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In your story “From, To,” a man named Vadik, whose Soviet Jewish family immigrated to North America when he was a child, loses his mother in the summer after the October 7th attacks in Israel, while his eighteen-year-old daughter, Mila, is living in an encampment at her university, protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. How did this scenario come to you, and why did you choose to explore it in fiction?
Inchoately, I had been seeking a way to write about what life had come to feel like for me and for most Jews I know since October 7, 2023. Last July, the premise came to me very vividly, and I knew immediately that I would need to write it: a grandmother dies and a granddaughter who has been living in an encampment at her university must come home. I felt that only a story that dealt with life and death could address the gravity of the moment. It also needed to have a dispute between generations, something that has particularly plagued Jewish families—not for the first time, but that’s little comfort. I had published an op-ed piece not long after the war started but, even as I tried to be ecumenical, it was still too partial. Fiction affords a chance to dramatize the full complexity of a situation and immerse a reader in a way that an essay or an op-ed cannot. I knew that, in order for the story to have any possibility of succeeding in such a polarized time, it would have to be intensely personal and painful and sympathetic to all the characters.
Vadik is caught between allegiances, neither as hawkish as the older members of his family nor as willing to defend the innocence of Palestinians as his daughter. For me, your story drives home one of the ironies of the moment: the middle can be a lonely and sparsely populated place.
The middle does feel lonely and sparsely populated, although I don’t know if it truly is. I hope it isn’t. Vadik hopes it isn’t. He tries his best to maintain his moderate position until he can’t. I think his effort is commendable. He would like his mother and his daughter to make the same effort. It’s too late for his mother, but he hopes it isn’t too late for his daughter. In the story, he reminds himself that everything in life is a choice and that the only immutable thing is death. Somehow we forget this, or convince ourselves that it isn’t so.
Vadik notes (though he can’t say it out loud) that it pains him that the painful past of his family doesn’t pain his daughter. Do you think that pain and trauma should be transmitted across generations?
I think that ancestral knowledge should be transmitted across generations. Some of that knowledge includes pain and trauma. But I think what pains Vadik is that—in his estimation—Mila privileges adversarial pain over ancestral pain. And he believes that doing so will harm her people and her, too. It would be just as bad to use ancestral pain to justify hurting others—which is what Mila accuses Zionists (and him) of doing. The challenge is to not be dismissive of anyone’s pain. Neither masochistically nor sadistically. Again, the sparsely populated middle.
Obviously, Mila would tell a different story about this period in time than her father does. Did you think about writing this from her perspective as well?
Mila would tell a different story. Vadik’s mother, Basia, would also tell a different story. I chose Vadik not only because he is in the middle and trying to accommodate both his mother’s and his daughter’s positions but because he, unlike them, is both a child and a parent. We find him in the very final moments of being a child, still pitiably identified as “the son.” Thus he feels the love, pain, and devotion of being a child and the love, pain, and devotion of being a parent. I’m sure an interesting story could be written from Mila’s or Basia’s perspective—or even from Vadik’s younger daughter Lily’s—but these would be more limited in scope. Vadik is intrinsically involved in all of their lives and they in his.
Can you tell me the significance of your title, “From, To”?
The prosody of the slogan “From the river to the sea” activated the part of my brain that is compulsive about words, language, and meaning. The combination of the two prepositions—“from,” “to”—evoked something greater and more poignant. The prepositions, combined in this way, can be spatial or temporal or, for lack of a better word, interpersonal. From there to here. From then to now. From me to you. They seem to encompass everything important in a life. And it may be because I am in middle age, and have young children and elderly relatives and relatives who have died, and was born in a country that no longer exists, where a great tragedy befell my family, and now live in a different country that has been very hospitable but is showing signs of something darkly familiar, that I pose philosophical questions composed of these prepositions.
There’s also the fact that I like economy and concision, and a two-word title—made of two prepositions, each one a single syllable—appeals to me. I don’t know if it has been used as a title before, which seems like a good reason to use it. ♦
