Love Letter A
To Brazil

A self-described “Appalachian Jew”
captures the lushness and flow of
the South American country.

SANDEE BRAWARSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

Brazilian writer with a cigar in her mouth
and a suitcase in hand nonchalantly
climbs up an almond tree in a park near
Copacabana Beach in Rio and reads a book.
Soon after — she’s missing.
Poet and translator Idra Novey captivates the
reader in the first lines of her debut novel, Ways
to Disappear (Back Bay Books). This highly
original literary mystery and love story involves
a well-known writer named Beatriz Yagoda, her
family and her admiring American translator,
Emma, who knows every wrinkle in every one
of Yagoda’s stories. All of these characters and
others, too, are Jewish, and even if they don’t
pay much attention to that identity, it’s how they
are seen by Brazilians.
With suspense, humor and prose that is
spare, polished and vibrant, Novey captures the
lushness and rhythms of Brazil. The book is, in
fact, as she says, “a love letter to Brazil.” Earlier
this month, Novey was named winner of the
2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for
Ways to Disappear, with an award of $100,000.
Novey describes herself as an Appalachian
Jew. She grew up in Johnstown, Pa., in the
Rust Belt, where her father, originally from
New York, is a pediatrician and was active in
their local shul. Her mother is third-generation
Appalachian. Novey’s great-grandfather, an
immigrant from Poland, started a scrap-metal
business by driving a horse-drawn wagon
through the streets. The company he began,
now called Novey Recycling and still in the fam-
ily, is 100 years old. (The author, named for her
maternal great-grandmother Ida, adopted her
surname.)
About her hometown, Novey says, “It was
terrible. I just had to get out of there. That was
my goal.
“In my high school, there was one Mexican
kid, a few other Jewish kids and me. We all
looked out for each other, and that stayed with
me — the awareness that there were a few of
us who weren’t part of the majority and we had
a responsibility for each other.”
At age 16, she wrote a full-length play, and it
was produced in school. “I loved writing it. That

nobody came to see it didn’t matter. It was a
pivotal moment.
“Being an Appalachian Jew felt so different
from everything around me,” she says.
She did get out, and attended Barnard
College in New York City. In a class there, she
studied the Brazilian Jewish writer Clarice
Lispector, whose work she has since translated.
That was “the one class that shaped everything
that happened after.”
While at Barnard, she worked as an assistant
to the writer and photographer Ruth Gruber.
Through her, she met the writer Gerald Jonas,
who has remained a close friend and literary
mentor. Later, Novey moved to Chile and then
to Brazil.
“When I started writing poems in Spanish in
Chile,” she says, “I disappeared in translation. I
found my own voice by imbibing the voices of
writers I admire.”
In the novel, she describes the translator as
in-between, suspended, “floating between two
countries, in the vapor between languages.”
She writes, in Emma’s voice, “And wasn’t
the splendor of translation this very thing — to
discover sentences this beautiful and then have
the chance to make someone else hear their
beauty who had yet to hear it?”
The novel is written in many short, visual
chapters and each section is, in Novey’s words,
“chiseled to its essential elements.”
“For every sentence, I probably deleted six.
I’m a compulsive reviser. I wanted every sen-
tence to be immaculate,” she says. “There were
so many things I wanted to do. In every draft, I
layered in some other question. It’s a kaleido-
scopic book of many moving parts.”
Sometimes the narrative is interrupted by a
page with a definition of a word she has used,
with humorous references; emails from Emma’s
boyfriend in Pittsburgh; or radio reports. Novey
describes these brief pieces as like a “Greek
chorus of the novel, deepening the themes.
“I loved writing the radio reports,” she says.
“They’re in sync with the way we are distracted
while reading, the way you are when you’re on
your phone, the dissonance of doing several

continued on page 26

ISRAEL/JUDAISM

• Before his death in 2015, Holocaust chronicler David
Cesarani just completed Final Solution: The Fate
of the Jews 1933-1949 (St. Martin’s Press). Based on
decades of scholarship, newly available documenta-
tion, diaries written in camps and more, the book puts
forth Cesarani’s idea that the persecution of the Jews
was not always the Nazis’ central preoccupation, nor
was it inevitable.
• Originally published in Hebrew in 2010, Jewish
Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State
University Press) by Yuval Harari discusses the essence
of magic in general and Jewish magic in particular.
• An analysis of the outlook shown by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is offered by Israeli
journalist Ben Caspit in The Netanyahu Years (St.
Martin’s Press; due out July 2017). The leader’s poli-
cies, struggles and fight against the Iranian nuclear
program are examined along with relationships estab-

lished in communications with American leaders and
experiences with American Jews.
• From drones to satellites, missile defense systems
to cyber warfare, Israel is at the forefront of both new
technology and ways to implement them in hostile
situations. In The Weapon Wizards: How Israel

Became a High-Tech Military Superpower (St.
Martin’s Press), Yaakov Katz, editor-in-chief of the
Jerusalem Post and lecturer at Harvard University’s
Extension School, takes readers inside the story of
how Israel has succeeded in inventing, developing and
manufacturing the most sophisticated arms in the
world today.
• What if the Exodus had never happened? What
if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492?
What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda
instead of Palestine? What Ifs of Jewish History:
From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge University
Press), a pioneering anthology of essays by 16 distin-
guished scholars in Jewish studies edited by Gavriel D.
Rosenfeld, covers 3,000 years of dramatic events and
invites readers to indulge their imaginations. •

—Suzanne Chessler, Jeffrey Hermann and Lynne Konstantin con-
tributed to this story.

jn

June 29 • 2017

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