Libby Lazewnik: plotting, translation, and the natural balance between streams of life

A matriarch of frum literature, Libby Lazewnik published her first book 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since, with titles spanning all ages and genres. Libby’s newest series, The Starlight Sisters, features five classmates experiencing every girl’s dream: a Jewish performing school of arts. It’s imaginative but relatable, and fantastic reading for 5th and 6th grade girls.

Libby is a writer, editor, and translator who has published more than 60 books, including her most recent adult novels, Deception and The Last Lie. She is currently finishing the translation of the 4th installment of M. Kenan’s Khazar series, which Artscroll expects to be published in March. 

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It’s been 35 years since the publication of Shira’s Summer. So much has changed in the world and the frum publishing industry in those 35 years. How has your approach to writing changed over time?

For one thing, people's attention spans have become a lot shorter. The writing has to be quicker and snappier, with shorter paragraphs and easier words. When I look back at my older books, I'm surprised at how dense they appear because my newer books are written in a quicker fashion. Menucha Publishers has been reprinting some of my books lately, and as I was reading through the short stories, I couldn't believe the vocabulary I used. 

You were the author or co-author of many of the Bakers’ Dozen, a series that was the product of so many different talented writers. How did you get involved, what was your role in the series, and how did the many authors ensure consistency and continuity between different people’s work? 

That was our job as the editors. Miriam Zakon, my dear friend since elementary school, is the creator of the Baker's Dozen and BY Times. She was the editor-in-chief of Targum Press at the time, and she offered me a job working with her as the senior editor. She had just created those two series and needed help to get them off the ground. We plotted them together and then gave it over to whichever author was doing it. But the plot and editing came from us, so we made it all consistent. 

The idea for Baker’s Dozen just sort of evolved. Mimi created this interesting family of 12 children and asked me to write the first one or two books in the series, and then we sort of kept working on it. But I realized I was busy with other projects and I couldn't do all of them. So we found other people to pitch in. Each Baker’s Dozen has the name of the author on the cover, so if my name is on it, that means I wrote it. For the BY Times, we made up an author called Leah Klein for all the books, but it was written by many different authors. I wrote a bunch of them. 

The books you’ve published span a wide range of styles, audiences, and genres. From action-based, like Deception, The Judge, and Fortune Seekers, to family dramas like Broken Promises and The Lost Legacy, to character and emotion-based like Stay with Me, Quicksand, and Fool’s Gold. Which of the genres you’ve done do you think represents you and your interests most?

They all do. I love the page-turning quality of a thriller, but at the same time, there's something delicious about a long family saga where you really get into the characters. The only thing I don't like is a book of a whole life that goes from birth to death. That makes me sad. But I like writing about a lot of different people, getting to all their heads and showing how their lives intertwine. 

When I plotted Between the Thorns, my very first book for adults, I knew it was going to be a big book. In those days, we had rolls of serrated computer papers. I took three or four of those and on one side I wrote all the characters' names, and on top I wrote each of the five years. Then I lined up the significant events of each character for each year. The plotting took me so long that by the time I wrote it, I knew exactly where I was going. That was a very big undertaking. But something like Deception calls for a whole different type of plotting. Because it’s more of a mystery, I had to have a good plot seeded with clues while not giving away the answer to the mystery–a whole different kind of challenge.

Did you plot Deception and The Last Lie in one go?

I intended to do a whole series of books with these characters and keep continuing the story. Each book would have a mystery or some thrilling aspect while we continue following the lives of the characters. The problem is, we didn't write on the cover of Deception that it was part one of a two-volume book, so people who bought it thought it was a standalone book. Mimi Zakon, my editor at Artscroll, told me to quickly write the second one and finish off that story. She said that I could always write other books with those characters later, but this one has to be finished because people are sitting on shpilkes. So it was essentially one long story. I would like to do another installment soon. When I finish with the Starlight Sisters, to which I’ve committed myself, I do want to go back to them. 

You’ve talked about the issue within the frum world of thrillers and suspense novels losing their human element. Your most recent novels, Deception and The Lie, are a fascinating combination of action, character, and relationships. Can you tell me about the process and challenges of combining these elements?

My favorite kind of book has the thriller aspect that makes you sit at the edge of your seat, but also a lot of human connection, preferably including a shidduch or some other challenging  relationship. So, how do I make it work? I start off with characters I'm interested in, characters who are either seeking or struggling with a relationship–including their relationship with themselves. I think that the plotting is very important: the main action, along with subplots to show what's going on in their personal lives and their close relationships. And then you need to intersperse one with the other to get the right balance. It comes pretty naturally because that's what real life is like – you're not always involved with one stream of your life, you're bouncing around from one to another.

Second Fiddle, the first of your new Starlight Sisters series, is such a fun breath of fresh air. It seems like each book will be centered around one of the school’s performances, similarly structured to The BY Times or The Cheery Bim Bam. Can you tell me about the structure of the series?

It’s going to be about four girls, and the last book will add a fifth. Each book is told by another one of those girls. I'm going to try to end each one with a performance. At the end of the first book, they get invited to fly to London to perform at the end of the year, so the fifth book will reach its climax there. With each character, you'll see how each one has her own dilemmas, emotional challenges, family stuff, and problems to solve.

The premise came from a series by Noel Streatfield, who wrote books for kids called Ballet Shoes, Theater Shoes, and so on. Ballet Shoes is about a few adopted girls, each with a different talent, who grow up together and are enrolled in a school for the performing arts. It's an old-fashioned book set in England, but I loved those books when I was growing up, and my daughter loved them too. So I thought, let's make one for frum kids! 

The main character of Second Fiddle, Ora, is introduced on the first page as being moody, and you’re not hesitant to paint her as a flawed and improving girl. Adult fiction can present nuanced characters, but children tend to have black-and-white thinking. How do you show this nuance to kids and keep girls rooting for this moody, jealous, and sometimes snobby character?

I hope the kids will root for her. The first two of my Shira books came out with Feldheim Publishers, and they told me then that their policy is that you can have characters do anything wrong, as long as they deal with it, acknowledge that it's wrong, or rectify it. You can't just have them do something wrong and then go on their merry way. Ora’s a moody person, that's her temperament, but she becomes aware of it and starts to work on it. I think that's real life. You learn how to change, to adapt to what's needed in life. She does come off as rather abrasive, but I hope the girls will root for her and that by the end of the book, feel for her.

Ora struggles with feelings of inferiority and jealousy. But this is set against her being the most talented member of her family, and either the best or second best singer in her elite school. I think most readers would be jealous of Ora’s life! Do you think this makes Ora’s challenges, and ultimate realizations, more or less relatable for girls? 

If a girl in our frum world has a good voice, how often does she get to use it? You have a choir once in a while… So Ora may be talented, but she has friend problems, and she has a sister who's all-around popular and great and beautiful. In real life, she sees herself as inferior, but when it comes to a choir, she shines. In this new school, she will have opportunities, but she's surrounded by people who are just as talented–or more! So that's not going to be the place that's going to give her real happiness in life. The main thing is to find friends and to feel good about herself. Her singing is just a bonus.

Let’s get into some of your translation projects. How would you describe the art of translation? 

It's like a simultaneous process of Hebrew and English going on in my brain at the same time. My fingers are just translating as I read; it comes very naturally to me. Occasionally I get stuck on a word that I don't know, and then I go into a translation app to figure it out. 

I never read the book ahead of time, so I'm translating it as I’m reading. If it’s a good book, I'm very excited to see what happens next! 

So much is converted during the translation process other than just language. Sometimes there's details in a story that aren’t relatable to American readers. What do you do when you bump into those things?

I actually changed some names in the Khazar series that were a  bit too hard to pronounce. There's no need for such a complication, especially in a last name. But there was one name that was a pure honest mistake. In the first book, Istrak has a bunch of siblings. The youngest one was named Lissiah, who never says a word. It sounded like a girl's name to me, so I made her a three-year-old girl. After the author had a friend read the whole book in English, she emailed me and said Lissiah was supposed to be a boy, and that she’d had plans for him when he grew up which she would now have to change. That was actually the only time I had contact with the author. And Lissia has remained, and will forever remain, a girl.

I translated the book The Mashgiach, about the life of R’ Meir Chodosh. Boruch Hashem, the translation was good, except there was one mistake I made. Thank God they caught it before it got published. Rebbetzin Shulamis Ezrachi mentioned that a person was a Sheim Davar, and I translated as a Shum Davar, which means a person who’s a “nothing.” When they had someone read it over in English, they told me that a Sheim Davar means a person with a sheim, a fine reputation. It’s actually the opposite of Shum Davar! I was appalled at the way one letter can make such a difference in the meaning of a word. But I certainly learned to be extra careful in the future.

Maya Kenan’s Khazar books are some of the most beloved translated fiction, and fans have been eagerly waiting for the final book. As American readers who don’t get to see Maya’s writing firsthand, what can you tell me about translating her work?

I don't think American readers are missing anything because  I'm very faithful to her story. I don't make major changes. She writes at great length with a lot of dialogue. She has an interesting combination of action and soul searching, people's thoughts and feelings and growth. She has a very good balance of all the different elements of a good story, and a tremendous imagination. I very much enjoy translating her novels. When Artscroll tells me they have a new Kenan book to translate, I know I’m in for months of fun. Of all the writers out there, she's one of the few that I relate to personally, even though I never met her and don’t talk to her. I think that both of us have an inborn drive to write, write, write.

Do you find that kind of soul-searching to be harder to translate? 

Sometimes I leave bits of it out because I think an American audience will have less patience. I don't even have that much patience for all of it. I try to get the main idea across without all the pesukim and references. While I leave in as many as I can, I do tone it down a little bit for Americans. Sometimes it's just not translatable, and I'll just take out a reference and simply get across the idea of what she's trying to say. It’s such a long book that even if you take out a drop here or there, there's still so much rich material left. I don't feel that anyone's getting shortchanged. 

This last book that I'm doing now is about 860 pages long in Hebrew, and English is a  longer language, so it might be a 1000-page book. The people at ArtScroll kept asking me, “How long is it? Are there parts you’d be able to take out?” I told them that I wouldn’t know what I could take out until the last page. All the subplots lead to something; you can't just take something out without knowing its place in the whole scheme of things.

What's coming up next for you? You recently finished a serial story, will we see that published soon?

I don't know yet, I have to ask them if they're interested in putting it out as a book. I'm working on the Starlight Sisters now. I just finished the second one and have three more to go. I really would like to do another one of the Deception series. At the end of The Last Lie, the family was thinking about moving to Baltimore, and I’d planned on setting a third book there. But I’ll only do it if I can find the time to devote to it. Time is really the constraint here–there's so much fun stuff to do!