A Q&A WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN

 

Q: PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN explores the widening interpersonal rifts within the American Jewish community in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza. These fractures have been extensively covered in mainstream media, yet you hope to offer something different. How can fiction illuminate these divisions in ways nonfiction cannot?

 

A: We enter the troubled, aching heart of this conflict through the humanity of the tragic protagonist, Rabbi Adinah. Fallible, giving, determined, and vulnerable, she disarms the reader with the authenticity of her many and sometimes contradictory loves. This is fiction’s great strength: in the face of such a longstanding, emotionally charged, seemingly intractable conflict, it makes the stakes immediately and powerfully human, and binds the reader to them through the intimate act of reading. In this way a novel can be more real than real, more human than human.

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By transposing the experience of fracturing communities to a fictional world, the novel enables us to see our situation more clearly through distance. Our reality becomes mythic and fluid, disrupting even the idea of firm and inflexible positions. Though unity may always be illusory, the novel still wants to say that something special is being lost when we are so divided: the “Kingdom” as the rabbi imagines it, lush with powerful virtue—not just within Jewish communities, but across multifaith and multiethnic America where Jews have so often thrived.

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Q: Much of the novel unfolds before October 7—an event that hangs over the reader but is entirely unknown to the characters. Why did you choose this structure?
 

A: For me as a person, the horrific events were and still are unfolding. I couldn’t access a clear-enough grounding in reality, let alone render that on the page.

As a writer, I chose this structure to maximize the dramatic potential of this misalignment between the character’s and the reader’s knowledge. The stakes for Rabbi Adinah are already incredibly high, and are heightened further when you add this meta effect of a ticking clock. The structure also offers a dramatic, heart-breaking personal turn for Rabbi Adinah: Pre-October 7, she still sees possibility, has fertile hope. Tragedy emerges from that.

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And as a historian, I’ve long been interested in the deep roots of the conflicted Jewish feelings about the state of Israel. October 7 froze people into positions of vitriol and contempt that were in many cases long-brewing, but the media seemed to characterize it mostly as a contemporary generational divide. I didn’t want to caricature anyone’s reality or position, or dismiss the history of these divisions.

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Q: The synagogue’s congregation spans the full political spectrum. As a secular Jew who has long advocated for a two-state solution, what was it like to write right-wing, pro-Netanyahu characters? What qualities does a writer need to portray characters whose beliefs they don’t share? And how does a writer avoid the appearance of conjuring a cast of ideological caricatures?
 

A: To write characters as full people you have to love them no matter what they believe or how they behave. To do that you must realize every one of them has been wounded, humiliated, or passed over at one time or another. We’re all capable of love and hatred, of blindness and cruelty. And circumstances reign. So as a writer, you soak up your circumstance like a sponge; what you squeeze out will be authentic.

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As a writer (and a human), there is a lot to learn from characters who think differently from you. Authenticity requires that you disrupt, contradict, and reverse stereotypes—which you may discover had swayed you without realizing it! Of Rabbi Adinah’s congregation members, one of the most pro-Israel is a liberal union organizer; one of the most pro-Palestine is an Israeli American. These people do of course exist, but it was a deliberate choice to include characters like them.

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Q: What does being an American Jew mean to you? Can that identity be separated from Israel or Zionism?
 

A: It means that I have a special key that opens a door to another, differently American perspective, whether I’ve been conscious of it or not. That I have the freedom to see things in a specific way, to ask different questions, to access a deeper memory and a stranger, nonrational history. And that I never feel aligned with the whole. In that misalignment is the opportunity, the duty, the need to ally with others who are misaligned and mistreated, including the Earth itself.

 

For me, none of this has anything to do with Zionism or Israel—a place I find exhilarating and exhausting, soft and fierce, powerful and splintered—except to feel personally implicated when the Jews in power there commit manifest injustices. When that happens, I want to ask what they think it means to be a Jew.

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Q: Why does Judaism exert such a powerful gravitational pull on so many secular Jews?

 

A: Because we share a search for belonging and meaning in a Christian-dominated yet profoundly multiethnic nation. Judaism offers a place of beauty, of echoes (in the liturgy, in the music of Hebrew chanted), of childhood—a place to be shared with one’s children. You can enjoy community, identity, a sense of self without challenging your secular views; you don’t have to believe in God to take part. Judaism holds such cultural richness, to which Israel maybe, until recently, offered a deepening dimension. Nevertheless, I know many people who feel most at home taking part in the life of their synagogue. This is not where I gather my Jewish forces, but many others do.

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All that said, I fully understand why so many American Jews associate being Jewish with a mandate to love Israel. I was doing some family research recently and discovered an article about a pro-Zionist event celebrating the work of the Jewish National Fund that took place at the synagogue my great-grandparents helped to found, where I became a Bar Mitzvah. This event was in 1935. In the list of attendees were seemingly half my ancestors. The need for, a Jewish homeland was a shared belief among many American Jews well before the Holocaust.

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Q: However this conflict continues to unfold, the fault lines in American Jewry will remain. What happens next? And what is the role of the artist in making sense of it?

 

A: The crisis in Gaza is not over; the way Jews respond will determine how much deeper the communal fault lines go. There are so many kinds of Jews it’s impossible to anticipate these responses or any unity among them, and certainly there are enough who don’t care about the suffering of Gazans. But I see many more people becoming aware of non-Zionist Jewish perspectives, contemporary and historical, and I think that offers some air to the conversation. There are alternatives here.

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Art’s great capacity is to transform our experience of reality. To literally reset the stakes. I wrote this novel to make better sense of these things for myself. That’s the artist’s role: to take the time, to observe, to reframe, to call out, to touch the nerve, to transform.

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Q: This book is about a Jewish community, but you don’t describe it as a “Jewish book.” What do you mean by that?
 

A: It is a Jewish book in the sense that it draws on Jewish experiences in its orientation to the world. The novel’s protagonists are Rabbi Adinah, her passion for her work, her community, and her congregation. A woman with a broken heart and a vast intellect, she’s seeking a meaningful way to remain loyal to her deepest beliefs.

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But the book isn’t confined by its Jewishness, in neither plot nor appeal: it is just as much about present-day America. One of the Rabbi’s dearest friends is Imam Abdul, and together they co-founded and lead a multifaith coalition. The novel not only asks what will happen to that friendship after October 7, but also encourages the reader to imagine what will happen to all of us, Jewish and non-Jewish, if our interfaith friendships fall apart.