Michael Weingrad is the author of the new novel in verse Eugene Nadelman: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse. He also has written the book American Hebrew Literature. He is a professor of Jewish Studies at Portland State University, and he lives in Portland, Oregon.
Q: What inspired you to write Eugene Nadelman, and what do you see as the book's relationship to Alexander Pushkin’s classic Eugene Onegin?
A: I wanted a way of revisiting America in the 1980s, its music and pop culture and the experiences of my youth. The sonnet form Pushkin invented for his classic poem works like magic: it brings the loftiest pretensions down to earth with gentle humor, while imbuing the most ordinary experiences with poignancy.
I actually came to read Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin late, after reading other writers who had used the form for their own novels in verse, e.g., Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and the Israeli writer Maya Arad’s Another Place, A Foreign City.
I loved what they had done with the form and, after reading the great model (in James Falen’s wonderful English translation), I decided to try it myself. But could I rhyme bar mitzvah? Yes, and I was off and running!
Although Eugene Nadelman is a fraction of the length of Pushkin’s epic, and set in 1980s Philadelphia, I do pay homage to the source in a number of ways beyond the form and the name of the protagonist.
As in Pushkin’s poem, my book has a duel and a character dies. (Well, a character in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, to be precise.) My poem is also about youth and love and regret and memory. And there is an interlude about childhood snow days (no school!) that is a direct nod to Pushkin’s wintertime reverie.
Q: The literary critic Adam Kirsch said of the book, “Eugene Nadelman is the book that Lord Byron would have written if he had been an American Jewish teenager in the 1980s. What do you think of that assessment?
A: I’m overjoyed to receive such high praise from one of our best literary critics, and whose own poetry I admire. (Kirsch’s 2022 collection of poems The Discarded Life is also a Proustian look back at youth and pop culture.)
In addition, not only do I adore the wicked brilliance of Byron’s Don Juan, but one of my favorite 20th-century long poems is Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron.”
Q: How did you create your character Eugene?
A: There are aspects of myself in Eugene, something I acknowledge early on in the book:
May I
present: Eugene, who’s fourteen
Years old, our acne-speckled (poor teen!)
Protagonist. Our tale’s debut
Takes place in 1982
When I, for one, if not exactly
A double of our leading guy
Was, like him, bookish, awkward, shy.
To state the point more matter-of-factly,
A judgment harsh but not unheard
Is that our hero is a nerd.
At the same time, Eugene isn’t me. For instance, he comes from an intact family, whereas my father died when I was little. His parents are more well-off than mine were.
The book draws on a lot of real-life experiences and details. Eugene’s crush Abigail happens to have the same color eyes as my high school girlfriend (we’re still friends after all these years), and the Reform Jewish summer camp he attends in the Poconos is a thinly disguised version of the one I attended for five summers.
But it’s all transformed in the telling, and I enjoyed seeing Eugene and Abigail take on their own distinct personalities as the book took shape.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Eugene Nadelman is meant to be entertaining and fun, and also to inspire some wistful and, I hope, meaningful looking back to a different time than the one we live in now. On the one hand, confess in the poem to the critical dimension of this nostalgia:
I hope the
poem will remind us
Of things we’d otherwise forget,
The simpler times we’ve left behind us,
Our life before the internet.
Today our use of social media
Has led to cultural acedia,
Attention spans reduced to scraps,
Romance replaced by dating apps.
But I follow this with a different invitation—not to complain about change (“I don’t intend the lesson drawn / To be a mere ‘get off my lawn.’”) but to savor and appreciate your own memories—you the reader’s, not mine, e.g.,
Your teenage
mishaps, strange caprices,
The secret things you daydreamed of,
The first time that you fell in love
And how your heart was smashed to pieces,
The fears you faced, the lines you crossed,
The friends you made, the ones you lost.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have to attend to my day job—I’m a professor of Jewish literature—and I’m currently working on two books, one on Jews and fantasy literature, the other (without a Jewish connection) about divorce in American film.
These are scholarly studies with footnotes but, I hope, engaging to read for anyone curious about those topics. I don’t like academic jargon and inscrutability.
I’ll return to poetry when I have a new experiment I want to try.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: While Eugene Nadelman obviously has a Gen X sweet spot, I’ve had great responses from Millennial and Zoomer readers too. We all know what young love feels like, no matter the accompanying soundtrack.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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