arts&life

book fair

BOOKS.

BOOKS.

BOOKS.

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

The JCC’s 2017 Book Fair has everything

— including Pulitzer Prize-nominee

Nathan Englander.

I

n 1949, photographer Gjon
Mili asked Pablo Picasso to
draw a picture using only
light.
The artist agreed and, with
a strobe and in just minutes,
created images in the air that
were fanciful and wild, fluid,
staccato, bursting with color,
vigorous, swirling, at times
seemingly alive: a bull set to
charge, a profile of someone
about to speak.
Works of art, there and gone.
Conversations with author
Nathan Englander are like that.
In the span of two minutes
he will move from discussing
his books to politics to his dog,
from Israel to his daughter,
from Yiddish author Peretz
Markish to fitness to other
writers he admires to living in
Madison, Wis., where his wife is
working on her doctorate.
“Wow,” listeners are likely to
think. “Just wow.”
A finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize, Englander is the author
of the new Dinner at the Center
of the Earth, a political thriller
involving an American wait-
ress, a Canadian business-
man, a Palestinian, a prisoner
in a secret cell and an Israeli
general. He will be the guest
speaker for Patron Night at 8
p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 7, when the
66th Annual Jewish Book Fair
opens at the Jewish Community

Center of Metropolitan Detroit
in West Bloomfield.
“Our Book Fair committee
has worked incredibly hard
to bring in an amazing lineup
of authors,” said Book Fair
Director Wren Hack. ”We are
very excited to host Nathan
Englander. He’s a brilliant
author.
“We have so many wonderful
authors speaking this year: Jeff
Rossen, Alex Berenson, Rachel
Kadish, Amy Silverstein, Barry
Holtz and many more, plus our
very talented local authors —
this year we have 17. It’s going
to be a great year for Book Fair.”
In his poem “What Does It
Mean,” Czesław Miłosz (1911-
2004) wrote of the inability of a
person to know exactly who he
is, at the melancholy feeling of
being unknown even to oneself.
Englander, though, is certain
who he is not: He is not will-
ing to see himself as “other”
for being Jewish even if oth-
ers do; he’s a fifth-generation
American. He was not raised
in a haredi home; his family
was Modern Orthodox, and
Englander is no longer obser-
vant nor is he, as some have
called him, “a failed atheist.”
He’s not a “Jewish-American
writer,” as he is often described.
“I am just writing about my
world and my universe.
“I’m not involved in defining,”

he adds. “I don’t have a defini-
tion that suits anyone’s defini-
tion.”
(But there’s a postscript: “Of
course, everything is fluid,” he
notes, before jumping to anoth-
er topic.)
Nathan Englander was born
in New York in 1970. He attend-
ed the Hebrew Academy of
Nassau County where he spent
a lot of time questioning his
rabbis. He craved freedom. He
always wanted to be a writer.
He adored books like 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, 1984
(he took his sister’s copy) and
Portnoy’s Complaint, which he
found inside his mother’s book-
case, a stand “made of dark
wood with a metal grated door.”
After graduating from the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
Englander lived for five years in
Israel.
The first story in what would
be his first book has its roots in
Jerusalem.
Englander was in a history
class when the teacher hap-
pened to mention, spending
just moments on the topic, a
group of Yiddish writers and
poets whom Stalin had mur-
dered on Aug. 12, 1952.
Wait.
What happened?
Who were these men?
Englander had never heard
of them.

continued on page 36

jn

October 26 • 2017

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