Interviews

"The Porcelein Monkey"

Shira Nayman reads a story from her collection Awake in the Dark in this podcast from the Savannah Jewish Federation.

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Haunted by Nazis

Shira Nayman explores how the Holocaust haunts contemporary life in her new short story collection: Awake in the Dark.

Shira Nayman interviewed on the Leonard Lopate show.

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Q: You are an Australian, living in New York. One of the themes you take up in your new book, “The Listener,” is the ways in which national identity can be deeply integral to the individual’s psyche and sense of self. Do you see this as connected in any way to your own personal geographical history?

All my life, I resonated with the theme of historical homelessness (though I’d not have thought of it this way), which might be seen as a deep vein in Australia’s history: the story of white Australia, which of course centered on the experience of deportation, and the shameful treatment of the first Australians, who were stripped of their rightful home, exiled from their culture and place within their own shores.

What happens when one is ripped from one’s soil, roots severed and left hanging, wounded, in the air? Or, what happens when one never had a rightful sense of belonging and home in the first place—and still, one is forced to leave, or flee? Questions of national identity are brought into particularly dramatic play during times of War, when one is called upon to defend one’s country, or to fight in far off places in the name of one’s country. What happens to personal identity under conditions such as these? What are the internal rifts—the sundering of self—that can result?

These are all questions that have long fuelled my desire to write fiction. From an early age, I felt an aching sense of homelessness that didn’t always make sense to me. My response to this has perhaps been to roam the world, searching; I have traveled widely and lived in numerous countries—Israel, Mexico, France, and mostly in the United States.

My training and work-life also reveal a bit of a restless, nomadic spirit; I started out in Medical School, completed a B.Sc. in Physiology and Psychology, then a doctorate in Clinical Psychology, a post-doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatry, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature (with a year-long certificate in Jewish studies along the way). I’ve worked as a psychologist, a marketing consultant, and as a teacher of both psychology and literature, while also building a career as a writer. Perhaps in my work-life, too, I have been on a search, trying to find the right “home” for myself.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if for me, the journey itself is home; after all, being a wanderer is a way of life, an identity of sorts. I’ve long loved Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Snow Man,” from which the title of my new book, “The Listener,” is drawn (the title has other resonances as well, principally that of the role of the chief psychiatrist in the book who makes a career of listening).

A poignant meaning of the poem for me is the idea that a sense of identity—and belonging—might accrue to the person with “a mind of winter”: a person who connects with the more nebulous aspects of life, who is in touch with uncanny silences and experiences of distance and removal, who perhaps stakes their claim to being in the kinds of “homeless” realms I have explored in my fiction.

The poem, which begins:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

ends as follows:

… the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

As I copy down these words, I find myself thinking again of the haunting, beautifully unproprietorial home-making of the Aborigine’s original, nomadic way of life: being deeply connected to everything and yet needing to take possession of very little, of continual roaming and yet profound belonging, a belonging that is all-encompassing and yet needs no label, no name, and, until the white man appeared, for which one never needed to—was never made to—fight. Warless, nature-bound, soulful; a self-ownership that was also selfless, that involved belonging not to oneself, but to the rhythm of time.

And, closer to my own personal history are thoughts about the historical condition of many Jewish people—the cliché of the wandering Jew, putting down new roots in ever far-flung places (my grandparents were Lithuanian, my parents South African, I am Australian, my children are American).

One thing I’ve learned through my writing is that Home is a condition of the spirit: often troubled and conflicted, but always exerting a powerful gravitational pull. It grounds us in some strangely compelling way, even if that ground, to return to Wallace Stevens’ imagery, is as uncertain as a shifting snowbank, or heavy cold mist, or glittering ice on bare branches.

In “The Listener,” my characters have to grapple with the historical circumstances of their own sense of “home.” Their painful, personal journeys are defined fundamentally by nationality—by where each was born, and by what each is called upon to do in the name of his/her country.

Wars occur between nations, but in a way, at the individual psychological level, every war is also a civil war, taking place within each person whom war affects. In this sense, no war is ever over. I suppose my book, “The Listener,” is in part about this kind of troubling, socio-historical, but ultimately vividly personal and internal reality.

An Interview with Shira Nayman
By Karen Karbo, MORE Magazine

A new author talks about family, fiction, and finding time for it all.
Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark (Scribner's) has received an unusual amount of praise prepublication for a debut collection of short stories. And rightly so. Soulful and deftly plotted, these stories about the children of Holocaust survivors remind us that we're each the sum of personal histories, known and unknown. MORE checked in with Nayman, 46, a clinical psychologist, marketing consultant, wife, and mother of school-age children in New York City, to see how she is handling the sweet smell of literary success.

MORE: Awake in the Dark deals with deeply held parental secrets.

NAYMAN: The effect of our parents' secrets can be amazing. As a psychologist, I've found people living in reaction to secrets they aren't aware of. And not just the children of Holocaust survivors. When I was meeting with my editors and the book's sales force, they responded strongly to this notion of parents' hidden pasts.

MORE: Many in our generation would prefer to hide their wild pasts from their children. Is disclosure a better choice?

NAYMAN: It's not necessarily best. While it's difficult to live with a sense that your parents are hiding something, knowing the truth carries its own difficulties.

MORE: Why do you think your stories are grabbing people?

NAYMAN: I wish I knew. I wrote the book very quickly, and when my husband read it he said that while it was lovely, he didn't think anyone would be interested in it because the subject matter is so difficult.

MORE: What are you working on now?

NAYMAN: In my office I have piles of other pieces of fiction -- a novel that's almost complete and several collections of stories. Like many women our age, I had other careers and a family before I was able to devote myself to writing full time, which I'm trying to do now.

MORE: You're going on a book tour, you still work as a marketing consultant, you've got a husband, two children, and your writing. How do find the energy?

NAYMAN: I overextend myself. I want everything, which forces me to live at a hectic pace. I don't get enough sleep. Sometimes I wind up sick. Once, when I was in the hospital with meningitis and a very high fever, I started ordering things advertised on television. I wound up with a Turbo Jam exercise CD. You know, it's an exercise program out of California. Now, I absolutely swear by it!

Darkness Visible: Shira Nayman's characters chase the ghosts who haunt them
by Michael Standaert, Nextbook

The women in Awake in the Dark, Shira Nayman's debut collection of stories, seek answers to their existential questions in their parents' lives. An Orthodox mother learns that a treasured gift from her father was taken from a baby whose death he witnessed in a concentration camp. When an American professor takes up residence in her childhood home in Heidelberg, she discovers a hidden crawl space—and finds that she's not exactly who she thought she was.

Nayman, a psychologist, peels away layers of identity, leaving exposed her characters' secrets and the hidden parental pasts that have shaped them.

All of the stories in Awake in the Dark focus on lost, buried, or mistaken identity. What brought you to these issues? And what is it about modern Jewish identity, and specifically the Holocaust, that lends itself to the crisis of identity?

The whole idea of how identity is formed and how time or history, in different landscapes and contexts, influences this is something I've been very interested in for a long time—the age-old question, the feeling of historical homelessness that Jewish people and many other diaspora people feel. That sense of cultural displacement or displacement from the country in which one lives is something that intrigues me in digging through how people come to their sense of self.

In your stories, daughters uncover their parents' true identities, learning about themselves in the process. You seem to be suggesting that these daughters are correct in wanting to know about the buried pasts, even though their discoveries are often damaging.

I think it boils down to the question of how we become who we are. Obviously one's personal family history is so influential to building an idea of self. Psychologists endlessly talk about that. But one thing I haven't seen a lot written about, at least in professional journals, is the question of secrets. What happens when the people around whom your own identity is formed have all these private fears and secrets that you have no access to? How are you going to develop a sense of self when there is not just a blank but a blank where behind it is possibly something scary? It connects, for me, to rather profound, even instinctual things. Children are often afraid of the dark, or afraid of what's hidden, of monsters under the bed. It's almost primal, fear of the unknown, of danger lurking. I'm driven by how the person's identity is formed against that backdrop.

The question about what right does the child have in respect to a parent's past—that's something many people can relate to. In a way I give my characters the feeling that they have full rights. How can I become me if I don't know who you are? But from an intergenerational point of view, do we ever really know our parents? When we look at these 50- or 60- or 70-year-olds, to imagine them as glorious, sexual 23-year-olds at the height of their youthful splendor—that's almost impossible to envision as an adult child. Can we ever know our own parents? My gut feeling is no.

Are these stories autobiographical?

The community I grew up in, in Melbourne, was comprised mostly of Holocaust survivors. Almost all of my friends were children of survivors; being in their homes left a lasting and painful impression. My parents' parents fled pogroms in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, landing in South Africa, and my parents immigrated to Australia when I was a baby. Their relatives, however, remained, and were murdered by the Nazi regime.

Also, I was inspired by a book by Amos Elon called The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933. Although it has "Jews" in the title I think it has universal questions about identity. I grew up in a very close knit Jewish community and left at 17—quite a young age—and spent a year in Israel, and then left more decisively when I turned 21, when I came to the United States. Really, at that point, I stopped living any life that had anything to do with Jewish life. I married someone who is not Jewish. I had nothing in my life that was in any daily way Jewish. Reading Elon's book, I had an extraordinary feeling, it was almost as if I was having that feeling of unity and connection with an entire history of people. He writes mostly about German Jewish intellectuals, artists, writers, people who themselves felt quite cut off from Jewish life, some of whom had converted. Yet they had this gripping connection to Jewish culture, thought. I almost felt like I was discovering a whole new continent of countrymen, and read the book with tears dripping down my face. By the time I closed the last page I had written notes on the back page and had pretty much outlined Awake in the Dark. I mapped out enough stories for three volumes.

Why did you leave that close-knit community?

I think I suffered under the weight of all the pain and trauma associated with the Jewish history in which I was steeped in my youth. I did not consciously choose to break the ties with my background, though I do recall feeling the need to break out into new worlds. In my writing life, I have come to see how very deep my ties are to my Jewish heritage, and how undeniably Jewish I am in my soul.

In the final story, "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a psychologist, the daughter of a survivor, treats an Orthodox woman having a breakdown. In the process, she experiences a breakdown of her own and begins to profoundly identify with her patient. Have you found yourself unable to detach from the struggles of your patients?

I loved being a psychologist. I worked only with patients in psychiatric hospitals, patients with severe mental illness. I did have questions: Why are we calling you crazy, and not me, given that we're all human beings with the ability to experience crazy things? The power relationships bothered me. I spent much of my time being a patient advocate, which is not what I'd really gone into it to be.

Everything I write is completely made up, but experientially that story is probably the most autobiographical thing I've written. Where I describe my first encounter with a psychiatric patient, where he comes up and strokes the glass—that was like a transcription of my first day on a psychiatric unit. All the things about growing up, the Jewish adolescence and the Youth Movement, and all those feelings about being connected but estranged, and being confused about Jewish identity—that's all autobiographical. Some people have seen my stories in this book as rooted in the Holocaust, and of course they are in many ways, but for me, the question is how we find ourselves in this modern world against the backdrop of the culture from which we come. The backdrop is the Holocaust and World War II, but, for example, the new novel I'm working on is set in a psychiatric hospital. It comes more at the questions of identity and madness, and how these interweave for people on different sides of the psychiatrist's chair.

Hidden places recur in Awake in the Dark. There are lots of physically hidden items, later uncovered, that help along the characters' discoveries of their identities.

It's a child's fascination with secret objects, stumbling upon clues, discovering mysteries. It's both the child and the reader in me, following some sort of mystery and trying to unravel it. Although what I write is probably considered literary fiction, I like to feel that I'm pulling the reader along and giving them something to unravel. It keeps me interested in the writing as well. Your browser may not support display of this image.

Closing the Distance Between Past and Present
By Erika Dreifus, JBooks

Shira Nayman’s debut fiction collection, Awake in the Dark, is not for the faint-hearted. The book’s four stories—tales of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators and, significantly, their children—seize you from the start. Even at the book’s end, they won’t let go. From “The House on Kronenstrasse,” which opens the book and appeared in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly fiction issue, to “Dark Urgings of the Blood,” in which a psychiatric patient (a survivor’s daughter), is convinced she shares a family history with her doctor, the stories blend the “what happened” of the past with the “what’s happening” of the present. And yet, each story takes you somewhere—introduces you to characters—utterly distinct, and unforgettable.

Born in South Africa, Nayman grew up in Australia. She has a master’s degree in comparative literature and a doctorate in clinical psychology, and has worked as a psychologist and a marketing consultant. Currently she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. As she prepared for the book’s release, and two book tours, Nayman took some time out to answer some questions.

Tell us a little about yourself—you grew up in Australia but you live in Brooklyn now. When did you come to the United States, and when did you begin writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, though I didn’t start seriously writing fiction until I was in my late 20s [Nayman is now 46], after I’d qualified as a clinical psychologist.

While studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a year after high school, I met some American students and began hatching my plan of eventually coming to study in the U.S. After completing my undergraduate studies in Australia, I came to New Jersey to attend Rutgers University, which has a wonderful doctoral program in psychology. I then did a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.

I had always wanted to study literature formally, so after my psychology training, I did a Masters in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, while working full-time. It was a marvelous experience. It was then that I began publishing book reviews and review essays, while also working more seriously on short stories.

In the book's Acknowledgments, you mention that these stories “were inspired by Amos Elon’s brilliant book, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933.” Can you elaborate on that influence on your work?

Reading Amos Elon’s book was a life-changing experience. I felt like I was discovering a lost Atlantis—an entire universe of people with whom I deeply connected, whose concerns and conflicts and passions felt familiar. It was as if I had been shadowed much of my life by a feeling of historical homelessness, and that here, in this book, I had found my landsman among the extraordinary array of personalities Elon brings to such vivid and compelling life.

Many of the figures Elon focuses on are inwardly torn; they are not people for whom traditional Judaism provided a comfortable and ready home. Rather, they considered themselves citizens of the world—though they were often denied rights or status of equal citizens because they were Jews. The result was a complex psychology and intellectual makeup that I found not only intrinsically interesting and moving, but also saw as somehow emblematic of aspects of the modern condition. It seemed to me that the questions of Jewish identity the book addressed, along with the tensions that arise from being an outsider in one’s own country (either through external forces that say, You are an outsider, or from the turning towards insular self-enclosure, either in reaction to being shunned or from an intrinsic desire), resonated profoundly with wider questions of alienation and the search for meaning.

In any case, I was gripped from the first page to the last, and often found myself in tears as I read. I was living in Mexico at the time. Perhaps this condition of a kind of multiple displacement—Jewish woman, born in South Africa, raised in Australia, having spent a year in Israel and then twenty years in New York, and now transplanted for a year to Mexico, a colonial culture in which displacement and disenfranchisement cuts very deeply—cracked something open. I wanted to try to express some of the feelings I had about how personal identity is so deeply connected with one’s cultural historical circumstances. I found myself particularly fascinated with the question of how the legacy of historical traumas, and the pain and secrets they typically engender, can be a force in the formation of one’s own identity and sense of self.

The transmission (whether overt or unspoken) of secrets (and trauma) from the generation that experienced and remembers the Holocaust most directly to the generation that follows certainly plays a significant role in these stories. Tell us more about this, and about the role History plays in shaping identity.

In my training as a psychologist, I was struck by how strong a focus there was on family of origin in the development of self and also of psychopathology, and how little discussion there was of cultural historical circumstances (I’m certain this focus has changed somewhat in the past 20 years).

It was in literature that I found such strong evidence that who one is is very much related to where one became who one is, and the historical circumstances around this. I’ve published an essay about Yukio Mishima, the Japanese writer whose preoccupation with the loss of the militarist Samurai culture in the face of the forces of modernization culminated in his dramatic, public suicide by ritual disembowelment. Here was a man whose psychological preoccupations could not meaningfully be disentangled from his cultural historical moment in time. This is of course equally true of the characters in the stories found in Awake in the Dark. They are who they are, ineluctably, against the backdrop of the horrors of mid-twentieth century Europe.

Coming of age in the post-Vietnam, pre-9/11 age of peace and prosperity in Australia and the U.S., I think I was gripped by the astonishing fact that only 30 or 40 years earlier, people like me were being murdered by the state in a country that had achieved the highest level of culture and civilization. It seemed so arbitrary that here I was, thriving, and taking it all for granted in a way, when only yesterday, or so it seemed, my life would have been so different. I think that some of this wonder is what fueled the writing of these stories, along with an aching desire to express some of the voices that have haunted me all my life [including those of family members who perished in Europe], in a way that would feel visceral and immediate to the reader. Being of Jewish descent myself, I was “writing about what I knew,” but I was of course fully aware that most, if not all, peoples in the world have experienced, or are experiencing still, enormous collective traumas, which have and will continue to have profound consequences on future generations.

The reader often seems to know more about what’s happening (or about to happen) in these stories than some of the characters do. I wonder if this effect also guided your choices to employ both shifting narrators (“The House on Kronenstrasse” and “The Lamp,” for example, both feature two narrators, a daughter/mother pair) and shifts in the narrators’ temporal vantage points; in those same two stories, we seem to shift between the 1980s and the 1940s. In “The Porcelain Monkey,” told by just one narrator, there’s a similar use of time shifts.

I have long been intrigued by the shimmering and paradoxical nature of time (my doctoral dissertation, written years ago, was entitled “Temporality and the Self”). The shifting narrators and temporal vantage points seemed to work well, allowing me the kind of fractured narrative I wanted but at the same time providing a visceral immediacy as far as the characters’ experience was concerned. I wanted to close the distance between the present and the past, and between the protagonists and the reader; I wanted to slam the reality of what I was writing about directly into the reader’s consciousness and emotions, to engender the feeling—“This is happening to me, and it is happening now.” At the same time, I also wanted to evoke the wider horizon of history, and to bring into sharp focus the terrible legacies that history can bestow.

The strategy of shifting narrators and temporal periods allowed me to play around with these different dimensions. It also allowed me to manage questions of secrets: to reveal to the reader things unknown and hidden in the worlds of the characters, so that the reader could then draw her/his own conclusions about the effects of the hidden history on the character in question.

Although many of the characters in these stories have clearly suffered because of the Holocaust, their suffering is not necessarily related to their having been born Jewish. Why was it important to you to tell their stories?

Again, I think my subject has to do with complexities of identity, and how identity is formed and maintained within the familial and wider socio-cultural-historical contexts. The aches and yearnings of the self, and the passionate, fraught nature of attachment—between child and parent and also between partners—is what intrigues me. And I suppose that through the writing of this book, and of some other books currently in various stages of completion, I’ve come to realize that for me, it is not easy to separate questions of personal identity from the contexts in which one’s identity comes into being.

I’ve come to believe that there are no hard or fast solutions or palliatives to the pain and agitation that seems so often to be part of selfhood (the human condition?), but that there is some deep satisfaction, and, I hope, value, in exploring the quandaries and difficulties and transcendence and joy that go along with selfhood—with being human.

At another, more conscious, level, it felt important for me to tell the stories in this book because I live with a strong awareness of the suffering that most of the world endures, in one way or another. Nazi Germany for me encapsulates, as it does for many others, the worst of what people are capable of, the worst of our most recent century. Highly successful and effective state-sponsored mass murder, in a country that had supposedly reached the highest level of civilization and culture, with the tacit or not so tacit acquiescence, or else active participation of the vast majority of citizens, surely tells us something terrifying about the human race. And, of course, we see this terrifying capacity at work in many places today, just as we can leaf through history and find it.

But I would stress that while the darkest reaches of the human soul fascinate (and terrify) me, I am equally driven by an awareness of, and desire to explore, the sources of light: the capacity for generosity, kindness, selflessness, and the extraordinary ability people have to rise above impossible circumstances—that might be soul-destroying, but through heroic effort are not—and stake their claim in the realms of heaven.

Copyright © 2010 by Shira Nayman

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