What makes a collection Jewish and feminist?
Consider that each person holds multiple identities, and often we bring more than one identity—and emotion—to an encounter: scholar, laborer, child, artist, parent, warrior, lover, antagonist, elder. How do you see this assertion being played out in the collection? And what happens when a character’s identities or desires are in conflict?
Photographs have a role in several of the stories here, including in “The Wedding Photographer’s Assistant” and “Street of the Deported.” In what ways do visual cues trigger memory, with its attendant emotions of joy, nostalgia, sadness over time passing, and also, as Holocaust documents do, bear witness to the past?
Why do you think traditions—familiar rituals or prayers, a baby naming, marriage rites, an unveiling—also can be occasions for transgressions, or for reshaping norms? Is it precisely because they are so telescoped, compressing close relationships or religious fealties, and come freighted with expectation? In which stories do female characters’ relationships to tradition shift through time?
Have you ever participated in a ritual that left you feeling erased or demeaned? Which traditions or rituals in this collection feel authentic to you? Or . . . deeply inauthentic? Why? Referring to the stories here, how would you want to shape (or reshape) a ritual or celebration so that it has meaning for you?
There is considerable range in what passes for intimacy in “Boundaries,” “Unveiling,” “Glass,” and “A Wedding in Persia.” Are there particular expectations Jewish women and Jewish men have of one another as romantic partners? The stories set in Israel—“Flash Flood,” “Road Kill”—offer a different angle on intimate connections between Jewish protagonists. What could explain this difference?
Women in almost every culture bear responsibility for caring for the young, the elderly, people with disabilities, and those who can’t fend for themselves, so the depredations of war and its aftermath take a special toll. How does this play out in the stories in the section “War?”
“News to Turn the World” deals with an illegal abortion and its aftermath. What does this narrative signal to readers about the mother-daughter connection?
We believe that one of fiction’s reasons for being is the opportunity it presents to enter empathically into the experiences of another. Yet there has been considerable discussion about whether an author is permitted to write fiction that steps into a life dramatically different from her own. What do you think? Does telling a story this way violate a precept enunciated by some marginalized groups: “Nothing about us without us”?
Short stories let readers take a sidelong glance at narratives we think we know. Like . . . what goes on in the mind of a widow? How should one sort through the belongings of someone who has died? Is there a microaggression in not knowing or remembering the name of an employee? Which stories here revealed something surprising about a situation familiar to you?