This is an edited transcript of the BOMBLive! video interview Nathan Englander and Rivka Galchen in conversation at the Brooklyn Public Library in September 2007.

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Rivka Galchen I was also kind of curious hope ends up having a special place in the novel, because the mother in the novel is really unable . . . is never going to give up hope. And when you’re reading the novel there’s something painful about that. You don’t know how to read her hope, you almost want her to get rid of it. How are we supposed to take the hope?

Nathan Englander I guess . . . I always call myself an optimistic pessimist. I mean this book ends in a very specific way but I don’t think it’s closed—I like that room. I guess, you know, one has to identify with the character but I believe in her hope. I guess on two fronts, for me, when people ask me how to do Argentina 1976, how did you imagine this, how do you go to a world where you weren’t? For me, I’d say the greater leap was building a wife and a mother and you know, not having children, what it is to miss a child that has been taken from you. For me that was, I think of the years that went by drawing her the way that I would stand by was a larger thing. So, you know, on a personal level, connecting with Lily in that, was a very, I believe in that hope. But separately which is something for those of you who don’t know Rivka better, she’s very smart about these things and I ask her questions about them a lot. I’m interested in physics, and the many worlds interpretations, let’s start with that. But sort of the idea where I got interested in sort of the quantum mechanics of it, like Schrödinger’s cat, you know the split. I wanted to look at a novel, not at two different opinions, but at two different realities where it’s not that the mother thinks “yes” and the father thinks “no” but that these two realities are functioning. One has a world where hope exists and one has a world where hope does not exist and I wanted to see if the narrator could treat both of those threads with equal respect.

During the junta . . . I don’t even know how to explain how insane it was but literally, if I was a suspect and they took me away, they would then kill Rivka because she’s in my daybook: talk with Rivka this morning. And then they’d take Rivka’s . . . you know it was just madness. A brother would not talk with his sister, potentially, whose child was taken. Like it was just—it was almost through politeness and terror, this idea of just cutting people off. But the mothers of the disappeared children, they got together, these mothers of the plaza. They organized and took on the government which was a death sentence, it was certain death. But these mothers, they still march every Thursday in the plaza across from the pink house and see that the Argentine government, in protest of their missing children. And the (inaudible) went to meet with the mothers when they were there during the game which was just really moving to me. So yeah, they were very active. And I was just in Italy where also many of the—Argentina is much more an Italian country than a Spanish country, so a lot of the disappeared are Italian. I don’t know, it was very strange to just be reading to audiences that had very personal, personal ties to the story or the country.

RG Also, in your acknowledgments to the book where you cite the sources, you know you don’t cite every source you use but you particularly cite Seymour Hersh’s famous New Yorker article, 2004, “The Grey Zone.” And you say, it was very helpful to you, and it’s actually an article about graves. You know, it doesn’t seem obvious.

NE Yeah well this is again about the weird thing of writing a book for so long where things break their boundaries. You know, the central metaphor for this book is about habeas corpus. In the book, habeas corpus is suspended, you know, they didn’t really honor that in Argentina. And to me that was just a symbol I used for a government gone awry. To me that’s the ultimate . . . if you do not have habeas corpus, you are not in a democracy, you are living with madness. I mean it’s not even a part of democracy. The kings, when they were drawing and quartering people and locking them in the Tower of London, even they recognized the right, they used habeas corpus. You know, kings recognized this. You know, when they had slaves. It’s before all that, people recognized it as a basic human right. So for me it was just the ultimate obvious symbol of a government gone mad. And during the writing of this book, in America we had begun to suspend habeas corpus and to me it was just this idea of what life was about for me and what this book was about as a representation of that life. And what that article sort of talks about . . . somebody’s quoted in there. I always talk like this, by the way, it’s very hard to (inaudible), circle, circle, circle, eventually hopefully it makes sense. But, uh, growing up religious, the world was very black and white and my whole life since then is very confusing to me of what it is to make decisions. Nothing is prescribed, you know, is this moral, is this immoral, you know . . . drugs, one’s bad sex, good? You know, you’re rewriting everything, figuring it out for your own self. And then I just thought about it again when your whole reality, when your government, when everything turns into this grey space. And what somebody said in this article . . . why this goes to the religious childhood is I have this very tall (inaudible) which you cannot take. An idea, if it’s a concrete idea, I really feel like you have to acknowledge it. And even though it’s like one word in this article, or two, I felt like it touched me very deeply. But they were talking about people who end up in these secret prisons, but being brought back into the white world. And I said that’s exactly what I’m talking about, that there’s this grey space, like almost biblical ideas of limbo worlds, that they’re putting people into this . . . this . . . it is not black and white. They’re not dead, they’re in grey space. And once I heard the word white world used, I’m like this is exactly what I’m talking about. You know, it was many years in, I was in Chicago, and I was reading in bed in the morning, and I found his New Yorker, and I just saw this moment, I said this is what I’ve been writing about, it was just a confirmation of something I deeply believed.

RG One of the sort of, for me, scary scenes in the novel, is when the character’s ID card—he doesn’t have it with him. Where did that idea come from? Why did that end up being so frightening in the novel?

NE Oh, I guess—it’s a nice friendly crowd (aside)—yeah so things to admit to. I’m always amazed when writers go out drinking and then they bring in a story, and hand it to you, and it’s the night we went out drinking. Like, my brain doesn’t work that way. I make up my places and I make up my people. They’re completely constructed to me. But there’s a couple of characters in the book that are real, and a couple that are taken from sort of a historical record and a couple of very poignant images that I got from friends who lived there that really just touched me and just grew over the years. Sort of the way I guess people whose parents are survivors of the Holocaust and things like that, where these people don’t talk and when they give you a story, it’s large. And I have these friends from Buenos Aires that I’ve been close with since I was 17, I feel like they started to trust me about last month. They’re so closed and so shuttered in so many ways and so not trusting that they, really, you know, people think I use them as access the whole decade I was writing this book I must have called them all the time. I did, but I can count on my hands the number of times they’ll tell me a dirty war story or a dirty war memory. But yeah, a friend just told me once, you know, just about forgetting his idea about being stopped, and the terror in which he told this story. And still, and I looked for it, but he told me when he hears sirens, he’s been living in Jerusalem for 20 years, and still his hand goes to his ID whenever he sees a police car or hears a siren. The panic of his one day forgetting his ID, that just became a central scene. I’m glad that you ask, it means those things are functioning, I like when questions connect to things that are central to you. But that for me was just a central moment around which the novel grew even though it’s very, very minor in the book.

This book took me a 100 years, took a decade, basically. So, um, it was just very strange for me to change while writing, and to watch the book change while I was writing, and to have the world change around me. I don’t think I knew it when I was writing, but I see now that I’m finished and now that I’m going door to door like a brush salesman and talking about it, that it’s very much a Jerusalem metaphor for me in a million different ways. But I guess I’m a lover of cities, you know, I just was in Italy a couple weeks ago and I had all these nice invitations, people wanna take me to sunny places and places with water and I just wanted to go straight to Rome, I always want to be in the most urban place I can. And as a lover of cities, I really had great hopes when I moved to Jerusalem we were going to build a whole new society and make peace and, you know, hold hands from Tel Aviv to Baghdad. And we really were, and that could have happened actually, it sounds naïve right now, but it really was right there. But yeah watching Jerusalem crumble around me really affected the shape of this novel. And Buenos Aires became the perfect metaphor for cities that crumble around lovely people. Living in Jerusalem, I saw how stories get written. And even national stories like where President Bush a couple weeks ago, well, just introduced, well we shouldn’t have left Vietnam. And suddenly that’s back on the table. Like governments write history, and I get very interested in how from the point in time when something is declared it’s just retroactive when actually it’s a slow process. I’d see so many frustrating decisions get made in Jerusalem, and then the repercussions, and it was as if it had to be. And I wanted to look at how when you were living in the midst of it, how slow that process is. You said a second (inaudible) as if that was a point, like it was building, choices get made all along the way, and that to me was what was horrifying about living there . . . the helplessness. I guess I just got really interested—as an American I was protected my whole life from the world, in a sense, in suburbia. And in Jerusalem I feel like I had the right not to die, or had the right to expect not to die going somewhere. That’s an American kid’s . . . Most people don’t take that for granted. I got really interested in what this book is, is what is the government’s obligation to the individual and what does the individual owe society. And a lot of that happens through the narratives that are imposed, you know, I didn’t know, it’s . . . it’s good to die for one’s country, which is this thing in Israel. That’s a really dumb saying. And you know Israel has functioned on that saying till the years I was living there when people decided, maybe I prefer to go to medical school. I just, again, got very, very hyper-focused on my right to want to live and the narratives that made me think otherwise. Because when I got there I was so prepared to die for the peace process, I really was. I thought if I die while we’re making peace, that is a just death. And then I saw that nobody’s even making peace, that it’s just bloodshed.

RG How do newspapers sort of figure into this, and I just ask this just because there’s a lot of nice moments in the novel referencing, like, you know, the newspaper says it’s not going to rain, but it looks pretty bad out there. Things like this, and also just sort of the sense of like where people are getting their information about what’s happening. Is there a sort of sense of news in the novel or does that play in how you were thinking about it?

NE That’s such a good question that I never thought about it at all, at all. But something really popped into my head when you said that, which would be an answer. I don’t have to do the whole thought process out loud. Now I’m going to speak those words that I recently thought. Yeah, you know what? I think maybe, kids running back to Jerusalem, my talk in Italy was about having friendly faces, was hard work because W. Grossman was there, the Israeli writer, he insisted on coming. And I begged him, stay in your room and watch CNN, stay in your room and watch CNN. But I ended up talking about Jerusalem so much and talking about Jerusalem in front of him was just so horrifying, you know, somebody who understands it so well in front of me. But nonetheless, so many of my Anglo friends in Jerusalem were journalists. We had a soccer game Saturday morning, I was the only fiction writer, otherwise it was all news writers. We’d be like, Fox passes to CNN, the man shoots, you know and it was all . . . the whole news world. But I guess I got interested, I never understood. The first time I got misquoted, you know, I called my agent, all excited, and she’s like, “Did you believe everything you read?” And I was like, “Every word until now.” I feel very much naïve, and I guess it was so creepy to me to watch the news get built, that it was my friends making the world news, you know, Jerusalem was the story, it was the big story till it switched to Baghdad and then they were like calling my phone, “Can you send us your armored car, we want to use it there.” And I’m like, “I still need it.” You know, these stories move. But yeah, I guess I was so fascinated by that things get written, especially with all the beepers, that ages me. But just that you would know the news before, someone could just be like, Mother Theresa’s dead, and then the story would like two hours later be announced to the world. I guess I got really interested that people are behind the news. I guess it fits into my whole idea of how my ideals get constructed. But I just can’t believe the news gets written, that was a real shocker to me.

RG And what are the translations that you’re working on?

NE I just was really interested, for a couple of years, in things like—I don’t know why I want to do this. Oh, I like, the epigraph for this book is that it’s from Hermippus. The Hebrew library is the only place in Jerusalem that makes me feel well read, because I can walk through the fiction shelf and be like, read it, read it, read it, read it. You know, I feel like, oh I’ve read the whole library. So then you start finding the other sections. But they have this thing called like fragments of attic comedy and it seems, as I understand it to be, these bits, like, my god, we have, you know, the Orestaia Trilogy, we have these plays. But then you also find two lines of some guy’s play and that’s all there is. And to me, that’s so romantic to have like a phrase that existed. So I was interested in the Cairo Geniza. You don’t throw out things with God’s name, holy papers. They seal them up into this room in Cairo, it was found about a century ago and it’s just all these fragments and old books and pieces of paper. I just got interested in these poems that haven’t been translated in thousands of years. And it’s before everything got codified, it’s religion before it became the religion that annoys me. You know, it’s really good poems and people just ripping on God in a nice way. But I wanted to translate that, and then I never got around to it. But young master (?13:57) who’s up the street, he’s doing a Haggadah and I was gonna do a little thing for it. But then he asked me to translate the Haggadah for him, oddly, to re-translate it. It was just strange for him not to know that I was secretly wanting to translate something. I don’t know, I’m looking at the text and it’s kind of exciting. Again, you know what it feels like? Exactly the same with the news, somebody writes the news, I’m like, I can’t translate the Haggadah. You know, who translates the Haggadah. I’m like until now, somebody else. Like it’s just somebody. I know the old paper, I know the religious stuff . . . I have a pen. So yeah, but that’s actually an exciting project.