Leah Gebber: Seamlines, forgiveness, and the forgotten struggle of history

Within My Walls isn’t shy about its nuance, care, or thoughtfulness. Its Afterword gives us a small peek into the layers of depth and emotion planted within the story, but leaves us thirsty for more. This week’s interview with one of the frum world’s most thoughtful and sophisticated authors takes us deep into the process and intention that go into Leah’s work. 

Leah Gebber lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh, where she is an author, therapist, and instructor of therapeutic writing courses. In addition to Within My Walls, Leah Gebber has published four historical novels, most recently Rocking Horse (2022). For more on Within My Walls, find last week’s full review and roundtable discussion here.

There’s a temptation with historical fiction to write about the average experience that sums up the time. Your characters, though, are consistently on the edges. How do you think the stories on the margins give us a better or lesser understanding of a historical period?

What is average? Who is normal? We’re a mosaic of so many different types and struggles and characters and experiences. I'm very interested in seamlines and the people on the edge, the people who are half in, half out. What happens when we're not fully integrated? What happens to the outsiders, to people who are vulnerable? 

Rocking Horse explored the vulnerability of Jewish women, giving readers an understanding of the very little agency Jewish girls had. In Map the Starlight, Astor is a woman in a world of men. But in Within My Walls, we’re in a world of women. Can you talk about this shift in tone and the control you’ve given your characters?

We think of a harem in a subjugated way. But really, it was much more multifaceted than that. It was an entire world. I wanted to show that when women build an alternative world for themselves, they have far more agency and joy than you’d expect in a regular setting. I once read a fascinating book about life in nunneries in Italy. It talked about choirs, sewing, and embroidery… There was a beautiful life inside the places that we might not have imagined. Life for women within a marriage could be tough then, and this is an interesting alternative.

Let’s talk about history. At the end of Rocking Horse, you describe your reaction to watching a school play, and you say “Please don’t think your ancestors or mine were so shallow. Please don’t crudely simplify or romanticize the past. Our nation - our womenfolk - would never abandon ideals for a hat.” Can you expand on this?

We simplify history. But the more you read, the more you see the real struggle, depth, yearning, intelligence, and loyalty of so many women. One of the things I love to do is read shailos and teshuvos that real women sent to poskim. You get all these fascinating examples of women's heroism. Like, my husband died and his brother wants to bring up my child, and he claims that because he's a man, he can be mechanech, but I don't want to give him up. And a Rav will actually address that. Is he really her dead husband’s shaliach in chinuch? Or can you rely on a mother to give that? 

Today, everything is a little bit sanitized. But there, it was so real, raw, and down to the bones. Maybe it's the intensity of the experience that attracts me to history. These were women's lives, their ideals, the things that they lived for. When a woman sent her husband to go work on Shabbos, it was because she had a dying child and she needed to pay a doctor. Not because she wanted a hat.

And to me that also points to another aspect of a woman's world, which is sisterhood. When we have a sense of community, when we're there for each other in a deep way, we are able to make decisions which don't betray our values. I tried to bring that out with Bilhah, that she goes from being a real loner to starting to be able to trust other people and make friends, and starting to think further than survival.

Why do we assume that history was simpler than it was? 

I think it's a wish to romanticize. We're always brought up with this idea of yeridas hadoros. Whatever we do, we're 1000 times worse, which means that they were all angels. Now, angels are boring. Who wants to know about angels? But really when you look at them and you read their lives, they were not angels at all.

Some of it is coming from the Victorian age, the 1800s, the time of Rocking Horse. It was much more repressed. It wasn't okay to express emotion. They were sort of trapped in their corsets, and they were also trapped in their experiences without having words or agency. Which is why it all kind of spritzed out into hysteria and then you had the whole Freud movement.

“Jerusalem is a city of fire. Tzfat is the city of air, and it is the place where they go when they can no longer breathe.” Hard to disagree, especially comparing your Yerushalayim story of Sisters Under Siege, a book best described as fire, to Within My Walls. What does Tzfat mean to you, in the modern day? 

Tzfat means summer. Tzfat means there's air, you breathe, there's a creative spirit. There's beauty in the streets. I love Tzfat, it kind of lifts you up into a different dimension. You see things from above. I could never live there, I would just start to fly and not be grounded. I couldn't live in Yerushalayim either. I live in Beit Shemesh, but when I go to Yerushalayim, it’s fiery. I was actually born on 10 Av, so it's like I always think to myself that I'm a fiery character, it's the day that the Beis Hamikdash was still burning. 

Here we're comparing the fire and air, but most of the book is comparing the ground to the air. The theme of roots intrigued me, and Rocking Horse had a similar thread of homelessness, that lack of stability we face in galus. Where are you going with this? 

A sense of place is so fundamental to who we are. It's something I only realized with age, as I've been through life a little bit more. I come from London, and I never felt at home there. I made Aliya at 20, I've been in Israel for 22 years, also feeling a certain sense of displacement for some of that time. Early on I realized I was desperate to buy a house and B’chasdei Hashem we were able to do so. But I always found it funny, why am I so desperate to have a house? A certain sense of rootedness is so fundamental to who we are and how we see the world. I think it's something that we don't see how much our surroundings shape us, shape who we are, shape our expectations, and give us a sense of identity.

Each of your books explored themes of mental health, with characters facing significant emotional challenges. I’m thinking of Hannah, Tirtza, Eliyohu, Bilhah… And from what you’ve described in your Afterwards, it sounds like you’re placing a diagnosis that we understand today into another context. Can you talk about describing these emotional experiences within a time when the language to discuss these feelings did not exist?

I start with characters. And as I explore them, I'm like, ah, she's been through this trauma. I remember the morning I realized that Bilhah had been through this abuse. I woke up very early, maybe even 4:30, and went outside to do some writing. I wrote with a pen and paper as the sun was rising. I was in Istanbul, in her little house, and then suddenly I heard her father's footsteps and I started to cringe inside. And I started writing and it came.

How do you do it without language? I try to find different words. I had a scene where Leonara goes riding. Today we call it horse riding therapy. But in those days it was just, oh, there's a rhythm that fills my heart and makes my thoughts calm. The word is always a gift, but sometimes when you don't have the word, you're forced to go around it with poetry, metaphor, and examples, and suddenly the experience becomes much richer. When I tell you this is a story about Leonora who has trauma and Bilhah who has been abused, that's stale. But when I tell you that Bilha thinks her father is an angel because he's restored printing, but whenever he comes, she shrinks inside his skin - wow, that's a story.

There's this assumption that these feelings didn't exist before we could label them. Have you come across proof that people were thinking about their emotions in this way?

It's everywhere when you look. When I wrote Chains, I found a book of gravestones in Rome, from a Jewish cemetery. The way they speak about their loved ones… My dear beloved, every day I cry, I think of your soul and I get comfort… There's so much tenderness, so much love. And there's also examples of writing that we have. We have Jewish poetry from Spain, and even earlier, that is filled with yearning, love, and humor. 

And honestly, we're coming to the censorship issue. When I say Spanish poetry, you think of  Reb Yehuda Halevi, who talks about longing for Eretz Yisrael and says I'm in the east but my heart was in the west. But we don't read all the other much more iffy poems. You have to wade past the censorship and look for it. 

Sometimes I think of my writing as bringing women's voices back to life. They've been snuffed out. I found this amazing letter written in the 1500s. A woman is writing to her son and saying, I know you want to support your daughter, but her husband is a gambler and everything you give her is going straight to him. I know it's breaking your heart, but they have to solve their own problems. And this was written 500 years ago! When you go looking, it's astounding what you find. So I think saying that they didn't have rich, deep authentic complex lives is selling our ancestors short. 

There are many references to Noach throughout the book. In one particular line that encapsulates so much of the story, you write “How else is it possible to encounter the memories that seep, unwanted, into your mind? What did Noach do, when he saw that a whole world had been destroyed?” What is the comparison to the era of Within My Walls, and what drew you to explore this time?

What's it like to encounter desolation? What would that have felt like? What is it like to encounter in your soul? I think we all have moments when we encounter outside ourselves and then, do we run? Do we hide? Do we close our eyes? Do we climb into the terror in the hopes of conquering it? Do we learn to live alongside it?

But it was very deliberately only forty years after the desolation. I wanted to show, if you want to use today's language, which I think is like pale and cardboard, a generational trauma. I had Leonora who was actually there. She was young, she was 14, but she experienced it herself. And then Bilhah was one generation away. But both in both situations, I wanted to ask, how do we encounter destruction and go forward?

An entire generation was uprooted, and we can undoubtedly assume there’s plenty of trauma going around. But the characters first presented as victims of their time later turn out to be suffering from their choices or private tragedies. How does collective trauma play out in Leonora, Bilha, and Eliyohu’s lives?

We see how what happened to us collectively and what happens to us individually are so intertwined. We’re never just the result of what happened to us in our bad times, but they do shape us in unexpected ways and lead to choices that we make. I think that’s so much more interesting, because if I'm just a victim, there’s nothing to do. But we always have a choice of what to do with that. 

Leonora had been through all this stuff. And then she made a choice that was fed by her experiences. Let's go back to the holocaust. With any trauma, you have the person who's traumatized, and you have all the people around them who are negatively affected by that person's trauma. That person is unavailable, snappy, in survival mode, in denial of their emotional needs. And then you have a lot of anger and hurt, a lot of fall out. That's the whole intergenerational thing. Then you have generation after generation of daughters hating their mothers and mothers and fathers overly passive or overly abusive. 

We all react to experiences differently. In my clinic I see people who are affected by the war that is going on and October 7th in different ways. I see friends of hostages, siblings of fighters, mothers whose children are injured. Every single one of those reacts in a very unique way. One of the ingredients in life is chemlah, compassion. Bring a sense of compassion to who we are and to the choices that we've made, even when they're wrong or caused damage, even when they wreaked havoc, because the person who abandoned her daughter was also an abandoned child herself.

Not always forgiveness, though. I didn't have Bilhah forgive her father. Many people questioned me on that, and I was adamant that she is not going to forgive him. I'm sorry, there are some things which are not forgiven. But at the same time, we’re people and we've been through so much hurt and wounds. 

In your afterward, you write that Leonora is a soul of tohu, although you admit you’re not sure yourself what that means. We get to know Leonora slowly, and you unwrap layers of her history, personality, and needs slowly. Can you talk about crafting this character?

I had a great time crafting Leonora. I wanted to make someone really different, powerful, obsessive, someone who had too much light and too little vessel. And I had a clear idea of what that was fueled by. It was interesting for me because something of yourself goes into every character, and I had to find a place inside me and distill it in me.

There were some really powerful women at that time. The one that we all know about is Donna Gracia, and there was Catherine de Medici in Italy and Queen Elizabeth in England. Part of what I wanted to do was smash the stereotype of this nebach widow. She was no nebach. She was going to use all her resources, business acumen, and leadership qualities for the Jewish world. She didn't always come out her best. Powerful people can be cruel and overlook others, and when powerful people are fueled by trauma and regret, they're not always in the best place. 

What is bibliotherapy? 

I have a master's in bibliotherapy, and the way I explain it to people is that it’s like art therapy, but I use stories, writing, and poetry. Sometimes it's hard to encounter ourselves and our issues in the present day in front of us. So we use the principle of distancing. If I'm writing about someone else who lives in a different place and different time, then I have a space, we call it a transitional space. Within that space, I can move around and try out different conversations, approaches, and mindsets. And then I can go back to my world with a certain flexibility of thought and feelings and understanding that I don't have when it's all in front of me about me right here.

How can the average frum reader use bibliotherapy principles within their own lives, perhaps while reading your own books?

First of all, I want people to read it and enjoy it. And then let it percolate and think about it, let it sink in. The way we grow in literature is the opposite of science. We absorb it and we think about scenes that might speak to us and then we forget about them. And then six months later, someone says something to remind us and we'll look back in the book and see, what did they do? What happened? How did that person pick herself up after all that time? How does somebody find it in them to find trust in a relationship? And they might go back and say, I can see some milestones that she went through. 

Is there a setting or time period you chose not to write about one? 

I would never do the Holocaust. I don't think fiction has a place here right now. We have so many witnesses. It's just a very visceral sense, I couldn't do it. I always choose time periods that have some light in them, though they're very dark. That’s another reason why I wouldn't choose the actual expulsion from Spain. I don't want to just go into the darkness. I want to see how the darkness is affecting us as we try to travel towards the light. I want to see how people grapple with it. When we’re just in the darkness, we're in the pit. You can touch the pit in writing, but there's not too much to write about inside there, not a whole novel. I want to get out of the pit and then learn to live alongside the pit.

What's coming next for you?

I do therapeutic writing workshops and courses, which give people a chance to write and share and explore their inner worlds. When it comes to the actual writing, I'm mapping out a story now, looking at a time period that is again filled with gray and ambivalence. 

What have you read recently that you could recommend?

I'm in the middle of a book called The Book of Splendor by Francis Sherwood. It's a fascinating, beautifully written book about what happened in Prague at the time of the Maharel. It's written by a Jewish woman about Jewish characters, but it's not from a frum perspective. And I'm reading The Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak. Not Jewish, but a fascinating book that deals with three Muslim women grappling with what it means to have belief and faith in today's world. Which I think is so relevant right now.