An Afternoon With a Novelist

By Aviya Kushner

Review of: After Long Silence by Helen Fremont. Delacorte Press. 322pp. $23.95.

Novelist Rachel Kadish often writes in a coffee shop that smells of olive bread. Kadish sits at a small round table, watching customers down a quick espresso after dropping their dry cleaning off next door.

The coffee shop is one of two Kadish frequents in her well-kept, tree-filled neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Harvard University campus. Apart from a toy store located in a narrow, brightly colored house, everything about Kadish's surroundings seems perfectly in place.

So one of the first things Kadish says over a glass of lemonade in that same coffee shop comes as a surprise. "I like messing around with stories," she confides, looking just like her book-jacket photo. "I like to think what would happen if this character said this, or did that."

Messy seems an odd word for the small, curly-haired Kadish to choose, since nothing about her is messy. Her fiction is complex, but utterly clean. Her first novel, From a Sealed Room, skillfully weaves the perspectives of older and younger characters, some American, some Israeli, and some Polish, using the simple, uncluttered technique of letters home as connective tissue.

And in a recent nonfiction essay published in the literary magazine Tin House, Kadish makes the image of a photograph serve as a neat framing device -- introducing a story and ending it. That essay's first paragraph also showcases Kadish's attention to the little things, like punctuation. Here, she makes each semi-colon, comma, and long dash count:

This is how I thought it would be to travel in Poland: My image of myself, of my mother and other family members I would meet there, was strangely irradiated. I pictured us as figures on a photographic negative -- our dark hair white, our faces darkened, all of us staring with white eyes out onto a world that would not recognize us. On the sidewalks of Krakow we would weave mute and unseen, ghostly figures superimposed on a city oblivious to our presence.

That's the pristine, non-fiction voice of a fiction writer using every muscle at her disposal. A Kadish short story that appeared in Story magazine and later won the prestigious Pushcart Prize for small-press writing also has that clean quality, a sense of all the hair in place: Ethiopian, Russian, and Israeli women interact in a battered women's shelter in Jerusalem. The mythical vision of Jerusalem repeatedly clashes with the reality. Complex, yes. A mess -- no.

The mess isn't evident in Kadish's work space either. Her study, part of her apartment in a character-drenched older home, is spare -- or at least it appears that way on first glance. From the doorway, it looks like a large, alabaster-walled room with two desks. A small desk with a computer faces one of the two windows that look out into the trees of her quiet street in Cambridge. The other desk is different. It has pens, papers, the tools of writing by hand.

On the walls hang two bulletin boards, decorated with a poem by Seamus Heaney and a quote from poet Mary Oliver. But the two chairs -- one rocking, one a simple wooden chair -- point to another life just beneath the surface in this quiet space punctuated only by wind occasionally rustling the leaves just outside the windows And that's because despite of the quiet here, there's some rocking, something brewing in this slightly asymmetrical room off a kitchen, drunk with sunlight.

"I like to work on several projects at once," Kadish said earlier, over that same lemonade, sitting in the coffee shop where she frequently works. Every table in that shop had jewel-like blue and green rectangles embedded into the surface, and Kadish's study has that same perfectly packed feeling. She points to a bookcase crammed with white papers: drafts of the novel; galleys; proofs. Then, in another corner, is a box packed with old letters, in those air-mail envelopes. These are letters from Kadish's father to her mother, written in the early days of their marriage, Kadish's father was a physician stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam war. For Kadish, the letters are material to be researched for a new project.

"One of the things I like best about researching fiction is the conversation it sparks," she says. When she worked on her novel, she called and e-mailed the Israeli branch of her family frequently, gaining a new perspective on all her mother's relatives in Tel Aviv. This time around, she is delving into her father's past, feeling privileged to be able to read the letters.

Delving into pasts is one of Kadish's specialties as a writer. Last summer, she took a trip to Poland, taking a look at where her family was from. "I did not expect to fall in love with Poland," Kadish wrote in that Tin House essay. But she did, in a complicated way. And now, her new book project is about Holocaust reparations.

That "complicated way" of finding inspiration is where the messiness comes in for Kadish -- her willingness to stretch perspective, including her own. She pushes deep into the unexpected, makes herself uncomfortable, and then molds that uneasiness into a story.

But all this doesn't answer the basic question that book jackets never seem to address: how does a novelist work?

There are tricks, it seems. Kadish keeps books of photographs on hand. Sometimes she sees a photo and thinks -- aah! That's a character. But mostly, she does lots of painstaking research. In one of the study's several bookcases, there's a "reference corner." There's a Concordance, in Hebrew, which lists each mention of every word that appears in the Bible. Dictionaries of Hebrew by Alcalay and Even-Shoshan have their space. The Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim get their own shelf. This is a writer who checks her facts, who researches tradition and keeps it near her.

Other "projects" are visible too: papers and books from the writing class she teaches at Harvard Extension school. There are tapes from a drama series she worked on for radio, about adaptations of American literature. And there's a book-in-progress of photographs and essays, which Kadish contributes to.

Frequently, it seems, Kadish listens to music. Her CD collection is full of hints of rumbling, thunder, chanciness. Aretha Franklin, lots of gospel, blues. Classical powerhouses Tchaikovsky and Chopin, along with the often-frenzied Mozart -- a master of the clean but complex.

Kadish also reads a lot. A few rooms away, a bookcase full of contemporary literature reveals some of Kadish's favorite writers. Toni Morrison -- her thesis adviser as an undergraduate at Princeton. Kundera. And Bernard Malamud.

"I love Bernard Malamud because he refused to be put in a box. I mean, he wrote all these Jewish stories, and then he also wrote The Natural. Isn't that great?"

Asked if she fears that her first book will get pegged as a "Jewish novel," Kadish says that what "bothers me is when people look at a book and call it a Jewish book. It's a novel, not a Jewish novel or a feminist novel. I think it's reductive to look at fiction in that way."

And for Kadish, range, layers, even a little mess, is what matters.

"I want to be able to write politically charged material and planet stories," she says, referring to her story "The Blue Planet." But Kadish wants to stay empathetic as she stretches.

"I prefer writers where there's warmth in addition to brilliance," she notes. Both in person and in print, Kadish is certainly warm. Many have called her work brilliant. What remains now for the young woman who terms becoming a novelist the "only no-brainer decision I ever made" is to move past her impressive first novel and chart a lifelong path as a writer.

Aviya Kushner has studied at Boston University, The Johns Hopkins University, and the Sorbonne in Paris. She is a writer and reporter in Cambridge, MA.