Ann Arbor author
Josh Henkin talks
about his first
novel.

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JULIE WIENER STAFF WRITER

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nn Arbor resident Joshua
Henkin is the author of StVim-
ming Across the Hudson (G. P.
Putnam's Sons), a new novel
about a young Jewish man
coming to terms with his child-
hood, his connection to Ju-
daism and the fact that he is
adopted. Raised in a modem
Orthodox lifestyle which
both he and his brother have
rejected, the protagonist is
shaken when his non-Jew-
ish birth mother suddenly
appears in his life.
A native of Manhattan,
the 32-year-old Mr.
Henkin received his
bachelor's degree from Harvard
and earned a master of fine arts
in creative writing at the Uni-
versity of Michigan. In addition
to writing, Mr. Henkin teaches
fiction-writing courses and offers
manuscript consultations.

Q: To what extent is Swim-
ming Across the Hudson au-
tobiographical?

A: To what extent something
is autobiographical is always a
hard question to answer. It's so
similar to answering whether
dreams are autobiographical.

They obviously are in the sense a writer. I studied political the-
that you had them and they come ory in college and was planning
from your subconscious and they to go to graduate school for polit-
tend to have characters that are ical theory at some point. I ap-
familiar to you, but [the charac- plied for fellowships to study in
ters] are often doing
England but didn't get
things they wouldn't
them. Instead I ended
Josh Henkin
normally be doing and "I feel very strongly
up going to work for
in places where they that every w riter has a Tikkun magazine in
wouldn't normally be. particular le ns that he California, where one of
In terms of specifics, or she uses to get at
my duties was to be a
unlike Ben, my pro- the general. And in
first reader of fiction. I
tagonist, I'm not this particul ar book,
saw how much bad stuff
adopted, I don't have Judaism is one of the was sent in and in an
a brother who . was particular
odd way it encouraged
adopted, I don't live in lenses I use
me, because it made me
California with a non-
feel like, 'Well, there are
Jewish woman, and I don't have other people out there who are
a brother who's gay. But there willing to try and fail, so I should
are things that are borrowed be willing to try and fail."
from my life. I was raised in a
modem Orthodox Jewish home. Q: And yet you succeeded.
So in the sense that Judaism is Was it difficult getting your
very important to Ben, it's also novel published?
very important to me. I haven't
A: It was a stroke of good luck
left the fold the way he has, but
my feelings about belief and Or- really. I'd published a bunch of
thodoxy are complicated.
short stories in literary journals
and had written the first 50 pages
Q: Have you always been in- of a novel. So I wrote the agents
terested in writing? How did of writers I liked and asked if
you get started?
they'd be interested in reading
what I had. To make a long sto-
A: Basically it was very un-
ry short, I found a wonderful
likely that I was going to become agent, and she sold the novel very

IP

quickly. It wasn't the horror sto-
ry so many people hear about,
and I am grateful for that.

Q: Swimming Across the
Hudson addresses some core
Jewish themes: Who is a Jew,
intermarriage, religious vs.
secular lifestyle
s. Is all your
work influenced by Judaism?

A: In general, no. I wrote .and
published a bunch of stories be-
fore I wrote this novel, and only
one of them has Jewish subject
matter or characters who are
identifiably Jewish. Most of my
characters tend not to be identi-
fiably anything from an ethnic
perspective, other than sort of up-
per-middle class, white, overed-
ucated. When I was in the MFA
program at U-M, Rosellen Brown
[then on the faculty] encouraged
me to write more about Judaism
since I seemed — at least at that
point in my life — to be very self-
consciously writing about char-
acters who were not me. Really
that one short story and this nov-
el were the only things that ad-
dress Judaism explicitly. And the
story Pm working on now and the
next novel I plan to write will not
be about Jewish subject matter.

PHOTO BY DANIEL LIPPITT

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