Chewing on Fiction
A chat with authors Adina Edeman, Esty Heller, Menucha Ceitlin, and Chanie Spira
Gut Moed! Hope you’ve been doing some great reading so far this Yom Tov. Today’s mini-interviews feature authors of four of the latest fiction releases, including Adina Edeman, Esty Heller, Menucha Ceitlin, and Chanie Spira. Whether you’re still book-buying for second days or just finished a great read and have the story lingering on your mind, take a step beyond the pages and discover a world beneath the surface. Spoilers ahead. (For more Yom Tov reading, see here.)
Breaking Open, Adina Edelman - Plummeting from the height of excitement to the depths of despair, Zehava is left floundering after a broken engagement, with no idea of what comes next and what to do with the feelings roiling within her. What follows is a raw and immersive journey through healing and self-discovery. Strong emotion and subtle growth are masterfully balanced with humor and banter to form a slow-paced yet compelling read. As Zehava deepens her self-knowledge, grows her confidence, and takes inspiration from those around her, she comes to live with her grief and push beyond it. Breaking Open is a debut novel by the editor of some of your favorite titles from Israel Bookshop. True to her background, Breaking Open shines for its sentences, engaging pace, and ruthlessly honest exploration of the mess within us.
Zahava’s journey is full of strong emotion as she muddles through the difficult mess of her emotions. Yet the overall tone remains light and everyday. As an author, how do you balance the intensity of growth to create an engaging read?
AE: Actually, one of my questions to beta readers was whether they felt Zahava was too self-pitying or being too dramatic. (Thankfully, they said no!) But I was concerned about turning off the reader with the amount of “emotional mess,” and I intentionally tried to keep a lighter tone. No one wants to read about a character going “Oh, woe is me” every day for weeks. It’s not fun. At some point we want them to grow up or at least mope in a way that’s more interesting. One reader told me that while the emotions were intense and subject matter difficult, it didn’t drag her down like some books do. There’s a few things I did to achieve this:
I made Zahava super aware about it. One of her problems was beating herself up for feeling the way she was feeling. She didn’t let herself linger in the intensity. While that wasn’t healthy for her, it was good for the story in keeping a lighter tone. It also made her more relatable.
I interspersed the personal scenes with tutoring scenes, which took the spotlight away from Zahava and put her in Adulting mode. This gave both Zahava and the reader a reprieve from the intense emotions. Likewise with family dinner scenes, or helping out Zaidy; it introduced that “everyday” element and reminded both Zahava and the reader that she is so much more than what happened to her. There’s still normality here, still regular, wholesome life to live.
Dialogue. I’m a huge dialogue fan, and I find that it’s the best way to keep things humorous and turn something serious and heavy into something manageable. In real life we do this all the time; in story we can emphasize it even more. In particular, Zahava and Henny have so much fun banter—and if you look closer, you’ll see that it’s almost always about the hard things going on! But introducing jokes and good humor lightens everything and also makes the characters endearing.
You’ve edited so many of our favorite novels, but this is the first of your own. As someone very familiar with the publishing process before starting, what was the most unexpected challenge of writing your own novel?
AE: The actual writing of it went way more smoothly than I expected, baruch Hashem. When entering the publishing phase, I think the greatest difficulty (besides the waiting) was working with another editor. I thought I was prepared going into it, and perhaps I was more prepped than other authors are, but it still surprised me how emotional and defensive I felt when first seeing the edits. I really had to step back and remind myself that there’s value here, that each suggestion deserves a hard look. Often I had to look past the actual words to see why the suggestion was being given, and then revise based on that. It certainly made me a more empathetic editor; being on the other side really gives you a greater appreciation for how hard it is to receive critique on your work. It was a growthful process, and one I’m very grateful for.
Power Tools, Esty Heller - When a construction loan gets between sisters Riva and Lani, their once inseparable relationship unravels. A spreading bitterness soon infiltrates their marriages, work lives, and worst of all, their children. Fans of Esty Heller will recognize the familiar scenes and everyday banter; what’s new is the slower and more serious tone as Power Tools hones in on the barriers we erect between ourselves. From a rotten work culture to perplexing classroom bullying, the most familiar scenes hit us hardest - some of the passive-aggressive dialogue and thick tension will have you on the edge of your seat, willing it to stop. Fast-paced and suspenseful, Power Tools is a powerful portrayal of the complex relationships that enmesh themselves in the fabric of our lives.
Power Tools is officially about bullying, but the complex relationship between Lani and Riva takes center stage, as well as the uneasy dynamic between Riva and her young coworker. What do these dynamics have in common and bring home?
EH: Bullying comes in various shapes and colors. Some bullying scenarios are clear-cut: bully vs. victim, guilty vs. innocent. But there are so many versions of bullying that are significantly more subtle. Those are often found in adult relationships, both between family and friends and in corporate environments. They revolve around mind games, and they often hurt on a much deeper level than a kid sticking out her tongue at her classmate. In Power Tools, Mr. Gabioff’s behavior toward Riva had the power to slowly erode her self-esteem. It’s hard to point at a specific incident and figure out where things are going wrong. Rather, it’s a quiet buildup of facial expressions, of heavy sighs and ambiguous comments that leave Riva floundering and doubting herself, trying to work out where she’s going wrong, what she could do differently, and what it is about her that makes her boss find fault in her every breath. That’s also where she goes wrong. It takes her a lot of time to realize that none of it is about her, and no matter what she would or wouldn’t do, her boss will remain who he is. She isn’t equipped to tolerate his cynicism – maybe some people are, good for them, but Riva doesn’t have a Teflon coating. Mr. Gabioff’s silent accusations, his constant dissatisfaction, eat away at her confidence and happiness, and it’s up to her to choose to suffer – or to escape. With Shuli, the uneasy dynamic is born because it’s impossible for her to observe this young, new coworker glide into a position at work that’s always been out of her own reach. She resents Shuli not because of anything Shuli’s done, but rather because her behavior brings Riva’s own shortcoming and suffering to glaring light. It takes mature communication to strip away the mask that shrouds Shuli’s true feelings and allow friendship and growth to blossom in place of antipathy. Riva’s relationship with Lani is essentially the same, although decidedly more nuanced, because Lani is not an antagonist at all. They’re sisters and they love each other, and this reality makes hard feelings even harder. There’s no obvious right or wrong – both sisters face challenges that lead to the conflicts they face throughout the story, and their challenges and conflicts overlap, sparking hurt and confusion between them. These threads all lead to same place. There’s always something lurking behind behavior that repels us. But that’s true about ourselves and our own behavior as well! That’s what makes characters in a story (and in real life…) complex. It’s hard to define right and wrong. Two (or more) sides to every story, and all that. But! When it comes to bullying, no explanation or lurking catalysts matters. The bully may need to go for help, fine, but the victim does not need to tolerate pain while that happens. Every person has the ability to recognize his or her value – and defend it. The power lies with us, and blaming people or situations won’t resolve any of our issues. Step up, step out – just don’t stay where you are and allow the world to step all over you.
Writers care deeply about building a character who is developed and consistent. Yet the bullying scenes in Power Tools highlight how sometimes we present ourselves or respond to things differently in different environments. In Chavi’s Chevi’s case, her position in one environment was what caused the reaction in another. This often plays out at work, where someone who is a difficult coworker can be a lovely person at home. How do you think about environment and dynamic affecting a character?
EH: A developed and consistent character is a character who feels real and human. Real people’s personalities have many layers and shades, which combine to shape a person’s choices, behaviors, and attitudes. In real life, a person will naturally behave differently in different environments. If a character is always jolly or always depressed, that’s not human. That’s a static character. At her core, Chevi is a sweet and innocent child, confident on the outside but vulnerable inside. She isn’t necessarily more vulnerable than a typical kid, it’s just that in this story, her vulnerabilities are put to test. When that happens, she reacts negatively, channeling the stress she’s living with at home – the stalled construction, financial crisis, and friction between her parents – onto her cousin and classmate, Fraidy. She’s consistent in this pattern – sweet when things feel safe, bitter when her environment feels threatened. We see the same with Shuli Nieder. When we get to know her, we see a cool, confident, and hard front. We don’t like her very much, and Riva greatly resents her. But later, we discover how weak and insecure she feels inside, and that the impression she gives is a veneer. And that’s actually when we start liking her – when we discover her weakness. It serves as proof that she’s human. And we like human. We don’t like perfect. Perfect is fake.
Is that consistency? I would call it consistently human.
It’s interesting that you mention a difficult coworker being a lovely person at home. In my current serial in Family First, To Rock the Cradle, we’re actually seeing the opposite. Leebie Herzog is a lovely person at home, but her behavior at home is not that pretty. Again, it’s the many layers of character, the influence of a person’s surroundings, and the conflicts they deal with, that bring about the behaviors we see.
Even Mr. Gabioff, who’s an antagonist from the very first chapter, isn’t consistently awful. Throughout the story, he often displays kindness, even if it usually leads to stickiness for Riva. And we see how different he acts in the presence of his family – like a jovial, suspendered Zeidy. And at the end of the story, we learn that there’s backstory to his behavior. No, it doesn’t justify his meanness, but it explains it. It explains that he’s human.
Humans are flawed – that’s what makes us real. Our job is to work on those flaws and use the many layers of our personalities to build the greatest character.
Last One Standing, Menucha Ceitlin - An English-first Agent for Hire (Yonah Sapir) takeoff, with all of the high-speed action and behind-the-agent humanity that teen boys have come to love. The Golans are a family of warriors, complete with the trauma, absences, memories, and secrets that come with a life of service. When Lior’s former victim lures him into a web of danger and alliances to protect his family, his brothers step up. There are befuddling connections and suspicious cover-ups, but the answers lie within the family.
Last One Standing peels back the curtain to the human lives, relationships, and emotions behind a family of agents. We love the human side of spying. How did you approach writing a cross-genre thriller that combines the action with so much interpersonal drama?
MC: I remember reading a specific Jewish thriller as a kid, and while I loved the action sequences and intricacies of the plot, the obvious highlight of the book was when the author took the chaotic technicalities of the mission and the enemies the character faced, and mixed them with something that hits every reader in their soft spot: family. This sparked the beginning of the idea to create a book that would intrigue not just thriller genre readers. To me, Last One Standing is not just about an agent on a mission; it’s the story of a family whose spiritual and emotional challenges are solved when physical enemies and hardships force them to take a hard look in the mirror and confront themselves. All the action in the world is worth all the more when it's changing you to become a better person.
Readers expect thrillers to be packed full of action holding them on the edge of their seats. Yet, when overdone, a thriller takes on a fake tone and loses its readers. How do you go about building a scene to its max amount of tension while keeping it believable? What are the biggest challenges to believability when writing a thriller?
MC: I’ll be very honest with you—I don’t think any thrillers, mine included, are strictly believable. If authors only wrote spy novels based on what the real spy world looks like, I don’t think those books would be very interesting. However, I do think that by keeping everything surrounding the action as authentic as possible—the setting, the dialogue, the character responses—if everything else feels "real," then suddenly a man jumping from a crane hundreds of feet in the air into a burning building doesn’t seem so unimaginable. I went through many different ideas in this book and discarded most of them because I only wanted to include sequences that I could thoroughly explain, so the reader could practically “see” it in their mind’s eye. Even so, there’s still a level of credibility to maintain. You don’t want your character to seem invincible; have them fail just as much as you can. Make your antagonist so good that you fear whether your character is talented enough to outsmart him.
In an age where readers are familiar with real life war stories and the world is paying close attention to the actions of Israel’s security agencies, the action within Last One Standing ring true. What research went into crafting these stories? (And/or: How much did current events and discourse inspire the plotline?
MC: All the stories and accounts we hear from soldiers and citizens in Israel helped shape the characters, their morals, and their tough personalities. I had to dive deep into Israel’s security systems, the different branches of the IDF, and the types of missions they carry out, as well as the workings of the Knesset and Israel’s political world. Interestingly, the plot and writing for The Last One Standing were completed before October 7th happened. I do wonder, though, how that might have influenced this book, and if I would’ve changed anything.
What led you to create the story centered around a family rather than one heroic agent? How do you think that impacts how far you can go?
MC: I love this question! I’m the youngest of a large, tight-knit family, and I subconsciously mirrored that fun-loving yet supportive and loyal dynamic in Last One Standing. I’ll give credit to one of my ultimate favorite books growing up: The Yellow Notebook by Devorah Rosen. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it! I loved how she took an eighth-grade class and delved into each character to the point that you could be reading a dialogue between four of the boys and know exactly who was talking, even without her specifying who said what. She made you get to know them so well, and that’s something I tried to implement in my own book. From another perspective, I find that it engages the reader to see the hero of the story in a more emotional setting rather than just in "agent mode," making the character more relatable. More than that, there’s a clear message that when someone has the support of people who are close to them, it can change everything. And when someone you love is in peril, that will push you to be braver than you ever thought you could be. Ultimately, family is everything.
House of Cards, Chani Spira - Light and familiar stories about family and community that hold up a mirror to our everyday and push us to look beyond the surface. My favorites: “Lily”, about a young girl and her autistic twin sister in the ‘60’s, and “Forgotten Facets”, about a young man stuck in the emotional desert of his childhood. Both feature the world of survivors, stories about the memory and trauma of the past shaping the inner worlds of our grandparents and passing on for generations.
One theme within this collection is the everlasting remnants of the holocaust and how it shaped the emotional lives of the survivor generation, their children, and their grandchildren. What draws you to this theme?
CS: My father is the youngest child of holocaust survivors, so the holocaust was always there in my childhood.
My grandmother visited us every year for a couple of weeks and I was lucky enough to share a room with her. She shared pre-war memories and war stories as she loaded me up on sugary coffee and bars of Swiss chocolate. Though, I was young, these stories left me hungry for more. I spent days thinking about the holocaust, and later on, reading about it. Many of the details in my stories are from snippets of those morning talks.
I also learned many nuanced details from those stories, about relationships and midos and circumstance. She missed my grandfather desperately every single day, for decades, choosing never to remarry in her more than four decades of widowhood. I learned even though my grandfather was fifteen years older than my grandmother and he had lost a family of five in the war, they had the shalom bayis of a starry-eyed shana rishona couple.
I was also zoche to have many sets of great-grandparents, some through my mother’s family and many through marriage.
They all shared some qualities: namely their love for us ;), yet there were many differences. That led the storyteller within me explore how the holocaust shaped different people. Above all, I hated when they said In my days… we didn’t… we never… we always.
Did they really? And if so, then why?
After exploring these issues, and teaching holocaust studies for over a decade, the stories were a natural outcome.
In addition, there’s tons of light, fun, contemporary fiction available. And I often write that way, too. However, many people above the age of forty find it hard to connect to many of these stories starring millennials. So sort of to stand out in the crowded market and in Yom Tov supplements where most of these stories were initially featured, I choose to write about older characters or characters from a previous generation.
You’ll notice that many of my stories have a main character aboveb the age of fifty, and my novelette has two such main characters.
Short stories and novelettes throw readers into one small moment within a lifetime and have limited space to show character transformation, creating a particular challenge when writing about older protagonists. How do you make significant internal change for older adults feel believable and earned within the narrow scope of a short story or a novellete? How can you employ to answer the reader's inevitable 'Why now?' question?
CS: You’re totally right! It’s harder… and easier. It’s never hard to come up with problems. I mean, put two yidden together and they can talk about problems, crises and challenges for hours. It’s coming up with the solutions that elude us. So, I usually use one of two techniques.
Number one: I throw a tremendous curveball at my character that it kind of makes him choose sink or swim. In real life, too, it’s unfortunately often very significant happenings that bring a person to change quickly. I worked with this technique in the novelette. Legal trouble makes your life change so drastically that change is usually inevitable. It causes characters to reevaluate their life choices and their family situation.
Number two: The second way I work with change in short stories is making the internal change very subtle. I often wonder when I wave goodbye to my characters if they will allow the change to continue and blossom into something long-lasting.
In addition, my stories aren’t that short and they don’t include too many characters. I think of it as zooming into one character for the duration of the story to allow them to grow. In fact, all my short stories have only one pov.
I think my stories are literally divided half and half. A late miscarriage, death, diagnosis, and TBI for the major curveball, while the rest of the stories are not so dramatic allowing softer realizations with hope for change.
I wish I could change as quickly as my characters…
