Barbara Bensoussan - a chat about representation, irony, and the conglomeration of experiences
This month’s summer collection featured Pride and Preference, “a carefree and gossipy shidduch parody that’s dramatic and exciting for all readers, and laugh-out-loud hilarious for those familiar with Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin”. Barbara Bensoussan joins us to discuss its creation and her writing journey. Barbara is also the author of The Well Spiced Life, a food memoir, and recently reprinted teen novel, A New Song.
Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you were reading?
I grew up in Philadelphia and moved to Rochester, New York when I was 14. Every week we would go to the big public library further into Philadelphia and take out stacks of books. I read a little bit of everything. Cereal boxes, whatever there was. I read voraciously.
Your early career was in teaching and social work, and you only started writing professionally later. How did writing play a role in your life before that? How does social work contribute to your writing life now?
I was always interested in psychology and how people become who they are. I went through most of a doctoral psychology program but did not finish that Ph.D. At that point, I had met my husband and I was becoming frum; it just didn't seem like a practical career. So I took a job at Ohel doing social work for a few years, and then I taught ESL for a little bit, here and there.
As my kids got into school, I started realizing how many things were going on in my head. I’d absorbed a lot of different cultures and lifestyles in one big gulp. I had become frum, went from out-of-town to New York, and married a guy from a Moroccan culture with family in Morocco, France, and Israel, and had a bunch of kids in rapid succession. It was a lot to chew on. I think that's really what made a writer out of me.
It was the beginning of frum literature then, in the eighties and nineties. Every new book was an event, and I wanted to jump in and join the conversation. So I wrote a few articles and got published in some early publications like the Jewish Homemaker, Jewish Observer, and Horizons. Rechy Frankfurter, then the editor at Hamodia magazines, noticed something I wrote and asked me if I would do a couple of pieces for them. When she moved to Mishpacha and became the editor there, I followed her.
I feel like my early interest in how people become what they are has been consistent throughout my life. In my magazine writing now, I do a lot of profiles, talking about people, how their careers launched, or what they went through. So I'm still doing that.
You started on the other side of things, with many personal essays and food writing. That eventually became what I think is the only frum published food memoir, The Well Spiced Life. What led you to food writing?
Oh, that's kind of a cute story. When I was writing for Hamodia Magazine, they ran a recipe contest and the first prize was a stove, and I needed a new stove. I sent in a recipe, one of my mother-in-law's Moroccan recipes. I did not win the stove, but I won second or third prize, a set of silverware, which was also useful. At the time I’d been writing more feature articles and Rechy Frankfurter said, Wow, it looks like you're a good cook. Would you like to do a food column for us? The idea was I was going to do a column on Sephardic food once a month. I guess it added variety to the Hamodia.
The Well Spiced Life was also inspired by a book called Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin. It's essays about food, funny and witty, and usually with a recipe. I always enjoyed that and wanted to do something similar in a Jewish form. So I thought, let me take my essays and repurpose them, brush them up and add some more personal stuff. And that's how that happened.
So much of frum life does revolve around food, but food memoirs haven’t picked up. Why do you think that might be?
Because it doesn't sell well. I originally submitted The Well Spiced Life to Artscroll and Miriam Zakon, the editor, came back and said, I love your writing, but these types of books don't sell because they're not a specific genre. The cookbooks that sell are the glossy ones with beautiful photos. Also, I was told the Sephardic stuff does not sell well because it's a more limited audience; a lot of Ashkenazic readers just don't feel it applies to them. Although that has changed since that book came out in 2014, largely because of the magazines opening up our world to each other.
Pride and Prejudice has so many heavy themes. What jumped out at you the most when comparing Jane Austen’s world to frum society?
I had fun with the economic and class differences. One reason the family is having trouble marrying off the girls is that they're not in a position to give much support. Unfortunately, that's the case in some circles. Also, you had wealthy families that generally tend to marry among themselves. When a shidduch with somebody wealthy was suggested for Shaina, the father was very suspicious. Why do they want us? How do we know there's nothing wrong with this boy? Why are they looking outside their own circles? So it can work both ways. You'd either be hampered because you don't have enough money or because your father’s suspicious of the rich people.
Writing it must have been toeing a balance because you wanted to keep the spirit of Pride and Prejudice but still maintain the standards of the frum community. What was the hardest part of ‘translating’ it, and what had to get left out?
I hit the story's major events, changing the venue and some circumstances, but I tried to stay as close as possible to the storyline. That was part of the fun and the challenge.
Probably the hardest part was to figure it out without the young men and women talking to each other so much. In the original, they had these long discussions, went to balls, and danced together. We can't do that in our world. Every conversation had to be accidental or with a chaperone present. For the longer meetings, they dealt with the shadchan, so I had to invent the shadchan. I enjoyed her. I've seen Shadchanim save shidduchim that were teetering on the brink, and a wise shadchan can do a lot to keep a shidduch on track. So it was fun to put her in.
Certain descriptions were censored. My original version was a little more snarky, so it was slightly toned down, but the essence is still there. Like the father is a menahel. So at one point I said that while his wife fretted about their finances, he would lie in bed snoring away. They took that out and instead he was swaying over his seforim. Originally, I had Leora run off with Nochum, but I was told now that's pushing it too far, it had to be the two girls running off with him. So we added a friend, and that didn't make such a difference to the plot.
Many frum publishers make you change things that might be objectionable. I'm sort of on the side of honesty. I feel like people can deal with this stuff. But I also understand from the publisher's point of view that if anyone objects to your book because it's not frum enough or offends people’s sensibilities, it becomes like assur, people won't buy it, and the bookstores return the book to the publisher. So they have to be very careful to keep everyone happy.
How did you ensure that Pride and Preference would be an enjoyable read for those unfamiliar with Pride and Prejudice?
The story is so good that anybody can appreciate it, even if you don't know the original. I had a friend who read the book and enjoyed it. A few months later, she decided to go back and read the original Pride and Prejudice. She came back to me and said, you know, I enjoyed it the first time, but now that I've read Pride and Prejudice, I enjoyed it so much more because I saw how you transformed it.
It's a totally different book from those two perspectives. Either it's a cute sweet plot or the whole societal commentary.
Hameivin meivin, for the ones who are familiar with the original, and for the others, it’s a fun shidduch novel.
Menucha Publishing recently reprinted A New Song. What led you to go down this route of reprinting it?
It came out with Targum in 2006. Within two years, Targum went bankrupt, so it never got a chance to finish its sales. People would tell me they loved the book, librarians would say that book is so popular, and I thought, why not? It was a good book; let’s see if people will still like it.
The idea first came to me when my husband came home on Shabbos, saw one of my kids reading a Harry Potter book, and said, Why are you reading that on Shabbos? Don’t you have anything Jewish to read? And the kid said, we've read everything Jewish. There's nothing Jewish that's as good as Harry Potter. And then one of my other kids said, Mommy, you like to write, why don't you write a Jewish Harry Potter?
I kind of got the germ of an idea going in my head. I thought, what's compelling about Harry Potter? You have Harry living with these relatives who have nothing to do with him. They're muggles and he's a wizard. He’s miserable, a fish out of water, until he's summoned into Hogwarts, and that's when he comes into his brave new world. I thought, what if it’s a Jewish girl? She’s also orphaned, her mother was Jewish and her father wasn't, and she ends up on her father's non-Jewish side of the family. She feels alienated and lonely and so different from them. And then somehow, she can get her summons to a Jewish world, her journey of discovery.
It was first published in 2006 to what you might call a different generation of teens. So much has changed in the last 15 years. Why do you think Melody’s story will resonate with kids who live in a world so different from hers?
The biggest difference, of course, is that when I wrote it, people didn't have cell phones so much, and the internet was not such a thing. The main character gets letters; today it would have been by email or phone. But otherwise, I think the story itself is just a nice story.
I made one of the characters Sephardic, one of the women who brought Melody to live with them. I feel like there's no regular frum Sephardim in Jewish literature. You have books about the Spanish Inquisition, but you don't have them in the current day.
I think people enjoyed that. It might have a certain exotic appeal to some people. Even if you grew up in a very Ashkenazic community, people do run into Sephardic people, so they'd have a sense of what that is. 25 years ago, people used to be a little more insular in their own communities. But I see with the magazines today, our world has opened up and we're much more open to each other's cultures.
You’re doing a lot of profiles these days, and your early writing was mostly personal essays. What's the difference between writing about yourself versus writing about others?
Writing about others is easier, in a way, because you just have to get the person’s story and get it down in a compelling way. Personal essays have to be very short and to the point. It's harder to be brief and pack a punch in 600 or 700 words. So I labor over those personal essays more than a longer piece about somebody else's story.
What do you do when interviewing somebody who is closed and hesitant to share personal information?
Most people who are willing to be interviewed are willing to share. But a few times, more than I care to admit, I'll do an interview with somebody, and then they come back and say, my wife doesn't want this to go to press. Or, I looked it over and it's just too personal, you can't publish this.
It's very disappointing for a writer who just spent hours interviewing and writing up the story! People will sometimes tell you their whole story, but then panic when they see it in print. Did you ever walk down a street and caught yourself in a store window, and you say, oh, is that me? When they see themselves described in print, it's that same kind of shock, they feel too exposed.
Coming into an interview, I'm sure you come in with your expectations, especially if it's somebody famous that you've heard before. Are you often surprised with the person once they get into their story?
Jacob Birnbaum was old and sick when I met him. He was the leader of the movement to free Soviet Jewry. I thought he would live in a very bekovadik type of apartment, but it was the most simple apartment, almost at poverty level. The living room was full of crates and boxes of books, because he was an intellectual. A teensy kitchen, one bedroom. I was blown away. This was a man who lived for others. He didn't care about gashmiyut. And even though he had met super famous people and had all these highfalutin connections, he lived almost like an American Rav Shteinman.
I interviewed Rebbetzin Jungreis towards the end of her life, just a couple of years before she was niftar. And yet she was just so fiery. I knew she was described that way, but to meet her in person, she was still so passionate and energetic, even though she wasn't physically that well at that point of her life.
Do you have any plans to continue with your fiction work in the future?
Right now I’m running a serial in the Jewish Press, Murder at the Plaza, a spin-off on Agatha Christie. It's about a Lakewood couple that goes to Eretz Yisrael for a family simcha, and one of the grandparents in the wedding ensemble ends up dead. It looks suspicious and becomes a kind of whodunnit.
How did you get to that genre, so different than your regular work?
It came from an experience my husband and I had when we were at a wedding in a hotel in Yerushalayim. You're seeing the same people for meals over and over again and meeting all the extended family. My husband and I were saying it's just like Agatha Christie's books, where you have a bunch of people all in one place, like an inn or a country house, and then people start turning up dead. My husband said imagine if the grandfather turned up floating in the pool or something… and we were just joking about it, but that planted an idea in my head.
My problem with it is that I was speaking with an editor at the Jewish women writing conference, and she said to me, murder shouldn't be entertainment. She doesn't think a frum publisher would publish that (although we do publish stories about kidnappings and terrorist attacks!). So I'm unsure what to do with it once it's done.
What frum fiction do you recommend most often?
I thought Sun Inside Rain was well done. I've recommended that to people. I like Ruchama Feuerman, The Kabbalist in the Courtyard.
What books are you keeping near your bed these days?
I would like to read The Last Slave. I heard such great things about it, and I just met the author at the Jewish women writers conference, so now I'm curious. I just re-read Persuasion by Jane Austin because readers keep telling me to do another Jane Austen. Maybe!