In case anybody out there hasn’t noticed, there appears to be a continuing – possibly growing – tendency among foreign artists to steer a wide berth around this country.
That may have something to with security concerns, that a fresh war could break out here at any given moment; or it could be down to less than favorable political stances on the way Israel has gone about its business in the Oct. 7 aftermath.
Either way, that leaves artistic directors of cultural events scratching their heads and scratching around to get folks to fly over and put in an appearance.
That, presumably, goes some way to explaining the lineup for this year’s International Writers Festival, which takes place at its regular venue of Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem, May 25-28.
Mind you, the roster is hardly a shabby affair with the likes of celebrated prolific Italian scribe Erri De Luca, whose Montedidio, released in 2001, sold very well here. It is, indeed, a delightful creation which looks at life through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy in Naples as the world unfolds before his sensitive wondering eyes.
De Luca has received numerous awards over the years, and has also developed a deep, academic interest in Judaism and studied biblical Hebrew.
Elsewhere, the cast of honored guests includes a roster of A-list writers who are either Jewish or have strong links with Israel, such as award-winning American thriller author Joseph Finder; compatriot historian of Judaism and Jewish culture Steven J. Zipperstein; American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature Dara Horn; and Argentinian author Marcelo Birmajer, whose bond with Israel has a tragic side to it. His brother Rabbi Reuven Eduardo Birmajer was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in Jerusalem in 2015.
Nell Zink also has a personal track record with this country. The California-born author was married to Israeli music theorist and poet Zohar Eitan, and she spent three years as a resident of Tel Aviv. She acquired an impressive knowledge of Hebrew and comes over here on a regular basis.
Her slot in the festival takes place on the last evening, when she teams up with Israeli writer-musician-actress Sharon Kantor to talk about contemporary American literature, and how her many years of living in Germany have influenced her work.
Often, people, naturally including artists, who look in on a particular cultural and sociopolitical milieu from the outside offer perspectives of which locals are not aware.
I wondered whether that applies to Zink, and whether her 26-years-and-counting sojourn in Germany has allowed her to take a more objective stance on the culture of her country of birth. And how has being in a non-English-speaking environment affected her relationship with, and use of, her mother tongue?
“When I first started publishing, I didn’t actually have any English-speaking friends,” Zink notes. “The only people I spoke English with were my family and some old friends in the United States. I only spoke English when I was in America.”
Hence, I surmised, the rhythm, texture, and colors – and possibly vocabulary – of her literary style, especially with regard to her earlier works such as her debut offering, The Wallcreeper, which caused quite a stir in the literary world when it came out in 2014, may have taken on extraneous cultural baggage.
Zink parries that idea. She feels that any influences she may have absorbed from her physical and human surroundings were tempered by her choice literary consumption.
Writing across borders: language, identity, and influence
“It depends a lot on what you’re reading. People say ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ but it’s like ‘Good stuff in, good stuff out.’ If I’m reading a bunch of George Eliot, I’m going to write a different kind of prose than if I’m reading the newspaper.”
The notion that what we may encounter when we read a novel may be very much a product of what the writer was ingesting him/herself when he/she “keyed in” the content came as some surprise. But, of course, we are partly the product of our physical, aesthetic, and emotional environment. Hence, it makes sense that artists necessarily demonstrate that in their work. Zink goes with that quotidian flow.
“There’s nothing wrong with that. You can influence how you’re writing by changing what you’re reading. It’s like communication. You adapt yourself linguistically.”
That can come into Zink’s bilingual equation, too. “I manage to keep the German and the English pretty separate in my head, although sometimes there will be overlaps, counterinfluences, or things that I like saying in German that, when I’m writing in English, I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh, I’d love to be able to use this German phrase. How can I find an equivalent in English?’ You know, you do get fond of German.”
With my Holocaust baggage, I can’t quite identify with that myself, but I can appreciate how the vagaries of that grammatically challenging language can leave their mark on some.
That is evident in The Wallcreeper – the title refers to a colorful bird found across an expansive region that stretches from Southern Europe to China – which features various verbs in Swiss German that deftly convey nuances that might necessitate far clunkier phrases in English.
The bird, as its name suggests, is adept at climbing vertical walls and cliff sides.
The ornithological theme is a leitmotif both in the book and – no surprises there – Zink’s own life. She tells me she was last in Israel in January when, together with some Israeli friends, she went up to our northernmost reaches, stayed at a hotel in Metula which had reopened just two days earlier after a lengthy security-imposed closure, and spent long hours espying feathered creatures stopping by at the Hula Nature Reserve and marshlands.
The titular bird – and other species – and relationships appear repeatedly in The Wallcreeper. That, for Zink, was a given, along with environmental messages she sews into the textual fabric.
“That is addressed in the book, that birds are an indicator for intact ecosystems, at least some birds,” she posits. “The wallcreeper is a sort of opportunist and likes to go where the weather is nice,” she laughs. “It moves around, and up and down the mountains. He is a role model for us all.”
He certainly is for Zink, who takes animal life and ecology in general very seriously, and would be delighted for her readers to do likewise.
“I have given them a lot of thought because I am interested in environmental issues and conservation. Birds are unlike mammals. Mammals are around us all the time, but you never see them because they’re nocturnal. There are shrews and mice and voles and weasels running around, whereas birds are out there and they’re singing and flying around. You can see them.”
Zink is of the opinion that our feathered friends could do with a social profile boost.
“People aren’t that fond of them. People look at a bird and it is as if they are looking at a fish. They just think it’s an alien being, and it has little beady eyes.”
Birds, language, and vision
She says she endeavors to redress that negative viewpoint, including through her writing.
“It has come to my attention that if you tell people more about birds and how they live, what they want, while they are singing – they have a lot of common with people.”
Indeed, there is nest building much as we set up our own homes, and we have our wooing behavioral patterns and rituals.
“They [males] try to attract a mate with a really nice nest they’ve built, and then show it to her, and then she’s like, ‘Uh-uh, I don’t like your house; this guy over here has a better house,” Zink chuckles. “You can identify with birds.”
Zink takes the ornithological-human analogy, in terms of relationships, a step further. “Most mammals have a really sexist social organization based on one male being dominant and forcing himself on females. Human beings are a more modern civilized society; they don’t do that. A man tries to attract a woman who’s going to become his mate of her own free will because she really likes him. That’s how it works with birds. The female bird has to be interested. There are funny parallels.”
The writer believes we would do well to ponder those dynamics.
“If you get people thinking about them, they get more interested in birds, and they don’t fear them anymore.”
Personally, living on a moshav, I don’t subscribe to that adverse line of thought on birds, but perhaps city dwellers have a different viewpoint on, say, pigeons that use their window ledge as a public convenience.
It is fair to say that without her ornithological pursuit, Zink might never have made it as a bona fide member of the literary crowd. The Wallcreeper ensued from correspondence she struck up with acclaimed American writer Jonathan Franzen, who also has a keen interest in birds. She saw an article Franzen had written for The New Yorker in 2010, which she greatly appreciated, but she was somewhat frustrated by the omission of any mention of the state of birds in the Balkans. And The Wallcreeper eventually came to be.
“I wrote it for the amusement of Jonathan Franzen,” Zink recalls.
The first part of the book simply poured out of her, in a torrent of keyboard punching. “I didn’t write it for publication. Why was I going to spend like a month working on it? I just wrote 40 pages in four days for the amusement of Jonathan Franzen because he’s a birdwatcher.” In fact, it was around that time that his novel Freedom, which also has a species of bird front and center in the storyline, was published.
Besides appreciating the importance of the subject matter, Franzen was duly impressed with the quality of Zink’s writing.
“He challenged me to take my writing seriously. I wanted to show him he didn’t need to tell me to take it seriously, and that I knew how to write.”
In the event, she needn’t have worried. Franzen was sufficiently taken with Zink’s storytelling ability and style to add his hefty industry standing to the marketing fray, and helped to promote the work.
The Wallcreeper follows a singular literary beat. There is an underlying staccato current to the textual continuum which forces you to pause and take stock of what you are reading, what it means, and where it is all leading. That, says Zink, was very much a direct product of the freedom she enjoyed in the absence of – then – any desire to make the content public.
The result of the writing style is alluring, as is the subject matter and how Zink conveys it. She comes across as a straight shooter who does not balk at addressing topics that may be considered unsuitable in “polite circles.” Sexual behavior and mores, left-field views of relationships, and much more are in the Zink writing mix.
Racism is also an issue that comes up in her work, particularly in her hugely successful sophomore offering, Mislaid, which followed hot on the heels of The Wallcreeper.
In a 2016 interview she gave in Paris, where she gave readings of both books at the legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, Zink talked about her time living in a community in Virginia which included blacks and members of the Ku Klux Klan. That, she says, gave her some enlightening insight into race and racism.
Her latest book, Sister Europe, paints a poignant picture of the upper echelons of European society, mercilessly dipping into gender issues, relationships, and social mores.
Zink is clearly a brave soul who is not afraid of tackling contentious issues head-on. Now 62, her literary career did not start in earnest until she was into her 50s. That, presumably, offered the inestimable advantage of bringing her accrued life wisdom to the plate and investing her work with maturity and hard-earned acumen rarely found in a young prodigy.
“Because I waited so long, I never had any idea I could publish at all; I just didn’t know it was an option for me. I did have the opportunity come out with something more interesting than most people can do with their first book. When you’re 22, you just don’t have that much in your head.”
So, does it follow that Zink’s advice to young budding authors is to simply not do it, to wait?
“No!” she exclaims. “These days, my best advice to young writers would be, I don’t know, light a candle and sit out somewhere in nature and think about what it used to be like, back when people read books,” she laughs a little grimly, referencing our tendency to make do with zipping our way across the Internet universe, fueling our ever-shrinking attention spans in the process, instead of relaxing our way into the evolving storyline of an absorbing novel.
“People consume news. Their need for storytelling is satisfied by the audiovisual media that require a lot less concentration.”
All of which presents a huge challenge even for well-established authors, let alone newcomers to the craft.
Humor, of the darker, grittier ilk, is part and parcel of the Zink writing ethos.
“It is just how my brain works,” she states. “I can’t do it any other way. I can’t keep up the pathos. I’m not about to write murder mysteries that seem witless to me. This is the way I write, and people don’t seem to mind.”
The latter is somewhat open to debate. Like all art, it is very much down to a matter of individual taste and the baggage each of us brings to the work in question.
But as an artist, you can’t take potential consumer response into consideration. You have to follow your own creative line and be true to yourself, and tell your own story.
“The people who mind, they hate my books. But that’s not my problem,” she chuckles.
Then again, a work needs a third-party sounding board to complete the picture.
“Often enough, someone will come up to me and tell me they love my books, so obviously someone out there likes them.
“To be loved by everyone, you have to be kitsch, and you only live once. I only live once, and I don’t want to waste my time doing something that someone else could do. I just write in accordance with my own personality and preferences, for as long as I can get away with it.”
Judging by her book sales figures, there are quite a few out there who dig Zink’s uncompromising approach.
No doubt, her tête-à-tête with Sharon Kantor, an envelope-pushing multidisciplinary artist herself, will provide a compelling and, possibly, eye-opening slot at the festival.
For tickets and more information: fest.mishkenot.org.il/en/home/a/main