arts & entertainment
The Architecture Of
Post-9-11 Life
A Jewish author, a Muslim protagonist and questions of identity
in the Ground Zero-centered The Submission.
Eric Herschthal
New York Jewish Week
T
here is a scene in The Submission
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux),
Amy Waldman's new and much-
discussed post-9-11 novel, where the
Muslim-American architect who wins a
Sept. 11 memorial competition confronts
the competition's chair, Paul Rubin,
a Jewish tycoon not unlike Michael
Bloomberg.
The architect, Mohammad Khan, is
avowedly secular, urbane and liberal
— much like Rubin — but he also is
obstinate in his refusal to cow to public
pressure. Ever since the jury announced
his design the winner from 5,000 other
anonymously submitted proposals, the
public has gone into frenzy over his
Muslim identity.
"I could change my name Khan says
to Rubin, in a secret meeting before
Khan's design is publicly announced.
Rubin takes him seriously: "Many archi-
tects have, mostly Jewish ones:'
Khan says he was only kidding, but
Rubin goes on anyway: "My great-
grandfather — he was Rubinsky, then
my grandfather comes to America and
suddenly he's Rubin. What's in a name?
Nothing, everything. We all self-improve,
change with the times:'
And yet Khan will have none of it. "It's
a little more complicated than that:' he
says, "picking a name that hides your
roots, your origins, your ethnicity"
Khan is, to put it simply, complicated:
a man with certain unassailable moral
convictions, but also coy and madden-
ingly intransigent. For a first-time novel-
ist to make him the center of a post-9-11
story — coming out amid the crush of
10th-anniversary coverage — is all the
more daring.
But Waldman insists the character's
complexity was necessary.
"It would have been much more of a
one-note novel if he was only the victim:'
she said. "I think that, 10 years on, we're
more ready to talk about this."
Waldman may be uniquely qualified
to write about the post-9-11 landscape
as well. A New York Times reporter for
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September 8 = 2011
nearly a decade, she covered the imme-
diate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks
in New York and then was sent abroad
— to Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout
Southeast Asia.
She studied literature at Yale and
began the book on a Harvard fellowship
five years ago. But she says her Jewish
upbringing was deeply informative, too:
"As different as Khan was from me, I
could draw on my own experiences as a
Jew," she said. "The other parallel is that,
historically, there's always been suspicion
of Jews, and I think that came in my
mind as well."
Waldman, 42, was raised in Los
Angeles and went through the typical
Jewish rites of passage: bat mitzvah,
Sunday school, a Jewish wedding. She
also recently went on the Reboot retreat
for young, successful Jewish creative
types. Though she's not observant, she
identifies strongly as Jewish, she said.
And yet to write the novel, she often
asked herself what it meant to "strongly
identity" as anything.
"Whether it's about Israel or some-
thing else she said, people have certain
assumptions about your views based
on your identity. In her book, Khan, like
many of the other characters,
faces a similar predicament.
"What are people's expecta-
tions of you as a member of
a group?" she asked rhetori-
cally."I thought a lot about
that when I was writing
the book."
"It's very rare for
us to buy" a first
novel before it's
finished, said
Courtney Hodell,
Waldman's edi-
tor at Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. "But
what I saw in these pages was
a reporter setting aside her [zeal for
veracity] and really letting her imagina-
tion go:'
Waldman's imagination was, indeed,
uncannily prescient. She wrote the novel
before last year's "Ground Zero Mosque"
controversy, though it reads at times as
if it were cropped directly from
those headlines. "It was a confirma-
tion of Amy's shrewdness and her
intuition," said Hodell, who had the
full first draft by February 2010 —
three months before the mosque
fracas erupted. Both she and
Waldman said they had to change
certain parts of that draft because
they were too similar to the event.
Waldman said she came up with
the main conceit around 2003,
while she was discussing the real
Sept. 11 Memorial competition
(won by Michael Arad, an Israeli-
American, with the memorial
opening this month). Waldman was
talking to a friend about Maya Lin's
Vietnam Memorial in Washington,
D.C., and the controversy that
ensued over Lin being Asian
American. "That's when I thought,
`What would be the equivalent for
Amy Waldman's experiences covering the 9-11
9-11?'"
Waldman fully concedes that her attacks, as well as her Jewish background,
were critical to writing her novel, she said.
long experience in journalism was
critical. "I think a lot of my report-
ing influenced the book:' she said. "Just
befriending a Muslim man while report-
being abroad opened me to how much
ing from a small town in England. Their
debate there is within Islam."
political and social outlooks seemed
Thinking about intra-Islamic conflict
more or less attuned when, almost out
she'd encountered came back to her
of nowhere, the man said, not knowing
when she was writing passages she was Jewish: "You know, Henry Ford"
of her novel, many of
— a notorious anti-Semite — "was right
which deal with
about the Jews."
the conflicts within
"I thought, 'No! Not you, too:" Waldman
America's Muslim
said, recalling her reaction to the com-
community. "I was
ment.
thinking, 'Who's the real
And yet, thinking about those corn-
Muslim here?'"
ments while writing her novel made her
She also knew that, for
ask whether such sentiments necessarily
the novel to feel realistic, she led to violence, or even sanctioned it.
needed to draw on Muslim-
"I didn't feel in danger:' she said, "and
Jewish tensions. The novel
that is the question: When do thoughts
itself touches only lightly on
like that become dangerous? And do we
those dynamics — Rubin's wife,
police those sentiments?"
for instance, has little sympathy
As for her views of Jewish-Muslim
for Khan's plight: "Daniel Pearl paid
relations in the post-9-11 world, she put
a much higher price for being a Jew"
it this way: "I think Jews feel more threat-
she says at one point.
ened by radicalism, yet I also feel that
Waldman said she also drew on expe-
Jews have a special obligation to stand
riences she's had with otherwise accul-
up for Muslims who aren't part of that
turated, liberal Western Muslims that
extreme, because of our past. I thought
have given her pause. She remembered
about that while writing this book."