Did I really think growing up in a secular Jewish home left no traces? If I had, I might have realized that who I am as a writer has everything to do with my obsessions, my core concerns, my values and judgments, and these in turn are tinged by my personal and collective Jewish background. But then, I had not looked deeply into the question. Why should this surprise me? Unlike other contemporary writers of Jewish heritage whose fiction is steeped in historical and fabulist Jewish lore - writers like Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss - I’ve never identified myself as a writer concerned with Jewish experience.
Now, working on a second novel, I look back at what I didn’t know I knew until after I’d finished my first book, The Conditions of Love, and am astonished to discover how much “my Jewishness” influences the way I perceive and interpret the world. Ten years ago, I might have felt a vague stirring of the connection, but had no sense of its depth.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, I was completely unaware of any relationship between my writing and my experience of being Jewish.
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