The Rabbi’s Suitcase follows a seventeen-year-old girl growing up in Jerusalem’s Orthodox community in 1926 who dreams of a life different from what tradition dictates, so she sails to America alone, hoping to create a life of her choosing. What inspired you to transform your family’s history into a novel?

I’ve always been struck by the power of fiction to close the distance between ourselves and the past. Writing “The Rabbi’s Suitcase” has changed the stick figures on my family tree into living, breathing people who formed the world I grew up in. I knew names and had heard stories of interesting, in some cases prominent, people in my family’s past, but I never had a sense of their humanity: what they ate, what their voices might have sounded like, what their homes might have looked like, who they loved and perhaps hated. After twelve years of research and writing, what I learned, with help from my imagination, has opened the way for me to experience them as living people I might enjoy sitting down with over a glass of wine and discussing the events of their day. It’s my hope that after reading my novel others in my large extended family, as well as readers at large, will also come to know them. Perhaps, 100 years from now, someone will do the same for you and me.

What challenges did you encounter while portraying the emotional and social consequences of Zipora’s forbidden relationship and the difficult decisions that follow?

Writing about my mother’s intimate relationship with a man who wasn’t my father was, to say the least, challenging. Only with time, as I stepped back and let her become a character in a work of historical fiction, one among many ancestors and strangers I had never known, did it become easier to portray her. Writing the novel transformed her into an unmarried vibrant young person laboring to define herself, one who even had an illegal underground abortion, rather than the happily married person who had lovingly raised me and who I had loved so deeply.

Reuven and Zipora, the novel’s two main figures, were complex figures. Bringing them together, portraying their passion for one another and the complexities of their relationship as they went their own ways while remaining tightly intertwined, was challenging. Each in their own way struggled to define themself and find a place in the modern world while remaining faithful to their families and the Old-World Orthodox ways that shaped them. Ultimately, I was surprised by how many of the hurdles they had to overcome, individually and as a couple, remain relevant to those so many young people face today.

How does the novel explore the tension between preserving cultural heritage and adapting to changing social and political circumstances?

As immigrants moving from Eastern Europe to the Holy Land, to France and Depression Era America, the novel’s characters were forced to adapt to new surroundings while endeavoring to stay anchored to who they were. Zipora and Reuven were rebels who inherited the cultural values of their times. Both were deeply committed to their families and homeland. After much research, I’ve tried to accurately and unflinchingly portray the difficulties the characters in the novel battled while laboring to preserve their lives and identities amid the hunger and disease in Ottoman Palestine, the slaughters of WWI, and the poverty and strife of Mandate Palestine. Zipora’s migration to America, arriving during the week of the market crash that launched the Great Depression, offered an opportunity to depict her ability to remain faithful to herself and her family despite the vast differences between life in the Old World and that in the New.

What was the most surprising or meaningful discovery you made while researching your family’s experiences across Lithuania, Jerusalem, and America?

Though she lived to 100, my mother was silent about the ordeals she had battled to become the person I knew. All that she had gone through, the details of where she had come from and what her life was like before meeting my father were unknown to me. As some of this has now been revealed through my research and writing, 25 years after her death she has grown in stature well beyond her diminutive 4 foot 11 height.

Living through the challenges withstood by the characters in my book has made me even more understanding and sympathetic to those immigrants face today. I’ve grown thankful as never before to the generations of people whose efforts to better themselves and the lives of their families have made it possible for me to become who I am and lead the fortunate life I’ve led. Their endurance and faith in the future has ultimately led to my own secure, productive life. In their ability to survive and find happiness, I see echoes of their faith, courage, wit and intellectual curiosity in my own personality.

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