those now in their sixties or seventies), this story
is something that everyone seems to know—I would start telling them the
story, and they would quickly supply the ending. Of course, this might mean
that the story is simply a popular legend. But then I discovered an
interesting piece of evidence. While I haven't seen it myself, I am told that
in a museum in Nova Scotia in Canada, there is an exhibit featuring "A set
of phylacteries [tefillin] removed from the floor of the Atlantic." That
clinched it for me. (I did not, however, have the experience of seeing them
in a junk shop!)
Other historical details?
I tried very hard in this novel to ensure that the details were historically
accurate. This was of course hardest in the story that takes place in the
1890s. However, I had several sources against which to check my facts. A few
years ago I wrote a story for a magazine about the Lower East Side Tenement
Museum, a museum in New York City located in a restored tenement building
that demonstrates how turn-of-the-century immigrant populations lived in this
neighborhood of New York, which at the time was a large center for Eastern
European Jewish immigrants. All the details about Leah's family's living
conditions—the square footage of the apartment, the gas lighting, the
sink (but without running water), the use of the living room as an extra
bedroom, the boarders, other material details-come largely from the research
this museum has done into material life at the time.
As a person familiar with Yiddish sources, I also knew a lot about this
period from articles, novels, and other sources written about this
neighborhood at the time period—the situation of Jewish garment workers
at the time is familiar to any student of Yiddish literature. Also, there
was at the time a very popular advice column called "A Bintel Brief" (A
Bundle of Letters) in the largest New York Yiddish newspaper, parts of which
have been published in English translation in book form. I read these
letters and was incredibly moved by them, and many other details of this
particular chapter come from there. For example, one letter describes how
factory owners would "fix" the clocks in the factories by turning back the
hands on the clock so that people would work longer than they were being
paid to work. The tension between the old world religious life and the new
world is also of course reflected in these letters. One letter is written by
a man who divorced his wife and then decides he wants to remarry her, but he
cannot because he is a cohen and now his wife is divorced! I drew on these
details as well as other information I have through Yiddish literature in
reconstructing this time and place.
Other items in the book are also historically accurate. The character Leah,
for example, the child of a woman who was raped, is sixteen–seventeen years
old in 1898 because there were pogroms in Yelizavetgrad and surrounding towns
in Ukraine south of Kiev in the spring of 1881, during which many Jewish
women were raped. Like Nadav and Isaac, many Jews were drafted into the
Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. There was a Montessori School in
Amsterdam in the 1930s and 1940s which did expel its Jewish students when
the Nuremberg Laws went into effect in Holland (one of these students was
Anne Frank). I consulted maps of Amsterdam from this period and discovered
that there were dozens of chocolate and candy factories, so Willem walks by a
lot of them as he strolls through the city. The Carousel of Progress Ride
is a real ride in Disney World, and it really was transplanted from the New
York World's Fair of the 1960s. Even a more recent detail is true: in 1999,
there was in fact an early hominid skull that turned up in a gift shop in
New York! I'm sure there are historical errors and even more historical
stretches, but I did try to ensure the accuracy of the work.
How would you yourself weigh the story: is it primarily a new book of Job,
or a specific sort of coming-of-age novel?
I'm not so excited about "coming of age." On the other hand, I also don't see
this book solely as a rewriting of the Book of Job. While the Book of Job is
the most obvious reference, the book is in fact saturated with references to
various parts of the Hebrew bible and rabbinic literature.
In studying modern Hebrew literature, I became intrigued by the way that
modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, particularly the work of the early
modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers, almost constantly refers to the Hebrew
bible and commentaries on the bible, even while challenging the religious
tradition. This is particularly easy to do in Hebrew, because of the
language's long history and the echoes tied to almost every word.
I wondered whether it was possible to create this sort of
literature—using biblically anchored language within a secular
text—in English. At first I thought it would be awkward to include
biblical allusions in an English book. However, I soon realized that most
English readers are familiar with biblical literature only in archaic
translations. This made it possible to create a work in English that could be
read on several levels without overburdening the language. I wanted to
create a different style for American Jewish literature, one more connected
to the Jewish literary tradition of constant reference to ancient text.
As for Job: When I was twelve years old, I became a Torah reader for the
children's congregation in my synagogue, which made me very familiar with,
and fascinated by, the text of the Hebrew bible. In college I majored in
literature and focused on Hebrew literature, and I soon became intrigued by
the Book of Job. This book is, of course, one of the most compelling and
confusing books in the bible, and for that reason, I believe, it also has
some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in any language.
What intrigued me most, though, was what I saw as the ultimate question of
the book of Job. The book asks the question that so many people ask
themselves: Why do bad things happen to good people? But as I read the book
again and again, I decided that this question was misleading. To me, the
central question of the Book of Job isn't that common question—which,
after all, can't really be answered and isn't answered at all in the book of
Job-but rather: Are people "good" to begin with, or are they shaped by their
experiences? What makes "bad things" important isn't whether they happen to
you or to someone else, because that's not your decision. What makes them
important is the part that is your decision: what you do with them once
they've happened. It is a commonplace to say that people are shaped by their
experiences. But that implies that you can't control who you become, since
these experiences are left to accidents of fate.
This premise—that the most fundamental aspects of your own life are left
to chance—is the subject of many books and movies of varying quality.
What I hoped to do, in this novel, was to present a different idea. People
are not shaped by their experiences, which they cannot choose, but rather by
something they do control: they are shaped by what they make of their
experiences. I also wanted to write a book that believed in happiness, that
showed that happiness was possible, even in a world dead set against it.
Happiness, I believe, is not something that one finds, but rather something
that one makes.
In this sense, I suppose, it is a "coming of age" story, but one that has
very little to do with age and very much to do with taking responsibility
for one's own life and choices. That's something that can happen at any age.
It doesn't happen in a moment, but over a lifetime.
Suggested Further Reading
The Book of Job
See especially Chapters 1, 2, and 3; Chapter 38:1–30; Chapter
42:1–6, 12–13, 16–17 (Tanakh, A New Translation of the Holy
Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text [Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1985]).
I. L. Peretz, "The Dead Town" (1895)
English translation available in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving
Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1990).
In this short story by the classic Yiddish writer, a traveler meets a man on
the road who claims to live in a place called "the dead town," a place that
can't be found on any map—a town where most of the inhabitants are already
dead, but none of the living residents have noticed.
Nachman of Bratslav, "The Seven Beggars" (early nineteenth century)
English translation available in The Tales: Nahman of Bratslav, ed.
Arnold Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
This complicated mystical tale by a Hassidic luminary tells the story of two
children, abandoned in a forest, who are rescued by seven beggars. Years
later, when the children marry, the seven beggars reappear at their wedding,
each bringing a story with him. One beggar's story takes place in a pair of
countries where no one is able to sleep.
Travels of Benjamin of Tudela (twelfth century)
English translation available as The World of Benjamin of Tudela: A Medieval
Mediterranean Travelogue, ed. Sandra Benjamin, trans. A. Asher (Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).
This medieval travelogue recounts the voyages of a Jewish merchant who made a
point of visiting and documenting Jewish communities throughout the medieval
world.
S. Y. Abramovitch, Travels of Benjamin the Third (1878)
English translation available in Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler,
ed. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden (New York: Schocken Books, 1996).
This comic novel by the classic Yiddish writer, set in a small Russian Jewish
town, tells of a modern-day traveling Benjamin—an idiot who barely
makes it around the block.
Sholem Aleichem, Yosele Solovey (1889)
English translation available as The Nightingale, or, The Saga of Yosele
Solovey the Cantor , trans. Aliza Shervin (New York: Putnam, 1985).
This novel by the best-known Yiddish writer is about a prodigy cantor named
Yosele Solovey ("Yosele" is the Yiddish equivalent of "Joe"; "Solovey" means
"nightingale") whose professional success quickly leads him to personal ruin.
A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the
Jewish Daily Forward, ed. Isaac Metzger (New York: Schocken Books, 1990).
Published in book form in English translation, this volume is a collection of
letters first printed at the turn of the last century in the advice column
of the most popular American Yiddish newspaper. Written by people desperate
for help in their new country, the letters reveal the particular problems
Jewish immigrants faced in their new home—as well as many problems that
never grow old.
S. Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night (1939)
English translation available, trans. Misha Louvich (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968).
This Hebrew novel, written by a Nobel laureate, describes a visit to a
devastated Jewish town in Poland fifteen years after World War I. In one
scene, a wounded Jewish veteran recalls being in a trench during a battle
and seeing an arm wrapped in tefillin, severed from its body.
Hayyim Nachman Bialik, Random Harvest (1923)
English translation available in Random Harvest: The Novellas of
Bialik, trans. David Patterson and Ezra Spicehandler (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1999).
This autobiographical novel by the most acclaimed modern Hebrew poet
describes the life of an orphaned Jewish boy in rural Ukraine. In one scene,
the narrator recounts how wolves occasionally entered his village.
H. Leivick, The Wolf (1920)
English translation available in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual
Anthology, ed. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986).
This long poem by an American Yiddish poet describes the destruction of an
Eastern European Jewish town during World War I. A rabbi, the sole survivor
of a massacre of the town's Jews, escapes to the woods, where he is
transformed into a wolf.
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