My book about four generations of women in my mother's family [In My Mother's House] is a highly personal story set in a highly detailed historic period. The history and politics pass seamlessly through the lives of individual characters (my mother's mother, a Jewish woman from the Shtetl, who could read and write, a woman tragically beaten and broken by her husband; my mother's sisters, one of whom was confined in a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia during WWII; my mother's father who left Russia for the United States leaving his family behind, then sending for them later, when the children no longer recognized him; my own father, who spoke Yiddish as his native language, as did the rest of his immigrant family, people high up in social class, according to my mother, because they owned a butcher story in the small town where both he and my mother were growing up). I love to observe the particular way in which individual lives carry history and politics, both of which are inevitably present in personal, even private stories. When I went to live in Israel, the ancient history of the land was as present to me as the women and men I met on our border Kibbutz. [Crossing the Border] Our land, our farm, had been taken over from Arabs who lived in villages up and down the mountain from us. They lived there without the electricity and water the government had installed for us, a Kibbutz on a dangerous border. Sometimes, taking a shower on a hot day, after work in the orchard, on a late afternoon, I would think this thought when the window of the bathroom steamed up and obliterated the world outside. My heretical sect of Jewish women, [The Flame Bearers], although purely invented, passed through genuine historical events. One of the characters even managed to participate in the attempted assassination of the Russian Czar. These characters came into these events naturally, with no premeditation on my part, simply because it was in their nature to do so. Often, I find myself thinking: Perhaps something is using us to tell its own story, against the unfolding we think of as history? Perhaps we are supposed to learn from fiction and story-telling that we too are merely fictions whose lives have meaning only because they are being used to tell a story.
 In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (UPDATED!) |
 The Flame Bearers: A Novel |
 Sex and Other Sacred Games (with Renate Stendhal) |
 Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey |
 In My Father's Garden |
 My Life as a Boy |