Lilian Nattel - The River Midnight

During an 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.

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.

>> Research