#jonathan rabb

“There are three roads to chaos[for the political realm]: first, by assassination; next, by military or foreign threat; and third, by a popular demagogue.”

author of Among the Living

Other Press: Among the Living is absolutely fascinating. It has a specificity of time and place and perfectly captures the tensions between so many different communities—the Jewish and black communities in late 1940s Savannah, the Conservative and Reform Jewish communities, European Jews who have experienced the Holocaust and American Jews who have observed it from a distance. Why write this novel? How did you first come up with the idea for it? Was it difficult to render all the different moving parts into one cohesive narrative?

Jonathan Rabb: I’m not sure there’s ever a satisfying answer to “Why write this novel?” At a certain point it becomes: how can I not write it? You get so involved with the characters—you’re grappling with questions that have more to do with you as the writer than with them—and you have no choice but to dig yourself deeper into that hole. For this book, the first idea came when I was living in New York. I had a cousin who had survived a concentration camp when he was only nine years old, and I began to spend a bit of time with him. We’d meet for breakfast, where we’d invariably talk about the book he was writing (about the head of the Gestapo in Paris during the war). I never saw a page of it—I can’t even be sure that he was writing it —but I realized that he had never really moved beyond those moments in his life. How could he have? At the same time, he wasn’t lost or delusional. He was a fully functioning man, with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. But a part of him was always back there. I suppose there was a part of me that wanted to find a way to free him of that. I couldn’t, of course, but maybe I could create a character who would be given that choice for himself.

And then my cousin died. To me—to my entire family—he had always been known as Edi (Ai-dee). At his memorial service, an American friend of his got up and said, “Let me tell you about my friend Ed Goldah.”

Ed.

I’ll be honest, for a moment I had no idea who he was talking about. This was Edi’s memorial. But it suddenly dawned on me how crucial a name could be, especially in the Jewish experience, questions of identity and belonging and alienation. To his friends he was Ed. To me he would always be Edi. And I knew that I had found an inroad to the character I’d been imagining.

The trouble was, New York seemed too obvious a place to start his story. So I waited. When I moved to Savannah—and discovered a Jewish life I had never imagined—it suddenly dawned on me that here was the place I could bring my character. It was so foreign to me, even if the Jewish experience dated back to the founding of the colony. I suppose I thought that, as I discovered what it was to be a Jew in the South, so too would he. So I set him in 1947—why not make the choices even harder?—and called him Yitzhak Goldah, a gentle nod to my cousin. (I dedicate the book to him and his parents, also survivors.)

Setting the story during the height of the Jim Crow era made perfect sense to me. If this was all going to be about identity and alienation—all those different moving parts—then I needed Yitzhak to hear echoes of his own recent past in the way the black community was being treated. Of course, he couldn’t know what it was to be a black man living in the South, but he could feel a certain affinity. And he could ask the hard questions.

That many of those same questions remain with us today made it even more important to situate them at the center of the book.

As to the other moving parts, those are what define the rich complexity of Savannah itself. It’s the key to the story. Where else were all those tensions bubbling just beneath the surface? And how else could Yitzhak find his way back into the world of the living without having to confront them?

Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb

On Sale Date: October 4, 2016

**I received this as an e-galley from Other Press through Edelweiss in return for an honest review.**

My Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5 out of 5 stars)

Synopsis:

In late summer 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives--distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak's past suddenly appears--one who is even more shattered than he is--Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life.

Set amid the backdrop of America's postwar south, Among the Living grapples with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish experience as it situates Yitzhak's story during the last gasp of the Jim Crow era. Yitzhak begins to find echoes of his own experience in the lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers--an affinity he does not share with the Jeslers themselves. This realization both surprises and convinces Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might have thought.

My Review: