off her nationwide promotional book
tour, Singer spoke with the New
Mexico Jewish Link at a Santa Fe. cof-
feehouse not far from her small home.
Her new life, she says, is a long
way from her hardscrabble begin-
nings as a writer living in a farm-
house in an isolated northern New
Mexico village near Espanola. After
moving from Boston, her first year in
the mountains — living in condi-
tions similar to the dirt-poor, 19th-
century Russian shtetl of her ances-
tors — informed and
guided the creation of
her novel, she says.
Like her great-
grandmothers in
Eastern Europe, Singer
has continued to live
what is virtually a
hand-to-mouth exis-
tence, not too far
above the poverty line.
"I'm interested in
how generations affect
each other, and it
seems to me that we're
still affected by the
pogroms and the
Holocaust in really
personal ways," she
says. "There's some -
patterning that I expe-
rience, and I wonder
about. Writing the
book was a way for me
to explore that."
The people in
Singer's life influence
her writing as much as
the places she's lived.
In the 1980s,
Singer was writer-in-
residence at South
Boston High, a school
famous in the 1970s .
for the riots that
ensued with court,
ordered desegregation.
During her tenure there, she edited
an anthology of students' stories and
photographs.
"I grew up with people with really
strong, sharp tongues from different
cultures and generations. [In south
Boston] they had incredible stories,
[though] often they could barely
write. Somehow, and I believe it was
the power of their stories, they were
able to get things on paper in a way I
could understand. I learned when a
story was coming from the heart or
the gut from my students."
The personalities of Singer's fic-
tional characters and the dialogue in
The Wholeness of a Broken Heart echo

the blunt, plain-spoken nature of the
people who surrounded her in child-
hood and in her work.
Though the life paths of her char-
acters often parallel Singer's — like
the protagonist, she grew up in
Cleveland, moved to Boston after
college and later to New Mexico —
she insists her novel is not autobio-
graphical.
"I've been struggling to explain fic-
tion to people," she says. "Where does
it come from? It's like building some-

"There's a
Yiddish
proverb
that says,
`There's
nothing
more whole than a
broken heart.' A
broken heart has room
to hold everything
the best and the worst
of being alive."

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thing. I wake up in the morning and
it's kind of like I feel pregnant with
this story and I write it down.
"Whatever I'm feeling on a partic-
ular day will affect what I'm writing.
Autobiography is really going for
facts. With fiction, I get really sur-
prised by what's happening. I get to
explore my own complexities."
Though Singer denies any autobi-
ographical context to her book, the
creative process did have tangible
effects in her daily life. While writ-
ing a section set in the Russian city
of Riga, where less than 10 percent
of the Jewish population survived
the Holocaust, Singer woke every

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