Creative Writing Program | Joseph Skibell

THE INVISIBLE BACKDROP

An interview with Joseph Skibell

Reprinted with permission from the June 1997 issue of The Algonkian

Question: Is it true that your novel started out as a play?

Skibell: Well, not as a play exactly, but as a monologue in a play that I was writing at the time and which, incidentally, I have never finished. The play was about a character very much like myself, coming to terms with the effect his aunts' and uncles' and great-grandparents' deaths in the Holocaust have had on him. At one point, the ghost of the main character's great-grandfather enters the stage, gunshot wounds in his face, et cetera, et cetera, very dramatic, you know, and he starts to speak. I had written this scene maybe fifteen times and was totally stuck. The whole play simply could not get over the hump of this one scene. (It still hasn't). Anyway, the great-grandfather's character recalls the day he died, the day the Germans roared into town, rounding up Jews and shooting them in the forest. And to my horror -- or to my additional horror, apart from the subject matter -- I saw that the character wasn't even speaking in dialogue. It was prose! I did everything I could to turn my great-grandfather's words into stage dialogue.

Question: Like what?

Skibell: I added "ums" and "uhs," I had him repeating words, stuttering, things like that. But there was no denying it: the monologue was in prose.

Question: So what did you do with it?

Skibell: I didn't know what to do with it. I kept it, fortunately. I filed it away in an ever fattening file of rejected drafts of an impossible scene in an unwritable play, and then, one day, it occurred to me that I could perhaps turn it into a short story. I had seen a notice for a short story contest and was trying my hand at the form, and I thought this might make a good little story. So I took the monologue out of the file, dusted out all the "ums" and "uhs," the speechy repetitions and whatnot, and when I sat down to write, the whole story came pouring through me. In one very intense sitting. In fact, I can remember getting to one particularly appalling detail, the gifts exchanged by the Polish family around the breakfast table the morn-ing after they move into my great-grandparents' house -- and I myself was appalled and sickened as the words appeared on the page, as though I were not the scene's writer but its first reader. It was only about one thousand words, but by the time I got to the end, I was exhausted.

Question: But how did it become a novel?

Skibell: Well, as soon as I wrote the closing period, the first sentence of what became the second chapter ("The Rebbe is not his usual self") presented itself to my inner ear, but there was no way I could continue writing. So I kept that sentence buzzing around in my aural safe-deposit box for a few months, and it eventually launched the second chapter, and ultimately the book.

Question: In the book, the fantastic elements are so...

Skibell: Weird?

Question: Yeah: dead Jews, talking animals. Did that weirdness just leap out at you during that intense hour of writing?

Skibell: Well, for years I've been a great lover of fairy tales and folk tales. Yiddish folk tales, especially, speak to me. It's my culture, after all. And I guess I had been soaking my consciousness in them for so long that a story with talking animals and Rabbis turning into birds and Jews unable to get into the World to Come didn't seem that strange to me. Also, it always struck me how much the Holocaust (which, to some extent, is the invisible backdrop to my childhood) seemed foreshadowed in the tales of the Brothers Grimm: the oven in Hansel and Gretal becomes the ovens of Auschwitz; the Pied Piper leading away the rats and then the children of Hamelin is, to me, the story of World War II. Hitler as the mesmerizing entrancer seducing the "rats" -- which is how the Nazis characterized European Jewry -- to their doom; the bad faith of the German people; the loss of their children, the next generation, who suffer the consequence of their bad faith: what is that if not the story of the Holocaust? And, believe me, after 150 years of "The Jew in the Thornbush" as a bedtime tale, nothing the Germans did should come as a surprise. So, anyway, I always had this idea, I had always made that connection, but I didn't really want to work through the medium of German folk tales. And when I eventually discovered the great wealth of Jewish and Yiddish tales, I knew I had found my form.

Question: A moment ago, you called the Holocaust the "invisible backdrop to my childhood." Can you explain?

Skibell: Yeah, I guess...I don't know. Although my parents were American, I grew up surrounded by great-aunts and -uncles and my grandparents, who were all European. My grandfather and his brothers were the sons of Chaim Skibelski. Chaim had had ten children. All of his daughters and one of his sons died in the war, and also all their children. My grandfather escaped, as did my uncle Sidney, who fled to Poland with his wife, Regina, and wound up in a Soviet work camp, which was nearly as bad as a German concentration camp. Eventually, they made it to America, after the war. All in all, about eighteen members of our immediate family had just disappeared, violently, from the face of the earth. And no one ever talked about it. This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways which eventually were not that pleasing to me. So the book is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, has all but disappeared. It's an imaginative reconstruction, of course, not a historical one, and because of that, I feel it is somehow truer. In any case, through this imaginative reconstruction, I've gotten to spend two very intimate years, primarily with my great-grandfather, but also with my great-grandmother, and my great-uncles and -aunts and cousins, through writing this book. They've taught me a lot.

Question: Would you characterize the novel as a book of forgiveness?

Skibell: That's a complex issue. As Chaim says to the head of the German soldier, "You've taken everything from me. Must you have my forgiveness as well?" It's not really up to me to forgive. Or not completely, anyway. I can only forgive the effect it's had on me. Most of the ones who could forgive have been dead for fifty years and soon most of the ones who need forgiveness will be dead as well. Have the culpable ones even asked for forgiveness? Not only for what was done to the Jews, but to the whole world. I feel the world suffered a tremendous blow. I don't know, I don't know. In Jewish thought, we are taught to look at everything that happens to us as a blessing. Good or bad. There is only one God, after all, who is the source of everything, so everything is a blessing. Or should be seen as such. It's not always easy to do that, I know. In any case, I hope this book is a book of blessing.

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