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36

October 26 • 2017

jn

“How is it that people know noth-
ing of this?” he asks. “They were
murdered, and that’s that? I thought:
You don’t get to do that. They died
with the greatest stories of their
lives.” He thought about the mur-
dered men for years and decided:
“A real writer should write them a
story. They deserve that.” When no
one did, he decided to give it a shot.
“The Twenty-Seventh Man” was
the story he used to apply to grad
school and became one of nine tales
in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,
Englander’s first book, published in
1999, and called “brilliant” by the
New York Times.
Twelve years later, he was nomi-
nated for the Pulitzer Prize for his
short-story collection What We Talk
About When We Talk About Anne
Frank.
Dinner at the Center of the Earth,
his latest work, actually began many
years ago: “I’ve wanted to write this
book about the peace process since
it fell apart and broke my heart,”
Englander says. “The further peace
recedes, the more I want to grab
onto it.”
So, the idea was there, and along
the way came moments that seemed
to reach out and fiercely grab him
— like when Englander was leaving
Israel and he read about an Israeli
traitor who had killed himself in
custody.
Here was this prisoner, a trai-
tor to Israel, disappeared into the
system. What did it even mean to
be loyal? What would it mean to
be physically alive but so alone, so
broken, so hopeless that you are vir-
tually dead? “We know the reasons
people become traitors: weakness,
blackmail, greed,” Englander says.
What would it be like to take such a
character and “flip him, using empa-
thy — which is in really short supply
these days.”
All this thinking eventually helped
create a character in Dinner.
Those are what Englander calls
the “conscious parts” of a novel.
Then comes the sitting down
and “just typing and typing and out
of nowhere something comes up,
which is how writing works,” he says.
“That’s the subconscious part.”
It took Englander two years to
write Dinner, which he says was
amazingly quick for him because
there is always a first version, and
maybe a 200th.
“I do so much of my work in
rewriting I can’t even tell you,” he
says. “I draft compulsively.”
Dinner was initially “something

like 430 pages, then 200, then 500,
then 250.”
The result has critics in awe:
“Glorious … devastating … a
beautiful masterpiece,” says NPR.
“Englander has produced a master-
piece of literary imagination that
seems to mirror his own evolution,”
says the Jerusalem Post. “Equal parts
political thriller and tender lamen-
tation, the latest from Englander
explores, in swirling, nonlinear
fashion, Israeli-Palestinian tensions
and moral conflicts … Ultimately,
Englander suggests that shared
humanity and fleeting moments of
kindness between jailer and pris-
oner, spy and counterspy, hold the
potential for hope, even peace,” says
Booklist.
When not writing, Englander
loves being with his wife, Rachel
Silver, and daughter. He likes going
to coffee shops. Sometimes, he’ll
start reading and he won’t be able to
stop, ending up “devouring books.”
“I’ll walk you through my shelf,”
he volunteers, reading the names of
favorite authors: Turgenev, Gogol,
Flannery O’Conner, Raymond
Carver.
He does CrossFit, a workout that
combines gymnastics, weightlifting,
running and rowing, and takes his
friendly black dog out for walks.
He likes talking with friends, and
he admits his own comments usu-
ally come back to the same topics:
history or the Holocaust, or CrossFit
on a lighter day.
He says he speaks like he types:
Quickly. But Englander is thought-
ful, too, and he links up three of the
seemingly most disparate groups:
professional athletes, writers and
observant Jews.
He paraphrases Joyce Carol Oates,
saying that writers write when
they’re healthy or when they’re sick,
when they’re inspired or when they
are not. At the same time, an athlete
will run for four years, without fail,
to perform for a matter of seconds
at the Olympics. The religious man
puts on tefillin even if he doesn’t
believe that day.
You do it, Englander says, because
you are in training for that moment
when everything comes together.
You make a conscious effort, you
work hard and eventually “you reach
that sweet spot.”
As a child in a Modern Orthodox
home, “I didn’t understand so much
of what we were doing when I was
growing up,” he says. The routine.
The prayers. The learning. “Now, I
totally understand.” •

