Perle Besserman is the author of the new novel The Kabbalah Master. Her other books include The New Kabbalah for Women and Grassroots Zen, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Agni and The Southern Humanities Review.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Kabbalah
Master, and for your character Sharon?
A: I spent several years writing nonfiction books about
mystical traditions from around the world and studying the Kabbalah with
scholars like Gershom Scholem and rabbis like Aryeh Kaplan.
So, after experiencing, first-hand, the emerging pop culture
phenomenon featuring self-styled, charismatic Kabbalists and celebrity
followers like Madonna, I could hardly resist putting this colorful cast of
characters into a novel.
Corresponding to the women's lib movement, Western interest
in spiritual traditions like the Kabbalah, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism were
all the rage--thanks to the Beatles, hippies, and mind-altering drugs.
Interestingly, like the other traditional Asian meditation
practices that had been introduced to the West in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, the
Kabbalah, too, had been closed to women. But once these practices had been
appropriated and reinterpreted by Americans and Europeans, women seekers became
actively engaged followers of the almost entirely male cohort of spiritual
"masters."
Sharon is a composite of many of the women I encountered
(and a little bit of myself) whose dreams of enlightenment too often drove them
to "surrender their egos" to these powerful men.
Q: You've said that you see a connection between the novel,
set in 1972, and today's women's movement. What do you see as some of the
similarities?
A: The ‘70s saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism--a truly
radical reinterpretation of women's sexuality, characterized by the enormous
popularity of such manuals as Our Bodies, Ourselves, the demand for
reproductive rights, and symbolic bra-burning street demonstrations.
Then, too, women were questioning the patriarchal hierarchy that
determined their roles as “objects”--in politics, at work, in the home. Like
today's women's movement, feminists fearlessly spoke up about rape and abuses
stemming from the power differential between men and women.
On campuses, they marched to "take back the
night," at the workplace, they formed unions and fought for equal
pay. Women writer/activists like Grace Paley and lesbian poet Adrienne
Rich modeled new forms of female "agency," rejecting traditional
roles as wives and mothers who depended on men to shape their images of
themselves under "the male gaze."
The women's movement in the ‘70s is very much part of my
novel, as Sharon and her sister Arleen struggle to express themselves beyond
the example of their mother Pinnie, who is also searching, in her own way, to
liberate herself from the social constraints of her male-dominated "silent
generation." All three confront the same male abuse of power that women
are struggling with today.
Q: You've written about the Kabbalah in other books. What do
you think this novel says about it?
A: All my previous books are nonfictional, historical accounts
of principles and schools led by major Kabbalists from ancient times to the
present.
Focusing on the biographical, social, and religious contexts
of innovators as different, and sometimes as controversial, as Rabbi Simeon bar
Yohai, in 1st-century Yavneh, or Abraham Abulafia, in 16th-century Spain, or
the 18th-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, in Galicia, I unpack
the often deliberately opaque complexities of the Kabbalah so that readers can
make sense of spiritual practices that at first present themselves as
impenetrable.
My book A New Kabbalah for Women draws on the ancient myths
of the Hebrew goddess that underlie the hidden female aspects of the Kabbalah
and suggests returning to a more woman-centered approach to the practice.
As a novel, The Kabbalah Master takes imaginative liberties
with Kabbalah as a spiritual practice by weaving its historical, symbolic, and
lesser-known comic elements into a contemporary personal and emotional
drama that today's reader can relate to and enjoy.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started
writing, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I don't usually know how my novels and stories end,
because I generally let them take me along with them as they go. The
characters and situations appear on the stage of my imagination, and I don't
interfere with what's going on, whether in the action or dialogue, until after
the book is written and I'm "outside" looking in with a critical
eye.
Only then will I revise, but rarely in a major way. By
the time the end of The Kabbalah Master approached, every detail--the setting,
the light, the background sounds and smells, the characters and their
actions--was in place.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I've been working on two books --The Infamous Doctor Dee,
a novel about Queen Elizabeth the First's astrologer/scientist/spy updated to
the 20th century that takes place in New York and Europe; and Fay's Men, a
novel of linked stories about a dancer and yoga teacher who travels the world
in search of a spiritual teacher, and finds him in a Japanese Zen master whose
samurai treatment drives her to commit herself to a psychiatric ward but
ultimately reveals what she's been looking for on a beach in Hawai'i.
Several excerpts from both novels have been published in a
variety of national and international literary magazines.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My husband and I travel extensively; of late, we've been
dividing our time between Honolulu, Hawai'i, and Melbourne, Australia. The
opportunities for dipping into the literary life of places and cultures
different from my own have immensely influenced my work, my reading, and my
life.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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