Gabrielle Sher’s debut nov­el is a dark, mes­mer­iz­ing tale of a Jew­ish fam­i­ly strug­gling to sur­vive in 1905 Odessa. When the Jew­ish quar­ter is once again thrown into vio­lence, each fam­i­ly mem­ber is thrust down a dan­ger­ous path filled with des­per­a­tion, mag­ic, and mon­sters. Simona Zaret­sky spoke with Sher about the fam­i­ly dynam­ics at play, Jew­ish sto­ry­telling as a means of sur­vival, and the ques­tion of monstrosity.

Simona Zaret­sky: Told through the per­spec­tives of three char­ac­ters — Frie­da, the moth­er; Morde­cai, the father; and Yet­ta, the daugh­ter — the nar­ra­tive explores the fig­ures’ agency as they find them­selves increas­ing­ly hemmed in by forces out­side their com­mu­ni­ty and also with­in the fam­i­ly struc­ture. How do you see the ten­sions of these stric­tures (par­tic­u­lar­ly gen­der and reli­gion) operating?

Gabrielle Sher: Part of what I love about the goth­ic genre is its abil­i­ty to high­light all the ways that char­ac­ters are con­fined and caged by lay­ers of social and polit­i­cal struc­tures. In a way, Odessa can be read as a domes­tic goth­ic. The women are men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly con­fined by the domes­tic space. They are chained to the house, to their roles as wives and moth­ers. When the book begins, we see Yet­ta putting off her mar­riage to Benyamin — even though she loves him — because it feels like the only con­trol she has over her life. Her deci­sions have been made for her: she will grow up, get mar­ried, and have chil­dren. It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly that she doesn’t want these things — she just wants to have a choice. Yet­ta resists, with­in the con­fine­ment of the domes­tic, as much as she is able, until those struc­tures begin to crumble.

In the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in this time peri­od, their choic­es would have been large­ly lim­it­ed. Women were not allowed to sit with the men in syn­a­gogue or even pray aloud. The only time Frie­da can leave the house is to go to the mar­ket for food and to go to the mik­vah. She has so lit­tle pow­er that she relies on her super­sti­tions — like obses­sive­ly count­ing the mem­bers of her fam­i­ly — to feel any sem­blance of con­trol over her sit­u­a­tion. None of her con­trol is real, only imag­ined. It’s when she starts to believe that she can make her ideas real that she real­ly begins to find her power.

The men are trapped by ris­ing anti­semitism, but what they don’t real­ize is that they, too, are trapped by the patri­archy and the role it has des­ig­nat­ed for them. Mordechai believes it is his duty to pro­tect his fam­i­ly, and it is. But he also believes that the women in his life can­not help him because his ideas of strength are so lim­it­ed by patri­ar­chal assump­tions. It’s the rigid­i­ty of these struc­tures that is so dam­ag­ing, and when the char­ac­ters want to make deci­sions out­side of this des­ig­na­tion, they can’t. Agency is one of the most impor­tant themes for me in Odessa. It’s about choice, and our abil­i­ty to cre­ate ourselves.

SZ: Odessa fea­tures so many beau­ti­ful, stark­ly drawn set­tings that are full of seem­ing­ly oppos­ing ideas. The safe­ty and oppres­sion of the shtetl; the free­dom and dan­ger of the for­est; the pos­si­bil­i­ty and unease of the non-Jew­ish quar­ters. The syn­a­gogue is a place of inspi­ra­tion for Morde­cai, but of con­tain­ment and dis­sat­is­fac­tion for Yet­ta and her moth­er. What is the role of space and place in the nov­el to you?

GS: The more research I did into Jew­ish women’s expe­ri­ence, the more I was con­front­ed with para­dox­es. This ques­tion reminds me of a quote from my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion: ​“Even the Jew­ish stereo­types were male-cen­tered — the stereo­type of the wan­der­ing Jew per­va­sive in goth­ic lit­er­a­ture is specif­i­cal­ly male. The sto­ry of the Jew meant there was nowhere to go, too much space but no space to set­tle. But the sto­ry of the female Jew was one of con­fine­ment, of not enough space.” All of the man-made struc­tures in the nov­el — the house, the syn­a­gogue — are oppres­sive and cage-like to the women. Mordechai hides his wife and chil­dren in secret com­part­ments in the walls when the Jews are attacked. Frie­da and Yet­ta are con­fined, lit­er­al­ly, into the house itself. But he does it to keep them safe, and the threat to their lives is very real. Nature is dan­ger­ous, but gives the women free­dom– phys­i­cal free­dom as well as spir­i­tu­al free­dom. Two things can be true at once. I think even the para­dox­i­cal nature of their real­i­ty is a cage, because it can keep the char­ac­ters locked in inde­ci­sion. Nei­ther answer is right, both are right.

SZ: Sto­ry­telling plays an impor­tant role for all the char­ac­ters as they nav­i­gate the frag­ile, frac­tured peace of their world. Yet­ta and her moth­er find strength in the coura­geous and yet some­times doomed efforts of bib­li­cal women, while Morde­cai turns to the Hanukkah sto­ry as a tes­ta­ment of resis­tance against seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able odds and as proof of mir­a­cles. How do you see sto­ry­telling and mir­a­cles oper­at­ing in the sto­ry? How do you see Odessa in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­er Jew­ish literature?

GS: One of the sub­jects I researched for my PhD is some­thing called nar­ra­tive psy­chol­o­gy. It’s basi­cal­ly the idea that our brains are wired to under­stand our­selves and the world in a nar­ra­tive struc­ture. Humans are con­stant­ly telling our­selves sto­ries, con­stant­ly in the process of cre­at­ing our­selves and our iden­ti­ties. Nar­ra­tive psy­chol­o­gy is also large­ly con­cerned with trau­ma and its effects on what I call ​“self-nar­ra­tive.” Trau­ma frac­tures this self-nar­ra­tive, because trau­mat­ic mem­o­ry is not incor­po­rat­ed into it, but exists as a bro­ken shard of expe­ri­ence out­side of time and a chrono­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive. The char­ac­ters in Odessa all react to trau­ma in dif­fer­ent ways (such as fight, flight, fawn, freeze), but they all use sto­ries to sur­vive. The Kov­nat fam­i­ly draws strength, each in their own way, from Jew­ish sto­ries. There is real pow­er in sto­ry­telling because it can influ­ence our deci­sions, our think­ing, and the way we live our real lives. That’s the real mir­a­cle: sto­ries make a dif­fer­ence. Incor­po­rat­ing trau­mat­ic mem­o­ry into self-nar­ra­tive is heal­ing. It doesn’t make us whole, but it gives us pow­er over ourselves.

SZ: There is an eerie sense of haunt­ing that sat­u­rates the phys­i­cal set­ting of the shtetl and lingers heav­i­ly on char­ac­ters in a spir­i­tu­al and emo­tion­al sense even before vio­lence descends in the present day. Could you speak about this?

GS: One goth­ic con­ven­tion that I love is the con­ven­tion of cycli­cal time, which, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is a very famil­iar con­cept in Jew­ish his­to­ry and was a use­ful way for me to show the cycli­cal nature of anti­semitism. Cycli­cal time is haunt­ing, it’s some­thing that has the pow­er to return again and again, intrud­ing into the present like a ghost. In the begin­ning of the nov­el, there’s a feel­ing of dread, that ​“some­thing bad is going to hap­pen,” not because of any kind of pre­science but because the char­ac­ters have seen it before, in their own time and in the time of their ances­tors. It’s an anx­i­ety that lives in each char­ac­ter, and in the Jew­ish consciousness.

SZ: Woven through­out the sto­ry is the ques­tion of mon­stros­i­ty. There is, of course, a char­ac­ter who some might con­sid­er a lit­er­al mon­ster, and yet at times it is humans who seem the most capa­ble of mon­strous acts. How did mag­ic, myth, and folk­lore — the unre­al — enter the sto­ry to help illu­mi­nate very real human acts?

GS: I real­ly love these ques­tions, because it gives me the best excuse to rant about my PhD research! Anoth­er part of my research I loved was about mon­ster the­o­ry. Basi­cal­ly, it’s the idea that when you decide that some­one else is a mon­ster, they are dehu­man­ized. A mon­ster is always ​“oth­er,” not like me, not famil­iar, and there­fore anoth­er step away from human. The non-Jew­ish peo­ple liv­ing in Odessa who enact­ed vio­lence against the Jews tell sto­ries — libels — that make Jews into mon­sters as a method of jus­ti­fy­ing vio­lence toward them. When we make some­one else a mon­ster, we cre­ate a false bina­ry where we are inno­cent and right­eous. But all humans are flawed, and we are all capa­ble of good and evil.

The Jew­ish char­ac­ters also ​“mon­ster­ize” the peo­ple who attacked them, and this, I think, does a dis­ser­vice to the jus­tice they deserve. Their attack­ers aren’t mon­sters, they’re humans who made a choice to act on hate, and they are a small part of a larg­er sys­tem of anti­semitism. To make them mon­sters stops them from being held account­able for their actions, as humans should be. It halts the ques­tion­ing of hate­ful ide­olo­gies. Hav­ing lit­er­al mon­sters in Odessa, and hav­ing those mon­sters not be what you might expect, helped me unpack the bina­ry of mon­ster­i­za­tion and com­pli­cate that kind of black and white thinking.

SZ: The sto­ry opens with a descrip­tion of Frie­da in the mik­vah: ​“Her mus­cles con­tract­ed, shocked from the cold, and she was remind­ed sud­den­ly of giv­ing birth to her chil­dren: the way her own body had been a stranger to her, know­ing things she had nev­er learned, mov­ing with­out her com­mand.” Right away, a sense of mul­ti­plic­i­ty and unknowa­bil­i­ty in the body is present. How did you go about incor­po­rat­ing the vis­cer­al details about the body present in the nov­el? What drew you to those details?

GS: Part of the human con­di­tion is hav­ing to live in a fal­li­ble body, and that’s some­thing hor­ror knows well. Our bod­ies fail us, they dis­gust us, but they also work in ways we don’t under­stand and are capa­ble of more than we know. One of the key­stone books for my research was The Denial of Death by Ernest Beck­er, and I’m remind­ed of a quote of his:

[Man’s] body is a mate­r­i­al fleshy cas­ing that is alien to him in many ways — the strangest and most repug­nant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is lit­er­al­ly split in two: he has an aware­ness of his own splen­did unique­ness in that he sticks out of nature with a tow­er­ing majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blind­ly and dumb­ly to rot and dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. It is a ter­ri­fy­ing dilem­ma to be in and to have to live with.

Hav­ing a char­ac­ter come back from the dead in a new iden­ti­cal body was a great way for me to show this ele­ment of the human con­di­tion. The way she sees her­self, and the way oth­ers see her (espe­cial­ly men) is mon­strous, because it is mon­strous to have a body that will die. Mor­tal­i­ty is the real monster.

SZ: Were there ele­ments of research or fam­i­ly lore that went into craft­ing the novel?

GS: The nov­el began with fam­i­ly lore. Grow­ing up, my grand­moth­er told me sto­ries of our ances­tors in East­ern Europe, espe­cial­ly about her grand­moth­er who came to Amer­i­ca on her own, escap­ing pogroms against Jews. Because I was a child, the sto­ry took on a folk­loric qual­i­ty, so it blend­ed well with my lat­er research into Jew­ish folk­lore and the his­to­ry behind the pogroms.

SZ: I was struck by how much the nov­el read like hor­ror and how apt­ly a pogrom fits into that area. Did genre fac­tor into your writ­ing of the nov­el at all?

GS: I def­i­nite­ly set out to write a goth­ic nov­el. I love hor­ror, but I think there is a dis­tinc­tion between the two, in the sense that goth­ic is hor­ror but hor­ror isn’t always goth­ic, because it’s based on a spe­cif­ic lit­er­ary tra­di­tion with its own set of con­ven­tions and mean­ings. Odessa is a blend of real life hor­rors and ele­ments of the goth­ic and super­nat­ur­al. And while Odessa can sit com­fort­ably on the hor­ror shelf, it also can sit in his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, and Jew­ish fic­tion — prob­a­bly oth­ers, too. It can wear a lot of faces depend­ing on how you read it. I real­ly like genre-bend­ing fic­tion, and I think that’s what Odessa is. The sto­ry was informed by so many threads of research that end­ed up fit­ting togeth­er in a way that spoke to me.

SZ: What are you read­ing and writ­ing now?

GS: I will pret­ty much read any­thing. I always feel like I’m miss­ing out on some unex­plored genre. I like chang­ing things up, let­ting myself be inspired by some­thing new and fol­low­ing my curios­i­ty. I just fin­ished Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mir­rlees, which was so delight­ful. I found it because I read that it inspired Susan­na Clarke to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Nor­rell, which is an all time favorite of mine. And I had orig­i­nal­ly dis­cov­ered Jonathan Strange because I read Babel by RF Kuang and read that she was inspired by it. It was a kind of back­wards way to dis­cov­er these books, but I had a great time.

I’m writ­ing all kinds of things. I’d love to dive into the world of acad­e­mia in my fic­tion, and I’ve also been read­ing a lot of Jew­ish fairy tales that have been real­ly inspir­ing me late­ly. In the same way I read what makes me curi­ous, I write what makes me curi­ous. I real­ized after writ­ing Odessa that a nov­el is a long under­tak­ing. So I have to want to go back to what­ev­er world I choose to write about again and again. I have to want to think about it all the time. It has to lead me down a path of research that I am des­per­ate to learn about. I have a mil­lion ideas and it feels like there’s not enough time to write them all, so I’m always excit­ed for what­ev­er comes next.