Hello! Welcome to another issue of Frum Books, home of everything related to the frum publishing world - articles, interviews, recommendations, etc. This week we talk to Ruthie Pearlman, author of almost two dozen frum books, most notably the Yael Reed series. Listen to some highlights, or read the full interview below.
Did you always know that you would want to be a writer in your adult life?
Yes, I think from a very young age, I always knew I wanted to be an author. I started writing when I was about 10, 11 years old, I wrote my first novel, didn't get anywhere. I carried on, but I think the real crossroad came with deciding to write for the frum market. Because in the beginning, I thought about being a famous secular, but I wasn't making much headway in that department.
When I first sent my first book, which was a Rivky Nesher book, I had to send them to three publishers before anyone accepted them. And so it wasn’t an easy path, but now I'm with Menucha and they're good for me, and we worked together very well.
I want to ask you about the new book that came out and the Yael Reed series. The first thing that I noticed when I was reading the new book is how you started taking the plot back to the origin of the series. You're going back to the school and the high school girls being the starring characters. What was your intention there?
I'll be honest with you. These books, as you might know, were originally serials in the Aim (Ami’s kids’ magazine). I didn't really want to go back to the school. I'm trying constantly to steer away from my serials being a kids’ adventure.
For example, Yael. The number of arguments I had with Esty, the editor, to get her married, was nobody’s business. I wanted Yael to get married and to have more adult adventures as a young woman with her husband and go on a daredevil mission together. And Esty was very much keen on keeping the school-girl side of things because of her readership in the Aim. And so we have that constant pull and push, pull and push - ‘kids’ adventure’, me wanting to do more adult literature…
I don't feel that the serial belongs in the Aim because I don't write for kids - I write for young adults and adults. However, the main reason I'm in the Aim is because of my relationship with Esty. Coercion went back to the school to keep Esty happy, but you will notice that the subsequent books after Coercion are no longer in the school and they take place in England and in a yishuv in Israel. So I'm trying to move away from the school completely.
That's very interesting. How does it impact the plots that you do? Did you feel limited in what you could do because it's in a school?
I think when you're a writer for a magazine, rather than a standalone book writer, then you are restricted and limited by what the magazine wants and needs. And so I am [limited], that's the minus. The plus side is that the discipline of writing a serial for the Aim keeps me writing, and I need that discipline.
I'm now writing another standalone book for Menucha, and I'm finding it so much harder to write without that discipline of an editor nagging and nagging and nagging and nagging because she needs a chapter every single week. So the standalone book, I've got complete freedom, really. I can do anything I want to, and I'm enjoying that. I'm writing, like in An Ordinary Wednesday, the first person as a man, and I love writing from that perspective. I've got complete freedom of the plot and everything. I'm finding it really hard to be disciplined enough to sit down and write it. I need to be pushed in like I am with Aim to keep me at it every week. The standalone book will get written, but it'll get written a lot slower than the next serial.
It's amazing, in the back of the books, it says, “Fans will be happy to hear that there are more books in the making” and every time I read it, of course, that's exciting because when you finish, you want more. In a way, it feels like these adventures are happening in real-time and you're frantically trying to keep up with them and just get it out to the people. And there's just always more coming. It's amazing how you keep it up.
Well, I don't have much choice, to be honest, it's like being a hamster on a treadmill. I've been writing for Ami magazine since its inception. And I've got to the pattern now that they want me to keep writing the serial in the Aim, and when I finished one, I start another. Sometimes I just wish for a break, but if she gives me a break, after a couple of weeks, I'm already itching to start again.
Do you find it challenging to come up with ideas since you've written so much about Yael and all these characters, at a certain point, you're going to run out of things to write about…
That's where Esty is very good, she's a very good ideas person. I mean, not always do I agree with her ideas. Sometimes I say to her, I need an idea of where's this plot going or something, and she'll give me some ideas. And I say, no, it's too ‘kids adventure’. Her ideas set me off thinking - I don't like that, but I could do this. She sometimes sends me ideas that are excellent and give me a jump-off point of her idea, and then I move away.
I want to change gears and talk about the setting, you've written so many books, am I correct that every single one is set in England?
The present book that I'm writing is in Eretz Yisrael, because that's where I live now. I'm not gonna write a setting that I don't know. Although I think one of my books, I can't remember which one, it was one of the Yael Reed when she was looking for her father, she ended up in Albuquerque. And I've never in my life been to Albuquerque, but I do have a very good friend here in Israel who was brought up there and between her and looking up details online, I managed to give it a realistic feel.
Bloodline took place in Tahlia, New York. Now I do know Brooklyn fairly well, so I hope I was able to give it a reasonable authenticity, if not, I'm really sorry. But for me to write about somewhere in the world where I don't know anything about it would come across as fake.
I was curious about the city where the school Ner Miriam takes place and looked it up. It seems to me that Bournemouth is very far away from London. Have you ever been there? Is it a place that you're familiar with? Why did you choose that place for school specifically?
Yes. Bournemouth is a seaside town on the south coast of the UK. It's about 210 miles from London, and it happens to be one of the most popular resorts for frum Jews to go to. The difference between England and America is that America has so many different places where you can be a frum Jew. England doesn’t. It has basically London, Manchester, Gateshead, and that's about it. If you go anywhere else, you're on your own kind of thing, Yiddishkeit-wise, Kashrus-wise. But Bournemouth happens to be a coastal resort that has had Jewish and frum hotels opening up, people buy apartments, and there's kosher shops there, so there is Jewish life there.
I didn't think that a Jewish school would be in a place where there was no Judaism or no infrastructure. So even though it's not in a mainstream Jewish area, I wanted it remote, but yet has a Jewish grounding.
You've been in frum publishing for a while already, and a lot changed in that time as an author. How does that affect you? How do you see the difference?
I actually think that the publishers and probably the readership has moved more to the right, they're not willing to accept things they accepted 20, 30 years ago. I'll give you an example. Menucha [Publishers] did a reprint of Dark Tapestry recently. Now I wrote Dark Tapestry in 1990ish, almost 30 years ago. When they came to do the reprint, I sent them the Word document and the editor told me they'd have to cut some things out. Things that were acceptable then are no longer acceptable now.
For example, in Dark Tapestry, Colin has a non‑Jewish girlfriend until he leaves her and marries Leora. I wrote conversations between Colin and his non‑Jewish girlfriend and between Colin and Leora in the beginning when they were getting to know each other in more detail than Menucha was willing to accept, and that had to be completely edited down to be acceptable to the current world.
As a reader now who's reading the books, we know Yael’s backstory. We know who her father is, where her mother is, about her sister… How early on did you know what her story was with those background details?
I didn't know it at the very beginning. I knew that she was a foundling, I think I knew that at the beginning. I introduced her first in School of Secrets. It was interesting because in School of Secrets, there were four girls, but Yael quickly stood out as being the leader of the pack as it were, the star of the show. I think I created a backstory for her after I created her. I didn't sit down and work out what Yael Reed’s backstory was from School of Secrets. It evolved.
So are you saying that you didn't even plan for her to be the main character? It just ended up working out that way?
I didn't plan for her to be the main character. When I write, my characters take over and have a life of their own and they tell me what they’re doing. When I write, I need that freedom for a character to say, I'm the leader here. I'm evolving. I'm the one who's standing out. And then I work on her and create her backstory and so on and so forth. So yeah, they tell me what they want to do.
That's interesting, I have a question about that. When you read a lot of the books and you go through all the stories, you start to see a pattern where Yael is the main character, and she ends up coming out as the hero. But in reality, she isn't doing much of the sleuthing work she's very much in the background. You always bring in another person like, in Coercion, you brought in Nesbitt to, to help out with that. Is that on purpose?
I think that there's only a limit to how much one girl on her own in a school can actually do. I didn't want to make her a kind of superhero type, where she would come in and solve everything and if it wasn't for her, nothing will be solved. I mean, she came in and she did certain things and things happen to her, but yeah, she always needed help. And I think that's more realistic because in detective books, very often, there's one detective who does absolutely everything and nobody else has a look in. In real life, there's a whole team of detectives and policemen and so on and so forth who work a case. There's not just one person. So whereas Yael was an important character, she's not this super Sherlock Holmes who sits there and pontificates about why have you missed this clue or that? I mean, she's just a girl, a young woman, and she's doing her best and she's an amazing character, but she doesn't do all on her own. She’s relatable. She's a real person.
If someone has never read any of your books, what would you say that they should start off with?
That's a good question. I would say they should start with Dark Tapestry because that's the book where Colin and Leora are created and they've carried on through all the books subsequently and that’s when I started writing crime thrillers and that's my present genre.
When they discover they like my style of writing, they can go back and read the earlier ones, the Rivky Nesher trilogy, Daniel, My Son…
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