Q&A with Bruce Bauman

Q: You were given residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India as part of your UNESCO/Aschberg laureate grant. Did you begin And the Word Was while you were there? What compelled you to write a book set in India?

A: The answer is yes and no. For years I had this idea for a riff on the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice myth where a doctor operates on his child and he can’t save him. All the contexts that I played with just didn’t seem right. I had the characters of Neil, Castor, and Sarah in my head for years. My wife Suzan was raised in the Church of Self-Realization, and she is quite interested in spirituality, (in the best sense of that word), mainly Buddhism, but also Indian culture as a whole, and through her I became interested in Indian mythology. That influenced the idea of setting the book in India, where someone who is running from himself and his culture would go to hide. A place so far away and seemingly so different, which ultimately doesn’t turn out to be all that different.

When I got to India, after a horrendous plane trip, and then 20 hours of sleep, I woke up and went downstairs to my studio and it was as if it awakened some creative DNA in me that I’d never known existed. I started writing and these voices materialized and took over—Neil as the lead narrator and Levi in the form of Mystical Mistakes and Chambers of Commerce—and I went on the greatest creative jag I ever had.


Q: Indian culture is making its way further and further into the American mainstream with the advent of “Bollywood” and a group of new writers. How do you see the pollination between mutual cultures?

A: The first thing I want to say is that I don’t really know India. It’s just too vast and ancient a culture. Although I traveled while I was there, I spent most of my time in Delhi. Although I walked the streets, met hundreds of people, visited many houses and read all kinds of books, I know I truly only scratched the surface.

I think that it is inevitable that there will be a merging of cultures. I met people in their twenties in India who seemed to know everything about American pop culture. Just check out the Times of India online and you’ll see what’s going on with the two cultures. The shared influences of the music, food, dress—it’s all happening. Most important to me is this wonderful sharing of language. Look at the new Webster’s Dictionary and you’ll see how many Yiddish and Hindi words are acceptable as “official” words. No one ever thinks about schmuck or bagels or guru as being foreign words.

My hope in this cultural pollination is that we create something wonderful and new. Each culture has so much to give. Leslie Fielder once said to me, “When cultures come together they sometimes make war—they always make love.” That sentiment gives me some hope.


Q: Castor, Neil’s son, is shot and killed during a school shooting. Was this theme in the book inspired by the Columbine massacre and the disturbing trend of school shootings in America in the late 90s?

A: No, is the short answer.

I was afraid of something like this as a kid. In fact, one time in the playground in Flushing where I used to go play basketball when I was cutting Hebrew school, a guy from Junior High followed me home. He came up beside me and said, “I’d love to blow all you SP Jews away.” (SP was the class for the ‘smart’ kids.) For weeks, hell, ‘til I damn near graduated, I was terrified. That was decades before Columbine.

Of course when I was writing this book I was aware of all these shootings. I couldn’t escape hearing about it. I decided to do some research on the murders. The stuff in the book about the cops using Elton John and Pearl Jam to solicit money is true. Same with the lawyers soliciting the parents of the kids to sue. Lots of other details about the shootings are ‘true.’


Q: Your main character, Neil, as well as one of the secondary characters, Levi Furstenblum, struggle with losing their religion and their faith in God in the face of personal tragedy. Why was this a concept you felt compelled to write about?

A: This is the most important question of my life. For years I struggled with it in my diaries. The challenge was to create engaging fiction out of my despair and disquiet. Even when I was a kid I thought, What kind of God asks someone to kill his kid for HIM? The Bible’s answer is—it’s about faith and then God spares Isaac. What about the God who allows children to die? What then?

Kafka and Gogol are two of my favorite writers. They were geniuses. Kafka is considered a religious symbolist. But I see Gogol that way too. I always though Diary of a Madman was a metaphor for humankind’s insane belief in God. I always knew I would write something that dealt with this question.

Also, in the space of four years before I started this book, and remember I had the idea for years before that, my wife had four miscarriages. And well, that’s all I can say about that, except that it was painful beyond, well, words. Obviously, that pain worked itself into the book, I do know that.


Q: Then let me ask you, do you see Neil and Holika as some kind of symbols of East and West?

A: After a few pages I stopped seeing them as symbols of religions or cultures coming together or anything like that. If I’d kept to that plan the book would have ended differently, but the characters demanded the story take on the life it did. That, I think, is what good fiction is all about. Letting the characters come to life and trusting their judgment. I did my work, my research, my reading and observing. The inspiration for Levi came from a Holocaust survivor who I only remember as Broucha, and who I met on a kibbutz I visited for a couple of days twenty years ago. We spoke one afternoon for a few hours. She was on a cot on her back the entire time we talked because of injuries she suffered as a girl in the camps. After that…Levi took me on his own journey.


Q: That leads me to ask you this. And the Word Was examines the intricacies of many different kinds of romantic relationships: Neil and Sarah, Charlie and Chrystie, Holika and Samaka, to name a few. Would you say that this is a love story above all else?

A: Yes. Absolutely. It is about learning to love. It’s also about my belief that falling in love is easy, staying in love is hard. In Neil and Sarah you have two people who fell in love and somehow, although remaining in love, lose their ability to communicate and confide in each other.

Charlie and Chrystie have a love based on vanity, money and more of a trade of the tangible than the intangible. But I still think they are in love. It’s a modern American marriage that entwines love, politics, and money.

The Neil and Holika relationship came out of the original design for the book. Before I went to India I had a foggy idea of how to use the Holi sacrifice myth in concert with the Abraham and Isaac myth, but my vision changed as the characters took over the book and as I inhaled and absorbed life in Delhi. As well as a riff on Abe and Isaac, it is also a riff on Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael—with a twist. Of course as the characters grew, the relationship changed immensely and the bond they struck up was one of a deep love that was in part romantic, but I’d say much deeper than that. They are both outcasts in their own lands and Holika, being such a strong character, has a different vision of love than Neil.

As Holika might say, love is the most complex of human emotions and we are inadequate to explain it. Although I’m a guy who considers himself a feminist, I’m still a guy with 10,000 years of guy behavior, history and instincts that I feel the need to examine and interpret. I hope that somehow seeped into Neil.

And don’t forget Neil and Levi; that too is a love story. In them I tackled the nature of hate—of how essentially good people can be destroyed by hate if they don’t understand and control and accept it.


Q: In what genre would you place this novel?

A: How’s a mystical-romantic-socio-political-comic-potboiler? Really, I suppose it is a romantic tragedy. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, written after what was called the ‘war to end all wars’ made a terrific impression on me. Especially the incredible chapter where Bill and Jake do their riff on “irony and pity,” a code for Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, which really is key to what I think a modern work of tragedy—and more so after Auschwitz and the last fifty years—must hold within its pages. I wanted to put both elements of iron and sympathy in this book. For me, irony without pathos and sadness is just self-indulgence. My humor is dark and sometimes a bit silly so that had to sneak into the book somehow.

Although voice and ideas are essential, and maybe this is old fashioned, I believe very strongly in plot. I love Gatsby not only because of the beauty of the language but because it’s a damned great plot. That’s why I say my book is a little potboiler.


Q: The Jewish theme is strong in the book in terms of references to Jewish literature. Why is it such an important part of the book? Why is Judaism such an important part of the book?

A: There are three reasons for that: cultural, religious, literary.

I came to what is now my Jewish identity very late. As a kid I knew I was a “Jew” but it was like having blond hair or brown hair. When I went to Hebrew school I felt that they tried to instill an “us against them” mentality, which I rejected and still reject. It was more important to believe in being a Jew than believing in God, which makes sense after the Holocaust, but didn’t make sense to me on a gut level. Later, as I left New York and traveled to Europe, Asia, and the rest of the country, especially Arizona where my wife is from, I felt that otherness coming at me. I remember a line I read, I think it’s from Bellow, and I’m paraphrasing—“When a Jew forgets he is a Jew, there will always be some non-Jew there to remind him.” That became my experience, so I began to take a stronger personal stand and that experience came out in the novel.

I am no fan of organized religion, including Judaism. How to deal with that problem is a central theme of the book. Right now, in America, it’s not easy to be a disbeliever. Spiritually, I’m struggling. I think I’ll always be struggling.

But I found my true Jewish identity in books: Kafka, Roth, Henry and Philip, Bellow, Mailer, Salinger, Joseph Heller, Grace Paley, Leslie Fiedler, and Rebecca Goldstein. In many ways, among many other writers who were not Jewish, they’re the people who were my shadow family as a teenager and throughout my life. And what they do best is tell great stories with intelligent ideas.

For me this book in many ways, I hope is in that tradition. I was very conscious of that tradition and how I was responding to it as I was writing the book.


Q: Throughout the text of And the Word Was, you draw passages from the works of the character Levi Furstenblum, which are reflections on his experiences during the Holocaust and how that affected his view of the world and his Judaism. In what way do these passages tie the many themes of the book together?

A: Levi and his writings are the soul of the book. Whatever thematic music is in the book comes from Levi and the ‘books’ he wrote. Friends who have read the book often cite Philip Dick as inspiration for the Hitler Nobel Prize sequence. And I’ve read Dick, but I think it emerged more from Borges, and the way he played with language and memory.

The most important aspect of Levi’s searching is how language is used and misused, whether it is in the large scale rewriting of history or in our smaller everyday lives. It is this search, this need to communicate our wants, our need to be loved and our losses that bind the book together.

And if you want to see how that works, well, you have to read the book.

Other interviews with Bruce Bauman can be found at these sites:

Opium Magazine
Interview by Susan Henderson

Beatrice.com
An Author-to-Author exchange between Bruce Bauman and Joy Nicholson, author of The Road to Esmeralda.