My parents grew up in New York City, my mother the daughter of a hat manufacturer, my father the son of a famous Orthodox rabbi who lived in the U.S. for fifty years and never learned any English. My mother: a secular Jew who went to Bryn Mawr College and Yale Law School. My father: a law professor at Columbia who attended Yeshiva University and fought in World War II and who has remained religiously observant. I am the product of these varied backgrounds, and of this happy marriage.
I went to an Orthodox Jewish day school, a Conservative Jewish sleep-away camp, and, for a time, a day camp in Colorado where no one knew any Jews and where I spent my days learning to ride horses.
Here are two stories I like to tell. The first is about my father who, in World War II, was scouting out enemy territory with three other American soldiers when they came upon a band of seventy armed Germans. My father and his battalion mates were unarmed, so the Germans were going to take them prisoner. But my father had gone to law school and he knew the art of persuasive argument. The problem was, he didn't speak German. He did, however, speak Yiddish. So in 1944, speaking what he calls "Teutonized Yiddish," my father convinced the Germans that they were about to lose the war and he got them to lay down their arms.
The second story takes place in 1968, when I was at nursery school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was Christmastime and there was hubbub that day; Santa Claus was visiting. All the kids were shouting, "Where's Santa Claus? Where's Santa Claus?" And then, in a moment of silence, a voice rang out: "Who's Santa Claus?" That was me.
A Jewish lieutenant speaking Yiddish to German soldiers in World War II. A boy of four, living in one of the biggest cities in the world, who doesn't know who Santa Claus is. These are what I like to call "pleasing contradictions," and they are, it seems to me, the lifeblood of a fiction writer. I teach writing now, to undergraduates and MFA students at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College, and when I tell my students that they need to find conflict in their stories, I'm really telling them to look for the pleasing contradictions, since contradiction is what makes fiction interesting, what allows a writer to explore character.
Growing up, I wanted to be a fiction writer, but I feared I wasn't good enough. Then, after college, I worked for a magazine where I read fiction submissions. Most of the submissions were terrible, and I was curiously encouraged: if other people were willing to try and fail, I should be willing to try and fail, too. I believe this is one of the most important lessons a writer can learn. You must always be willing to risk failure. Each time you sit down at your computer you know it's possible that your novel won't pan out. Even when a novel does pan out, you never know how long it will take. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson
I'm back in New York now, in Brooklyn, with my wife and two small daughters and our golden retriever. But I've spent almost half my life elsewhere, mostly in college towns: Cambridge, Massachusetts; Berkeley, California; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Although Matrimony isn't autobiographical, it's about things that are close to me. It's about spending your life with someone, and the challenges and pleasures that entails. It's about the writing life. And it's about living in some of the places I've lived--in New York, first of all, but also in a host of college towns, those places where time feels suspended, when you're in your twenties and thirties, when the decisions you make have consequences you aren't even aware of yet, when, without your realizing it, you're reaching the cusp of middle age.
