Margot Singer has been awarded the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction for her short story collection, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). The $5,000 award, conceived by its principal benefactor, Dr. Alexander Mauskop, a New York neurologist and member of Larchmont Temple, assists promising Jewish fiction writers. Previous winners have been Scott Nadelson (2007), Tamar Yellin (2006), Jonathan Rosen (2005), David Bezmozgis (2004), and Dara Horn (2003). To learn more about the prize visit http://urj.org/rjprize.  

Singer’s collection of interlinked stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like Susan, the protagonist of the stories, who lives in the U.S. but whose family is rooted in pre-state Israel, the stories themselves shuttle back and forth between past and present, Israel and the U.S., revealing the emotionally complex relationship between contemporary American Jews and the Jewish state.

A SAMPLING

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT

ISRAEL 1997–SUSAN

In my memory, my grandmother [Lila] is framed by flowers. Head-high stalks of gladioli, a backdrop of hibiscus, anemones at her feet. My grandmother is smiling, cheek to bloom. Here are the flowers still: tricolor lantana bordering the sidewalk, vermilion bougainvillea overhanging the second-story stairs. Here are photographs, a pile of black-and-white snapshots taken in the 1940s, not long after my grandparents arrived in Palestine. I flip through them like tarot cards, lay them face up on my hotel room bed. Here is my grandmother in a full skirt and blouse and walking shoes, kneeling in the Carmel woods called Little Switzerland. Here she is, arms linked with her two sons, posing on the beach. She is beautiful, or almost, cat-eyed and slim, with an aquiline nose and prematurely white hair. Here she is leaning against a railing by the sea. Her hair is blowing across her face and she is squinting just a bit. The sea behind her is flecked with white. The camera has caught that fleeting moment that precedes the self-consciousness of a smile, and that, with that slight squint and windblown hair, makes her look contemplative and a little reckless, both vulnerable and brave. I sweep the photographs back into a pile, leaving this one on the top.

PALESTINE 1939

Here in Haifa, it is primitive, dusty, dirty, hot. It is the Orient, the Levant, the Near East but not nearly enough. The road they live on is unpaved. Only cold water from the tap. Lila boils the drinking water, scrubs the fruit and vegetables with soap, makes sure to toast the bread. She pores over the notebook her cook gave her when they left, recipes handwritten in a slanting German scrawl. She cooks in the heat of the afternoon while Josef takes his nap—the kind of food they’re used to, too heavy for this climate—Wiener schnitzel, potato salad, a chocolate roulade. It is just so uncivilized, she writes to her sister in a letter she will never read. Everyone wears khaki shirts and shorts—even the girls! You see women squatting by the roadside, breaking paving stones, while Herr Doktor Professor drives a bus. Even Josef has had to take work selling curtains door to door. There are fedayeen and jackals in the hills. At night, the jackals come down into the wadi behind the house; you can hear them howling at the moon.

Reprinted with permission from The Pale of Settlement © 2007 by Margot Singer (University of Georgia Press, www.ugapress.org)

Q+A

Conversation with the Author

RJ: When did you first think about becoming a writer?

Margot Singer: I didn’t start writing seriously until I was in my early 30s. For many years I’d worked at a management consulting firm in New York City—a high-powered, consuming job that kept me from pursuing a writing career. I’d always wanted to write, and was told I was a good writer; it was sort of what I thought of myself as doing. After taking night classes at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, my desire and need to write got stronger and stronger, until finally I got brave enough to quit my job and see if I could really become a writer. In 1997 I went back to school, to the University of Utah, to get a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing. That’s when I wrote many of the stories that became a part of this book.

RJ: What writers influenced you?

MS: In the context of this book I was most influenced by the Israeli writer Amos Oz. I distinctly remember picking up Oz’s novel The Same Sea at a JCC Book Fair and being blown away by its unconventional style—it is written in short sections and incorporates poems and prose poems. Later, as a writing exercise, I decided to compose something in that form. The story that emerged, “Deir Yassin,” is in this collection.

RJ: The title “Deir Yassin” took me by surprise, because as you know, the name dredges up that perennial accusation of Israelis behaving brutally against Palestinians during the fight to break the siege of Jerusalem in April 1948, when, in fact, what really happened in the village of Deir Yassin is much in dispute. I was therefore relieved to see another story, “Body Count,” taking a pro-Israel perspective, about how Palestinian propagandists clumsily tried to convince the world that the Israelis had committed another massacre in Jenin in April 2002, when nothing of the sort happened.

MS: It was a challenge to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a balanced way. I think one of the powerful things about fiction writing is the ability to show how different points of view can simultaneously exist. “Deir Yassin,” for example, juxtaposes the perspective of Susan, an American journalist who has no idea of the history of the neighborhood now known as Givat Shaul, with that of her uncle Avraham, an Israeli archaeologist whose brother Zalman fought at Deir Yassin as a member of the Irgun. The story isn’t about “taking sides” or about the impossible question of “what really happened.” I’m much more interested instead in exposing the layers—the archaeological strata, if you will—of memory and history and propaganda and myth. Today, on the site of the Deir Yassin village, amidst the rubble, sits an Israeli mental hospital which once cared for Holocaust survivors. In a short story, you can present an image like this in all its incredible complexity and let it resonate.

RJ: Are the stories in The Pale of Settlement autobiographical?

MS: My paternal grandparents, like those of my main character Susan, immigrated to Palestine from Czechoslovakia and lived in Haifa. The grandmother of “Lila’s Story,” in particular, is very closely modeled on my grandmother. At the same time, there are important differences between the characters and my family; my mother, for example, is American, whereas Susan’s is Israeli, and I don’t have any uncles who are archaeologists.

Essentially, the book grew out of my experience of being an American Jew with a very strong relationship to Israel, the home of my grandparents and cousins, whom we visited every other summer. But because I never became fluent in Hebrew, I didn’t blend in or feel “Israeli”; I wasn’t a tourist, but I was still an outsider, “in between.” I remember living in Jerusalem the summer of my sophomore year in college, which was the summer of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. My Israeli friends and cousins, who were in the army then, were grappling with what it meant to be our age—19 or 20—and to be fighting a controversial war. Everyone would say to me, “So, when are you going to make aliyah?” And I thought, maybe I will. Back at Harvard, I realized that I was fundamentally an American. At the same time, my relationship to and knowledge of Israel was very different from that of my American Jewish peers. This, I came to see, was an important vantage point for a writer.

RJ: The book’s title refers to a geographical area in the late 18th- and 19th-century Russia within which Jews were forcibly concentrated. The focal point of your stories, however, is Israel, where Jews supposedly are free of such constraints. Are you suggesting that Israelis are trapped in a psychological Pale of Settlement?

MS: The Pale of Settlement is a place of historic memory, yet its shadow still hangs over both Israeli and Diaspora Jews. I can’t speak for Israelis, but from my own experience and imagination it seems that the Pale—a vanished place where Jews were forced to live, and later one of the sites of the Holocaust—is the dark mirror image of Israel, the modern Jewish state. The word “pale” comes from the Latin palus, which means “stake,” in the sense of a staked boundary line. I chose the title because so many of the stories have to do with boundaries and border crossings, with that liminal place where history, memory, and myth meet. Susan, an American born to Israeli parents, is constantly moving back across the border between the U.S. and Israel, trying to figure out who she really is.

RJ: Susan studies old photographs of family members as if stills will reveal hidden truth. What role do photographs play in this process?

MS: Photographs are tangible images of the past that appear to represent actual truth, but it’s not that simple. In reality, my grandparents had this box of old photographs, and often they would go through the images and say, “Oh, I don’t remember who that person is,” or “I don’t remember what that was all about.” It was a mysterious and wonderful box of clues about unknown aspects of the past.

In “Lila’s Story,” a photograph of Susan’s grandmother changes subtly each time Susan comes back to look at it. If Susan is looking for the truth about the past, she leaves feeling somewhat frustrated with the realization that even a fixed image can be elusory.

RJ: On the book jacket it says you write fiction and creative nonfiction. What are these stories?

MS: Amos Oz likes to say there’s no such thing as fiction. He points out that James Joyce took the trouble to measure the precise distance from Bloom’s basement entrance to the street above. I write in the tradition of realistic fiction, where everything is plausible and rooted in the details in the real world; only the characters are invented. The exception is “Lila’s Story,” which is based in part on my memories of the stories my grandmother told, and which at times crosses the border between fiction and nonfiction. Some particulars, like the narrative of the extramarital affair Susan imagines her grandmother having in the 1940s, are clearly inventions. And, of course, even memories may not be truth. As anyone knows, your memory of a story someone else told you may be far from accurate.

RJ: Considering that this, your first book, also won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, you must feel encouraged as a writer. What are you working on now?