Q&A with Zeeva Bukai

  

Photo by Ghila Krajzman

 

 

Zeeva Bukai is the author of the new novel The World Between. She also has written the novel The Anatomy of Exile. She lives in Brooklyn. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The World Between, and how did you create your protagonist?

 

A: My mother was born in Siberia in 1940, at the start of World War II. Her family, like the narrator’s in The World Between, was deported from Poland to the Soviet Union.

 

I wanted to understand what it was like for a child to grow up in a children’s home in a Siberian labor camp. My grandmother could only visit once a week because of her work as a laundress for the Soviet army.

 

I considered the loneliness, fear, the lack of food and medicine my mother must have experienced, and all of this in the midst of a devastating war. I wanted to understand this aspect of my mother’s life, one she rarely spoke about.

 

And so, I imagined it and in imagining it, I created the narrator whose experiences in Siberia shape her life.  It seems fitting that she is a Yiddish actress, a woman from a fading world, trying on different personas; it’s a form of escapism until it isn’t.

 

Exploring being an actor in the waning Yiddish theater in New York City in the mid-20th century spoke to the ineffable element of loss that I was trying to get at. When her marriage ends, the only thing she wants to do is return to the place where her marriage began, where she was the happiest and saddest in her life.  

 

She returns to Tel Aviv but soon finds herself in a sanitorium and it’s unclear how she got there.

 

The questions at the heart of this novel are, what are the effects of war and deprivation on children and adults? How does this childhood war trauma affect these survivors in their adulthood? 

 

Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: Everything I learned about the gulag was new to me. I read Anne Appelbaum’s seminal book, Gulag, and skimmed Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago to get a better understanding of the gulag system, and Tom Snyder’s Bloodlands to learn about the war and the Soviets’ role in it, especially in Poland.

 

I also read the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, and read about his time in the gulag, and Anna Akhmatova’s work to get at the visceral experience of what it was like in Siberia. The history of the gulag system was a sad, grueling, and brutal one.

 

To learn more about Yiddish theater I read Yiddish stories and plays: Sholem Aleichem’s Teyve the Milkman, adapted into Fiddler on the Roof, I.L. Peretz, A Night in the Old Marketplace, and I read S. Ansky’s Dybbuk, and watched an old movie of the play.

 

I researched the Yiddish theater in New York City and was surprised to learn that there were as many as 20 established Yiddish theaters at the turn of the 19th-20th century; this does not include the number of small venues and halls where down-on-their luck Yiddish actors performed.

 

Yiddish theater was so prominent on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that Second Avenue was referred to as the Yiddish Rialto or the Yiddish Broadway.

 

I was also surprised to learn how many famous Yiddish theater families there were and about the actors who transitioned from the Yiddish stage to Broadway and Hollywood: people like Molly Picon, the sweetheart of Second Avenue; as well as Stella Adler (actor, director, and teacher to such luminaries as Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro); Academy Award-winner Paul Muni; and Zero Mostel, to name a few.

 

Yiddish was their first language, and it was natural for them to act in that language. These actors changed the art of acting in Hollywood and on Broadway.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you? 

 

A: The title, The World Between, refers to the place between heaven and earth where the soul ascends and shatters and waits to be reborn. It is the nischt ahyn, nischt aher – the neither here nor there. The title also alludes to the idea of straddling two worlds.

 

Q: The author Max Gross said of the book, “The World Between is fragile. It’s mysterious. It’s wonderfully written. Zeeva Bukai has created characters who breathe with weighty, tragic experience.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love this description. I think Max Gross gets it right. The World Between is fragile, with fragile characters who are vulnerable to the joys and heartaches, to the vagaries of life. They live in the land of memory and loss. The backdrop to their lives is the war and the trauma they endured.

 

The structure of the story is like a glass puzzle, you can see through the pieces but you’re not sure how it all fits together. That is where the mystery lies. We don’t know why the narrator is in a sanitorium and we go with her through the events of her life to find out why she landed there.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a short story collection and I’ve begun a longer piece about a daughter who believes her father was lost in the war. By chance she and her mother learn that he’s alive and living in Tel Aviv.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’d like readers to know that this was a difficult story to tell and that I hope I told it well. Ultimately, it’s a story about children, trauma, memory, and loss, and, above all, love and all the ways we seek it.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Zeeva Bukai.