Bookstorm

Award-winning author Diana Spechler was kind enough to take the reins and provide a guest post for me today. Enjoy. I'll be back later this week.

When I spent a semester in Israel during college, I gained twenty pounds. If you look through my photo album from that time, you'll see a lot of pictures of me in sweatpants and sundresses, because my jeans were the jeans of a smaller me; they were the jeans of a girl not yet acquainted with the lafa, or with the idea of ordering falafel in lafa, rather than in pita, or with the capacity to eat not one, but two falafel b'lafa for lunch.

I don't know what to say. I was hungry.

I certainly wasn't the first person to become hungry in Israel. For years, people have been traveling to Jerusalem and consuming the city like it's good wine or chocolate cake or LSD. The phenomenon has even been named: the Jerusalem Syndrome, which Wikipedia defines as

... the name given to a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences, that are triggered by, or lead to, a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not endemic to one single religion or denomination, but has affected Jews and Christians of many different backgrounds.

The best known, although not the most prevalent manifestation of the Jerusalem Syndrome, is the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem. The psychosis is characterized by an intense religious theme and typically resolves to full recovery after a few weeks, or after being removed from the area.

It wasn't just food I was craving. I would stand at the Western Wall after the Sabbath and watch the Havdallah services, watch religious men hold the spice box over the mechitza (the divider between the men's and women's sections), so the women could smell the spices. The sight would make my heart pound, as if it was going to leap out of my chest and grab something. I would watch the men in black hats dance in circles. I would stay up with my friends into the early hours of the morning discussing the imminent arrival of Moshiach, the Messiah. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to pray. I wanted to pray until I felt the ground move under my feet. I wanted God to drop down out of the sky--Ta-da!--and land right in front of me.

When I got home, the cravings faded. I had decided to keep kosher, but within in a few months, I was going out for sushi with my friends. I wanted to wake up and pray every morning, but I kept forgetting. The twenty pounds came off. I started forgetting Hebrew words. Psychologists might have said that my psychosis was fading, and maybe that's true. Who am I to say? But it felt more like I was losing my edge, becoming complacent. Thinner, yes, but complacent.

I don't ever want to gain twenty pounds again, but I do miss that hunger. I’ve never felt anything like it since.

The lovely Diana Spechler, author of Who by Fire--a book I heartily recommend--agreed to a short Q-and-A session with Bookstorm. Go easy on me, kids: it's my first author interview.

Q. Bits travels to Israel to bring her brother back to the United States for a family funeral. But her prejudice seems to mirror a common American misconception about Israel, that it's a country wracked daily by suicide bombings. When you travelled to Israel, were you surprised that terrorism in Israel isn't as prevalent as the media (perhaps unintentionally) implies?

A. I don't think that spending time in Israel made me more skeptical of the media. There is violence in Israel; no one can deny that. But if I once pictured Israel as a war zone, spending six months there showed me that it's also just a place where people live. Kids go to school. Adults go to work. People shop in grocery stores, take public buses, smoke cigarettes on the sidewalks, talk on their cell phones, and eat in restaurants. They're living normal lives. But of course, why would we hear about that in the news? It's not really newsworthy.

Q. In Who by Fire, you write that the conflict between Arabs and Israelis didn't start in 1948, when Israel was founded--that it dates back thousands of years, to Abraham. Can you elaborate for us? Do most Americans have an oversimplified portrait of the conflict?

A. The Old Testament says that God promised the land of Israel to Abraham's descendants. Whether or not one considers 1948 the first year that Israel was a "Jewish state" depends on whether or not one believes in the Old Testament. In my novel, Ash is a very religious Jew, and he believes that to live in Israel is the Jews' divine right. Other characters in the novel, on the other hand, probably wouldn't consider Ash's claim, "We can't deny what's written," a strong argument for Israel's right to exist; they would be more likely to cite the U.N.'s vote in 1948.

Q. Let's talk about one of your favorite authors for a moment--J. D. Salinger. You cite him as an influence on your work, and you name Holden Caulfield as your favorite literary hero. What is it about Salinger and Holden that's been so instrumental for you?

A. When you're a kid, you're being forced to read all this stuff that's impossible to relate to--[D. H. Lawrence's] Sons and Lovers, for example, and Huck Finn. What sixteen-year-old girl is going to relate to Huck Finn? So when I discovered The Catcher in the Rye, I was blown away. I felt like I was in the head of this teenager, and he was so cool, and he was so real, and he thought about real things the way a real teenager would. Simultaneously, I recognized that this wasn't Sweet Valley High; it was beautiful writing. I kind of had a crush on Holden Caulfield. I haven't re-read The Catcher in the Rye in years, but I have such a soft spot for it. I remember thinking when I read it, "This is the kind of writer I want to be."

Q. And finally, with Nobel season upon us, I have to ask: who do you think should win?

A. I know there's some buzz about Philip Roth taking the prize this year, and I would love to see that happen. Goodbye Columbus is one of my favorite books. I love a lot of Philip Roth's work, and even when I read one of his novels and don't love it, I recognize how important and impressive it is. He manages to deal with political issues without preaching and without compromising himself as an artist. He's one of the greats.

I'm still feeling pretty lazy around here, so here's a little round-up for you ...

• Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
• Ron Rosenbaum on what William Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, and Bob Dylan each have in common.
• Chris Offutt decodes some common literary terms.
• Ladies: would you actually wear a fragrance called "In the Library"? (Aside: doing what in the library? Not reading, surely ...)
• Searching for the truth behind Homer's epic poems: "But thanks to evidence from a range of disciplines, we are in the middle of a massive reappraisal of these foundational works of Western literature. Recent advances in archeology and linguistics offer the strongest support yet that the Trojan War did take place, with evidence coming from the large excavation at the likely site of Troy, as well as new analysis of cuneiform tablets from the dominant empire of the region. Insights from comparative anthropology have transformed studies of the society that created the poems and allowed us to analyze the epics in a new way, suggesting that their particular patterns of violence contain a hidden key to ancient Greek history--though not necessarily the key that Homer's readers once thought they were being given."