Esther Kurtz: middle children, transactional reading, and the distance of our inner worlds
Gut Moed! Hope you’ve all been doing some great reading so far this Yom Tov. We’re here with an off-schedule treat of a deep dive into one of the most exciting new titles this season.
Released just before Yom Tov, Second Thoughts is a broad collection of short stories about everyday issues, peeling back the facade of simple topics to surface the complex emotions and dynamics that lie beneath them. Within the fun drama, trendy details, and snappy dialogue, complex ideas creep in that will make you cry, laugh, and think.
Esther Kurtz writes fiction and nonfiction for Mishpacha and Family First, offers online writing courses, and hosts the Emunah for Non-Rebbetzins podcast. In addition to Second Thoughts, she published Rule of Three in 2021.
Second Thoughts brings the style and quality of Rule of Three to a fresh new format, short stories. How does the short story format restrict you? How does it free you?
I love the short story format. I have a lot on my mind and a lot I want to talk about. In short stories, I can move from one short story to the next, punch and leave, and I don't have to fix everything up. If I'm writing a full-length novel, I owe the reader a satisfying ending where you feel like this was worth your time. On the other hand, there is that constraint of a short story where it needs to be super focused and you can't develop the side characters as much as you'd love to. You can't explore the other tangents that the conflict is bringing up. So on one hand, it's very liberating, on the other it's very constraining.
Esther Kurtz is all about character. Some of your stories have characters struggling with impossible balances where there is no right and wrong. And a lot of these stories end with a subtle character realization, not any real conclusion. What do you hope people will experience as and after they read these stories?
A story is a dialogue between the author, reader, and characters. I like to say that I subscribe to the transactional reading approach, where the reader brings as much to the table as the writer. So I don't want to tell you what to think because that's not what I'm here for. People don't think enough these days; I want you to think.
When I write a story, I’m always thinking, what does the reader expect to happen? What are the conventional stories? And then, what do we actually do? Because I think there's a lot of ideas of what we should do, and then there's the reality when it happens to you. Like when you hear someone else's story it’s very easy to judge, and then something happens to you and you're like, why do I feel so differently about this than I did before?
Last time we spoke, you said “What it comes down to is that each story is a reflection of me, different facets of my personality.” I loved Abby, and was thrilled to meet Miriam and Ahuva, and Shira, and I’m guessing these characters in particular are close to home for you. So my question is, how do you manage the balance of writing for and about yourself, while maintaining the distance of getting an objective, real look at a character and letting them go where the story leads them?
It's funny, I think someone gave me a prompt for Miriam and Ahuva’s story of, “Who will you be in 50 years?” And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm looking at myself and I imagine that disconnect. But those were things that were relevant to my life then, questions that I was grappling with at that time. Right now, those things are settled.
When I was working on the first story in Rule of Three, Facets, I was trying to figure out Abby’s age. I originally made her a drop older because I wanted to make Chana a little bit older, but Bassie Gruen said, I don't think someone who's 35 will be dealing with the problems that Abby is dealing with. And I was like, really? Will I be 35 and not be worried about friends like this? And then I came to the point where I'm 35 and you know what, Bassi was right! It’s nice to see that we grow up a little bit. In some way, the stories that we write are reflections of who we are at the time. We think that this will always be our life, but we evolve.
Game of Chance, Acquired Taste, Push and Pull, and Honorable Mention all seem to be driven by an exploration of our complicated emotions and beliefs around money. Is this something that has always fascinated you?
I think that it's something that complicates our lives in a way that we don’t acknowledge. We think money is money, you have it or you don't, and it is what it is. And I don't think we fully acknowledge our relationship with it and our money psychology. It's a very interesting topic to cover, particularly for the frum community in which there's so much discussion these days of how much it costs to be frum, materialism, and whatever it is. It's something that I think about on a practical level and also on a sociological level.
Two is Company was the one story that left me crying, even though on the surface this story has nothing to do with me. I think this story is about the things we do to fill the holes in ourselves, how these “fillers” become crutches, and how the people around us do or don’t understand our holes and our “fillers”. What did you have in mind for this to be about?
So it's funny, I'll tell you how the story came about. I have a friend with a dog and we once discussed how it would affect her child's shidduchim. It isn’t a problem for her family because of her background and what her children are looking for, but I was thinking: where would it be an issue?
So the story is about this crutch, a filler, the things about ourselves that people don't understand. What people ask us to give up of ourselves, what we give for our children, what we do for ourselves. That complexity of the relationship we have with ourselves and our children and who comes first and people not understanding what they're asking of us.
I also liked the fact that it was a dog because my approach was, I want to get people to care about a dog. Because I know most frum women are like, Dogs? Are you crazy? I can definitely say when I wrote the scene where she gave up the dog in the animal shelter, I bawled my eyes out crying, I was just a mess and I'm like, Why are you crying for a stupid dog?
In Personally Speaking, you wrote “Sometimes you need to play nice and dumb and keep your insights to yourself, to yourself in this world. Sometimes you walk away even when you probably should stay.” Your characters are really intelligent people, but the world doesn't necessarily care for that. Dov in Personally Speaking, Miriam in Picture of Contentment, and Shira in Coloring Out of the Lines…
In Time and Place, the novelette that you just finished in Mishpacha, Michal has this very worked-on internal world and assumes that she has an ownership of all pain and deep thought in this world. And this keeps coming up in your writing, how our internal worlds are ours and sometimes they should be kept to ourselves, sometimes they should be shared, sometimes we hardly know they're there… Where are you going with this?
When it comes to frum fiction, there are a lot of cliches, the harried housewife and the super mom. But if you zoom in on the real individuals, there's so much that we all have and there's a lot that we don't share. And I don't necessarily know that if people were to share it, that people would be able to receive it. So a story is a great place to talk about it.
I taught English for many years and I would always ask the girls on the first day, “Why are we learning? Why are we sitting around reading a bunch of stories?” Because it's not about entertainment, it's about ideas, communicating, understanding other people's worlds, and gaining a perspective that you wouldn't be able to hear otherwise. You can't hear things when it's just told to you as straight facts. Why is Animal Farm so effective when talking about communism? Because it's animals. We need that distance to hear ideas. So that's something that I'm exploring here; the thoughts that we aren’t sharing, but here are my thoughts anyway, in a way that you can receive them.
Do you think that's a concern where someone will be alienated from a story where the character is going on and on in their heads?
If a story is poorly written, then yes, someone's going to be very turned off by a character that is so unlike them because they won't be able to relate. But there's something to effective writing where a writer will write about a character that will be nothing like you, worlds away. You could be reading about some women in Somalia and feel their story, even if they think things that you would never think and act in ways that you disagree with; you’re still emotionally connected.
Ruti Kepler's Normal Like Me has characters with very built-up inner worlds, but such different viewpoints. They're a very Israeli point of view, which is a cultural thing, but she has you there with the characters and embracing their point of view and how they live it. It's that same exact idea where you're entering someone else's inner world and accepting it because of the skill of the writer. You could have someone else write the same exact story and it would fall so flat.
Personally Speaking feels like a product of its moment, possibly your most opinionated/controversial story. It’s a compilation of a few different issues. Can you talk about how you pieced that story together and why it needed to be said?
This story was a combination of personal experience, of being in Dov’s position, but then also seeing the people who I look up to. People will be like, oh my God, Esther Kurtz, you write, and I'm like, You know I'm just boring me. And then thinking of who I idolize in turn and trying to figure out the complexities and the balance between that.
I do think idolization has gotten ridiculous, and the fact that we can even say that there's a concept of a Jewish celebrity is the saddest thing I've ever heard. Our gedolim used to be our celebrities, but I don't know if that's what we consider our best anymore. We have so much of a gvir culture, of celebrity culture, I think that's very sad.
One of my favorite moments while reading Second Thoughts was when a character from the first story showed up in another, just as a wink to the reader. Tell me about how you made that happen, and why specifically Miriam and Karen.
I first wrote Picture of Contentment, and then later when I was writing The Gardener Sows, it just popped in that we can make a world here. I don’t know if you remember, in The Gardener Sows, Karen goes to the grocery store and sees a grandmother and granddaughter. I was thinking, let me continue and make a story about them. I pitched the idea to Family First a few years ago, but they didn't go for it. So I just stuck it in that one story, but I still have this idea of making these interconnected stories. It's funny; when I sent the stories to Menucha publishers and they were going through it, they commented, This is the same character that shows up, was that on purpose?
If you’d write a sequel or a more fleshed-out version of one of these stories, which would it be?
Coup of the Masses was one of my first stories, about high school jobs. It was very controversial then and I feel like it could use a follow-up. Not necessarily with high school jobs but it could be perceptions in shidduchim, getting your kids into a school... I feel like it's this concept of that average person being looked aside and not being paid attention to, and we only focus on the top and the bottom and people in the middle are just left to scrounge.
In my stories, I end up talking a lot about like the middle child, the people who don't get the attention that they should. You definitely see that in The Gardener Sows and Family Ties. That idea of the people who don't get attention, yet they're doing everything that they should be doing. Those are the people that I want to talk to.
Your podcast, Emunah for Non-Rebbetzins, features short clips going through Chovos Halevavos day by day. What is your goal with this new project?
I’m trying to make Torah accessible to women in a way that speaks to them where they are. People often either connect to the highest level, people who are already at the spiritual level or they're reaching people who are struggling. I want to reach the middle class.
One of the things that irk me is that everyone’s doing emunah and bitachon today, we trust in Hashem, we believe in Hashem… but when you sit down and learn Chovos Halevavos, you realize there is so much more than saying Thank You Hashem and everything will work out for the best. So it's nice if people are feeling the vibes and having an awareness, but at the same time, they don't really know the concepts. It’s almost a disservice, because when they hit that wall where they need real bitachon, what they thought was bitachon won’t help them. So Emunah for Non-Rebbetzins is not a feel-good podcast and I don't present happily ever after. It’s really all about: this is the concept, think about how it applies to you. Are you on that level? What is getting in your way?
Your writing courses are very focused, with a course on short stories and a course on personal essays. What do you find is something that people who take the course struggle with more than you expected?
Ideas are a dime a dozen, but people struggle with realizing the problems with their idea, and why it won't work in a story. They'll come up with like, so this woman is adopted. And I’ll say, OK, adoption, a lot of intriguing angles there. But we're setting this in a frum world, so adoption is very tricky because of yichus, where are they coming from? There's building up a story that is actually plausible. I think that's a problem that a lot of people come across when they're reading something and they're like, this will never happen. But if you work at all the details in your head of how this story can possibly happen, even if you don't share it with the reader, just one facet here and there, the reader feels like they’re in a reality that can exist and can go along for the ride.
What have you been recently that you could recommend?
I'm always rereading Rabbi Akiva Tatz’s works, and I've gotten into Eli Weisel’s work. I really enjoyed And Rachel Was His Wife, which was put out by Feldheim in the early nineties. It gives that historical perspective where you’re able to enjoy it and get a feel for the era as opposed to just a bunch of facts. And I just read Decisive by Dan and Cliff Heath, which was really fascinating. It took a lot of what I already knew about social psychology, behavioral economics, and marketing and made it more actionable.
I’ve always loved Liane Moriarty’s work, and I just came across her sister's work, Nicola Moriarty. She has a very similar style, a heavy chick-lit. It's a style that I aspire to, to cover heavier things but you're still entertained while you read it and don't feel it's as heavy as it is.
By the time this interview is published, readers will have read your new short story, in the Calligraphy. [Living the Dream] Can you share some backstory about why you chose the topic you wrote about?
This story once again involves money, but it's not just about money. In some ways, the things that I'm writing about are shifting a little bit. Money used to be the central thing and now money is part of it, but it's asking a larger question. Like most of my stories, it was sparked by a conversation with someone that led me down a rabbit hole. I suggested a title for the story and they're like, No, you can't use that title even though it would be perfect. The title that I wanted to go with was The Death of the Rebbetzin. So that's a little spoiler.