This week’s story, “My Camp,” opens with its narrator, a writer, searching for a holiday house in the depths of the New Jersey countryside, an activity he describes as a compulsion or an addiction. Why did you choose New Jersey? How addictive is the search for property?
New Jersey chose me: I was born there and grew up on the Jersey Shore, just past the southern terminus of the Pine Barrens, where this story is set. I own no property there, and I’ve never been in a position to go buying up houses or buying up land, so, for me, real-estate shopping comprises a fantasy far more outlandish than, say, shopping for clothes or shoes. In this story, I was interested in what it would take to “realize” a real-estate fantasy: the machinations required to turn a dream material.
Early on, the narrator refers to the summer of 2023 as the last sane season—“a golden age, at least a silver age”—and, after a long account of a tour of an abandoned summer camp, the narrator describes the attacks of October 7th in Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza. Do you want readers to have a sense of whiplash in that moment?
I would like it to be a surprise, yes. I wonder if we just ruined it, however. A surprise, a shock, a rupture.
The narrator is shocked that an editor at a newspaper, someone who is “far from a stranger,” contacts him that weekend to see if he’ll write an op-ed. The narrator has friends and family in Israel, but the editor asks nothing about them. How soon is too soon to write about something like this? Did you have any qualms about writing fiction concerning this period?
As a reader, I have no concept of “too soon.” As a writer, “too soon” is more of a psychological-technical issue: a matter of not having had enough time to absorb and assimilate events, to find the character and voice, the form and frame. I started writing an early version of “My Camp” last winter, with the same qualms I usually have (Why do this? Who’s this for?), but also with a great sense of relief from mounting rage, the avenging rush that comes from pronouncing a plague o’ both your houses.
One of the narrator’s Israeli cousins, an erstwhile tech entrepreneur named Oded, is visiting New York. He takes the narrator to a party in Tribeca where he wants to raise money to buy helmets for soldiers in the I.D.F. Oded thinks his cousin—the little Jewish writer guy—has clout at these parties. Is the narrator surprised by this assumption?
Ironically, this might be the least plausible detail in the story, that a writer would have this type of clout. Every time I’ve ever been in a Wall Street room, I’ve just been ignored.
Do you want the reader to elide your identity with that of the narrator’s? Do you want us to think of him as “Yehoshua,” as his cousin calls him, or “Joshua”?
I figured out a while ago that it doesn’t really matter what I want from the reader, though I will say that I purposefully didn’t call my protagonist “Joshua” anywhere in the text, so thanks for that!
There have, in fact, been a number of real-life fund-raising drives for helmets and other protective gear. Did you base this on anything in particular? Do you think the relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews has changed over the course of the war in Gaza?
I had a few such initiatives in mind, yes, but this version is entirely fictional. As for the relationship between Jews in America and Jews in Israel changing over the course of this ugly war—I don’t know. I can say they’ve become closer than ever, and that seems true, and I can say they’ve become farther apart than ever, and that seems true, too. The extremes always burn brighter and louder.
The narrator wants neither to talk to his family, “who wanted to bomb the Palestinian Nazis into silly oblivion,” nor to talk to his friends “who daily, hourly, sent me open letters to sign and petitions to circulate: ceasefire now, end military aid, stop Nazi Israel.” Do you think most people are committed to one side or the other? Or is the narrator’s ambivalent reluctance to join a side more common than he might think?
The U.S. and Israel, the two countries I’ve lived in the most and paid the most taxes to, are responsible for a large amount of killing in an ultimately rather small part of the world. What do I do with this information, beyond acknowledging it in a Q. & A.? I suppose this story was an attempt to opt out of this information, but not in the way that, say, a teen-age-vampire story or a wizards-and-dragons story opts out. I wanted to write about this opting out (or copping out) directly—what it might mean to claim oneself exempt, the folly of that claim, and yet the seriousness of the desire. I think I understand this Jewishly: my sense of Jewishness as the art of saying no—of saying no to everything—a refusal that’s quite the opposite of ambivalence.
Prospective donors, who are fervently anti-Palestine, start getting in touch with the narrator. What did you want to convey in the dialogue in these exchanges?
Realism.
Would you call the story a satire? Do you think it will offend many readers?
I actually think it’s rather heartfelt. As for it being offensive: I myself have never been offended by literature, and that includes all the “kike” this and “yid” that of my beloved Céline and Dostoyevsky.
Did you have the title in mind from the outset? If so, how important was it in determining the structure of the story? If not, when did the title come to you?
“What camp are you in?” I’m asked variations of this question constantly, and I always think, My camp, I’m in my camp. And, in my head, I say that in a stupid cartoon German accent: mein kampf. I’m an idiot.
In 2021, you published your novel “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” which is a fictional account of a visit by the historian Benzion Netanyahu and his family, among them his middle son, Bibi, the future Israeli President, to an American college. Did writing that novel give you any insight into Benjamin Netanyahu? Would Israel’s current trajectory have been any different under a different Prime Minister?
I don’t know. When another former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, dragged my book into the defamation lawsuit that Bibi brought against him (long story), Bibi was asked about my book in court under oath and he said, quite correctly, “It’s fiction.” It was the smartest thing he’s ever said. ♦