Joan Zlotnick: medium, subconscious symbolism, and the little lower level

After dozens of conversations with authors tearing apart their works, today we’re taking a step back and asking why this all matters. Why read deeply into a story that’s a product of someone’s imagination? How does looking past the surface enhance our reading experience? And how can I see my reading through fresh eyes?

Joan Zlotnick is a retired English professor who has pivoted from writing about American Literature to writing for the frum community about grief and loss. She co-authored the recent Brick by Brick, an anthology of light essays featuring stories and insights about Ahavas Yisroel and the power and joy of reaching across community lines. We talk about Brick by Brick’s journey to publication, the transition fromem academic writing to frum publishing, and getting started on the journey to deeper insight.

“Once you figure out the game being played, you can join in the fun.” - Thomas Foster

Check out some quick ideas to help you get started in the world of literature analysis, and see how it’s done through the novels you’ve read!

Your background is in academia, and until 2012 you taught American Literature at Brooklyn College. Since then, your writing has become personal and inspirational, with three publications about caregiving and grief and your newest about Ahavas Yisroel. How do your years of academic writing and literature studies inform the creative writing you’ve done since, which is so different?

My writing has always been a creative and intellectual experience. I wouldn't have gone into teaching English if I hadn't believed that literature changes lives. My publications in my early days were, however largely academic and never touched people in an emotional way. It was a long and difficult journey that led me to writing books that had a personal and deep emotional effect on people. 

This change began during the course of my husband’s long illness. keeping a journal was very helpful to me; it was, in effect, a healing experience. when he died, almost 12 years ago, I began to realize that if I were to make anything positive come out of this very awful experience, I had to do more than write to heal myself: I had to share the experience in order to heal others. so I began with a novel called Griefwriting, which was for a secular audience. 

Griefwriting, a novel about characters healing from grief through writing and the connections forged between them (e-book), disguises psychology and self-help beneath the facade of fiction. Why did you choose to present these ideas through fiction?

At that point, I was not so comfortable talking about my husband’s illness or its impact on our lives directly, so I decided to tell our story through a novel. But what happened was that I got this enormous positive response. people began writing to tell me how reading Griefwriting changed their lives. I have a very good friend, Rebbetzin Esther Reisman, who asked if she could show this book to a friend of hers at Mishpacha Magazine. And then the editor asked me to write a column on caregiving and grief, which ran for six months.

That series had an enormous impact, I got many requests from readers asking if they could talk to me. readers from all over the world, from Israel, America, Canada, and Antwerp. It felt really good to be helping people, Jewish people, my people. I got the idea of starting an international support group for women whose spouses suffered from the same rare but very devastating illness as my husband, and we formed a group. This has been enormously satisfying. these women had never spoken about their husbands’ illness. Their worries about shidduchim and lashon hara made this a taboo topic in the Orthodox community. And now they were connecting and sharing their grief, and also sharing ideas about what they were doing that worked well, comforting each other, supporting each other, and offering advice.

A while later I got a call from a publishing house in Israel, Tzufa Publications, asking if I would do a book on the subject. And I have to tell you, writing for this audience was not exactly comfortable for me at first. There's a lot of self-censorship that goes into it. So I wasn't eager to take on the project, but I did, and again, it had a tremendous impact. [Holding it Together]

I was still not finished with that project when my daughter-in-law, Grunny, approached me, asking if I'd help her with a book that she had wanted to write for a long time. At first I thought she just wanted me to edit. I edited her dissertation and professional publications, as well as my grandkids’ college applications; that's my job in the family. so I was surprised when she asked me to be her co-author. Again I was hesitant, but I went forward with it, and it turned out to be an incredible experience. 

In a way, it was the opposite experience to what you were doing because whereas your first creative writing style books were very personal and coming from your own experiences, Brick by Brick is telling other people stories. So that's a very different approach as a writer.

Yes, it was very different. I wrote two of my own pieces, but for the most part I was recruiting other people to share their stories with us. Some of them did not want to write, so they told me their stories and I wrote them as well. And then there was, of course, the editing.  

It was a really rewarding experience. One thing I know is that reading books about gedolim doesn't change many people, in the sense that we're just ordinary people. We're not gedolim, we can't do what they do. But these were ordinary people talking about experiences that they had. I honestly believe that you can learn or be influenced more from that than by stories about great people who are nothing like you. The book talks to you: this is a person who is just like you, and yet his actions, sometimes only small gestures, are having an amazing impact on his fellow Jews.

What was the catalyst behind choosing Ahavas Yisroel as the topic for this anthology?

My daughter-in-law had been wanting to write this book for a long time. This is a topic very dear to her heart. She writes articles about Ahavas Yisroel for the Jewish Link, which is our local New Jersey paper. She's very passionate about the subject, but I have to admit, I wasn't nearly as passionate as she was at the start. But as I got more and more involved, it was a very extraordinary experience. There were old friends of mine who contributed stories, but I had never known about the experiences they wrote about. So it opened a whole new dimension in our relationships. I also met many new people. It was wonderful and uplifting to hear their stories.

Anthologies are an uncommon format within frum literature. What are the challenges and opportunities of an anthology in giving over a message?

To quote Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.” Here, you had different kinds of Jews, with different backgrounds, different attitudes, different lifestyles, different clothing styles, all working together on a project. I don't think any other format would have gotten the message of our book across as effectively.

Were there any ways in which your approach or process differed when working for a frum audience?

It certainly did. When I did the book on caregiving and grief, it was very tricky. I was very cautious about what I wrote and always aware that I was writing for a new audience. And then I got back the manuscript, and the editors made some changes that were beyond belief. On the cover, they had originally decided they would have an older man and woman sitting on a wharf looking toward the sunset. And then someone objected that a man and a woman can't be sitting next to each other, despite the fact that they're two older people, husband and wife. So we went through a whole bunch of things and finally came up with two birds instead of two people. There were other instances where the editors objected to passages that were so cautiously written.

Readers look to books for many different purposes: to inspire, to entertain, to distract, to make us think. How does a close reading of literature help us with any of these? 

A close reading of literature gets us connected with the writer in a way that a very superficial reading does not. When you get deeper, you gain a better perspective of what this writer has to say. I'm very big on analyzing literature, and when I read a book, I like to explore what Herman Melville called “the little lower level.” I belong to a book club now and I'm trying to get my group into that kind of mindset. I always recommend books that have substance. There’s nothing wrong with reading for fun and relaxation, but you don't need a book club for that. I'm very analytic in my approach to reading and, I think, a little snobby about the books I like to read.

Frum authors are men and women who are part of our communities. Some are very thoughtful people, some less so. As someone who enjoys thinking deeply about what I read, I often present a thought or takeaway to an author that they haven’t thought of at all. What are your thoughts on author intent vs reader interpretation? 

Readers often bring insights to the literature that the authors were not aware of. This is not an uncommon thing. A lot of writing is on a subconscious level, I don't know that authors are always aware of the many layers of meaning that they are suggesting with, let’s say, a symbol or metaphor. You can find meaning that was not consciously intended. That was always one of the exciting things about teaching literature, finding stuff that maybe the author didn't even think of. So it's a kind of a joint venture, the reader is given something by the author, but the reader brings something to it as well. And then the book becomes the whole of what the author writes and the readers perceive.

How do you think about the difference between a lesson, a moral, and a theme? How does this play out within the confines of frum literature, where certain values are a given?

The lesson is the most didactic of these three, it’s outright, straight. This is a lesson we want to teach you in this book. Do a, b, or c. A moral is a little more subtle. It doesn't put it in your face. You kind of feel it, you get it, but nobody is telling you, “This is a lesson that you need to learn from the book.” And a theme is even more general: it’s what the book is about. Sometimes there’s an overlap. For example, if your theme is the devastation of war, there is an implicit moral that war is a horrible thing. In contemporary secular literature, we don't see much anymore in the way of lessons and morals. You go back far enough in history, that's what it was.

Do you believe that every book has a theme or is that something that only comes as a product of the author putting it there?

I think every book has a theme. When a writer starts out, he's got an idea of what this book is going to be about, what the overall idea of the book will be. I can't imagine a book without a theme.

Place in literature can almost be a character of its own, and you’ve written a lot about setting. Today, some frum authors choose to make the location vague, whether to make the story feel relatable, to keep from stereotyping, or something else. How do you think a missing or vague setting affects a story?

I think the setting affects the story enormously. But sometimes you want an identifiable setting because then it becomes a more universal story. It's abstract, it doesn't have a place. It’s not so limited, it's not so grounded. I can see experimental literature feeling that specific settings are limiting. But I could never write a book like that. That’s not my style.

Do you have any other writing projects coming up?

I have been thinking about a book on aging. It's an intriguing idea. I honestly don't think that anyone who's not aging gets it or understands what it's like. It would be for a frum audience. I think whatever I write going forward will probably be for that audience.

What have you been reading recently that you can recommend?

There are two books that I read recently that I absolutely loved. One of them is The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell. It's historical fiction and is about one of the Medici daughters, who is married at age 14 to a duke who winds up plotting to kill her because she doesn't conform to the traditional role of Duchess. It's actually based on the same story as Browning's poem, ‘‘My Last Duchess.” It's a wonderful story and very well written.

The other book I liked a lot was Gilded Mountain, by Kate Manning. It's set in the Gilded Age, and about the robber barons and the struggle of labor unions. Both of these are enjoyable reads with lots  of ideas to explore and delve into.

Ready to try “the little lower level” for yourself? While frum literature doesn’t have the history and breadth of secular literature, there’s more than enough to jump into! Here are three ideas to get you started.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality describes a web of published works, and how every book is in conversation with every other book ever written. Some books do this explicitly: Barbara Bensoussan’s Pride and Preference is a clear nod to Jane Austen’s original and Henye Meyer’s Adrenalin! is a response to the myriad of frum thrillers on the market. 

But it goes much further than this. Frum fiction often deals with similar themes, and comparing a book to other works that may have influenced it, or that may be a product or reaction to the other’s ideas, brings far deeper thought to the theme, plot, and characters. 

Yael Mermelstein’s Hospital Corridors and Riva Pomerantz’s See You are both about the costs of perfection. Zecharya Hoffman’s Dual Discovery and Yehudis Kormornick’s The Last Slave are both set in Egypt during galus mitzrayim. Henye Meyer’s Stranger to My Brothers and Leah Gebber’s Map the Starlight deal with village boys with unknown backgrounds departing from their Christian upbringing on a journey to find peace. Libby Lazewnik’s Fools Gold and Riva Pomerantz’s Green Fences have characters struggling with competition and interdependence. Each of these pairs of books has similarities on the surface but profound differences beneath it. How did the authors approach similar topics differently?

(Something to think about: many frum authors don’t read frum fiction, and have less awareness of what books are similar to theirs than their readers do. How does that affect their writing and how we perceive it?)

Situational Irony

Situational irony is how authors keep us on our toes and use our reader-savviness against us, guiding a plotline to the opposite of what we expect. But aside from adding suspense and keeping things interesting, irony highlights a dissonance that sparks curiosity about our assumptions, plot, themes, and how novels work. 

Deena in Follow Me has a fun and cool exterior, leading no-one to expect a dark and sad inner reality. Esther in See You’s heroic sacrifice leads her to depression, not the inner peace we expect. Felix in Rocking Horse ponders the world's problems while writing simplistic children's stories, only to use those very stories to solve the world's problems. Rule of Three’s antisocial Abby makes a friend accidentally, only later to find out she qualifies for her friend-finding competition with her husband. 

Each of these stories plays on our smugness of “I know how this will end”, taking the opposite path. What tropes and patterns did these authors use to set up our expectations so that they can choose the other paths? How is our reading affected when irony isn’t used and a novel follows our expectations perfectly?

Symbolism and Motifs

There are many kinds of symbolism, and as Professor Zlotnick describes, symbolism can be subconscious on the author’s part, there for the critical reader’s taking. A motif is one form of symbolism and is an object that is repeated throughout the story that takes on a bigger significance within the novel than its plain meaning or form. It’s often there to connect various threads of the story to reinforce a particular theme.

Pa’s astrolabe in Map the Starlight is the source and reminder of the greed, dignity, and worldview that are at the roots of a family conflict. Yechiel’s baseball cap in The Trepid Trilogy is a reminder of his first true friendship and introduction to yiddishkeit and stays with him as he transitions between the known and the unknown. Aunt Esther’s cast-iron skillet in Shortchanged is a humorous manifestation of the chaos that surrounds the Rosen home in good times and bad. Ernst’s violin in Rocking Horse is the representation, catalyst, and then closure of Hannah’s dissonance in her new world. Tscharna’s horseshoe buttons in This is America! may symbolize the long-ago dreams she holds on to despite change and struggle.

These objects all carry paragraphs of theme and emotion within each subtle mention. Some are more explicit than others, and some of their plots rely more heavily on the reader’s understanding of them. How soon do we notice that this is something that carries value? How do authors let us know to keep an eye on this object? How is our understanding of the conflict affected if we don’t catch on?