Lilian Nattel - The River Midnight

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Reconceiving the Shtetl:

Modern material on the shtetl tends to be either sentimental, i.e. it was a perfect, loving, close knit place or else looks at it as completely supersititious, dirty and ignorant; I wanted to write about the shtetl as a place where people had aspirations and hopes and love and fights and crime and talents and idiocy just as we do, now, and at the same time it was a place that had a particular character, historically and geographically, one that is rich and complex and interesting.

I was especially interested in the items that often get left out of books about the shtetl, except for marginalia: sex, women's lives, crime, the concrete ways that people live.

During one exercise for a course in writing and personal creativity, I imagined a large earth-mother type laughing; she was standing on a beach in prehistoric Hawaii beside a rack of drying fish. Unfortunately I don't know anything about prehistoric Hawaii, so I wondered if I could find a more familiar setting that would retain the mythical quality of my vision.

I immediately thought of the shtetl. I loved the incongruity: this big woman, free, independent, in a structured society in which women's roles were quite restricted. That led to a short story. People who heard me read it at a workshop were sure that I was working on a novel, but I said, "No. I'm not writing more Jewish stuffl." I didn't want to be a "Jewish" writer. But the story wouldn't go away. I wrote another about the same village. Both were accepted for publication. But I still wasn't finished with Blaszka. So I went away for the summer to a cottage on Prince Edward Island to see what I could do with writing a novel. That summer I wrote the sketch for The River Midnight.

The shtetl is a dream, now because it no longer exists, so there's a mythical/magical element to it; but at the same time it did exist and out of respect I wanted every detail to be historically accurate.

Magic and reality

The magic in the book came about irresistibly. The mythical nature of a world suddenly vanished calls out magic. And besides that ever since I was a kid, I've loved magic in stories, fairy-tales and folk tales and myths and legends. Yiddish literature is often infused with that sort of material. It was in its heyday at the turn of the last century when there was a great interest in collecting folk material and symbolist art/literature made use of fantastical and mythical elements.

On the other hand, I'm a strong believer in human agency: the world will be repaired not by magic but by ordinary human kindness and compassion for one another. So in my novel I make a distinction between magic (thinking particularly of some forms of New Ageism) and mystery. Magic is a tricksy snap of the finger or wave of the wand, a gimmick that has no permanent effect. Mystery is the amazing awesomeness of life and nature, including those inexplicable occurrences that transcend likelihood and leave us face to face with a little miracle.

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