[Dr Lee Kofman is a Russian-born, Israeli-Australian novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist and former academic based in Melbourne. She is the author of three fiction books (published in Israel in Hebrew) and the memoir The Dangerous Bride (Melbourne University Press 2014). Lee is also the co-editor of Rebellious Daughters (Ventura Press, 2016), an anthology of personal essays by prominent Australian authors. Her short works have been widely published in Australia, USA, Canada, Israel, the UK and Scotland. Lee holds a PhD in social sciences and MA in creative writing, and is a mentor and teacher of writing. She is also a regular public speaker and panel moderator. Uday Adhikari of The Gorkha Times recently caught up with Dr Kofman for an interview. We present the edited excerpt of the interview here.]
In the story “At the Russian Restaurant,” the narrator is desperate to enter the Russian restaurant. She says, “Something that stays with you forever…even though in Israel, I rarely admitted my Slavic origins.” She further says, “I want to be a Russian.” Do you miss Russia so much? How was the life in Russia before you left home?
My relationship with Russia, which I left for Israel when I was 12 years old, is complicated. I was born there when it was still the Soviet Union and I lived there during the Brezhnev era, which wasn’t as frightening a time as it was during Stalin’s reign, but still the country was very restricted and stagnant. Food shortages weren’t uncommon, we had to queue for various essential products on a daily basis, and personal liberties – especially speech – were severely regulated. On the other hand, Russia has an incredibly rich cultural tradition and the language itself is beautiful. Theatre, opera and most other entertainment were cheap at the time (heavily state-sponsored) and were usually good quality. I attended such events all the time and relished this. Then there is of course the landscape… Or rather, landscapes. Russia is enormous and during my time it was an empire with all those neighbors, like Ukraine where I spent my last 6 years there, being subjugated. I was born in the wilderness of Siberia and loved its extremeness as much as I loved the more mellow, and marine, climate of Odessa to where we moved when I was 6. I loved the snow, the chestnut and birch trees, the romantic melancholy of that entire country…
My family’s situation was particularly complicated, however, us being Jewish. The anti-Semitism has always been rife in Russia. As a child I’ve experienced bullying, but not as much discrimination as my parents did. Having had enough of both the Soviet regime and the anti-Semitism it informally sanctioned, my parents applied for a permit to leave to Israel when I was 6 and were refused. As a result, they became dissidents and our apartment in Odessa (Ukraine) became something of a hub for the Jewish underground activities. People come to us all the time, to study together – illegally – Jewish culture, religion and Hebrew, and to celebrate Jewish holidays, such as Shabbat. Outside of Judaism, the dissidents also circulated between them Samizdat, the forbidden literature typed also illegally at home and then distributed for free, in secret. (Samizdat translates as self-publishing, but not in the sense that the ‘publishers’ publish themselves, but that they are amateur publishers). In this way, for example, I got to read the uncensored version of my favorite ever novel, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Being the hub of all those activities, our apartment was watched by the KGB regularly, sometimes 24/7. For my parents this was frightening, traumatic. Whereas I, as a child, thrived in that environment. I didn’t understand the danger properly, but I understood the excitement of risk, of clandestine existence. I became addicted to this, I now think… Today when I miss Russia, I miss it in a strange way. I miss the country of my childhood which vanished when the glasnost and perestroika began. I miss the rebellious excitement of that underground existence. I miss Russia’s high culture. But I don’t miss the still-pervasive drunkenness that mars so much there, don’t miss the xenophobia which is still strong in that country or its still-dangerous politics. I do miss the snow, though… Most of all, I think when I miss Russia, I really miss my child self and the child’s sense of wonder that has since mellowed in me.
“There are so many ways to hurt her feelings and unfortunately I am good at this especially since the divergence in our spiritual paths.” This quote from your essay reminds me of Arundhati Roy’s, writer of The God of Small Things, which hints at a rather trouble relationship of the speaker with her mother for different reasons. You seem to be very close to your mother as she often enters your fiction or nonfiction. Is it generation gap or ideology that invites conflicts between mother and daughter?
Firstly, I’m flattered to be reminding you of Roy, in whichever capacity…I love what she does with language and how she plays with structure in that novel, which really reads like a poem.
In terms of my mother, oh….Where shall I begin? I wouldn’t say that we are close in the orthodox sense where I tell her everything, for example. But my mother is definitely under my skin a lot of the time – in the good and the bad sense…And she’s definitely one of my chief muses. She fascinates me continuously. My mother is a remarkable woman, capable of extreme self-reinvention – a quality that surely makes her a good character on the page, but that maddens me as her daughter. When I was about 7, my mother threw out her slacks and swimsuits, extended the hems and sleeves of her dresses to cover knees and elbows, took to wearing headscarves and wigs and began breeding children (I have 3 much younger brothers all born literally one after another).
Bur before that metamorphosis, my mother was better known for waving red flags, dancing the night away and reading untranslated Shakespeare, being a scholar of English. It was only in her early thirties when, utterly disillusioned with the Soviet regime that she fell in love with God and began a career in battling the KGB for the right to practice her religion and immigrate to Israel. Consequently, she lost her job and ended up working as a street cleaner. In Israel, my mother reinvented herself again as a teacher of Hebrew, only later to move to a Hassidic neighborhood in New York where she now gives classes on the bible – in Russian.
Being raised by an aspiring, if conflicted, saint has equipped me with a lifelong source of writing material. My mother’s difficult life, her resulting melancholy, and her ideas about how a woman should live her life – which are mostly incompatible with my own – both burn me and inflame my work. Besides, there is something in my relationship with my mother that reminds me of Russia. I’m afflicted by a longing for a woman that had long vanished – that secular mother from the first years of my life who drank vodka straight from the bottle, smoked and read Chekhov with the same enthusiasm she now reserves for the Book of Psalms. As much as I love my mother, since she became religious I’ve always felt that her God comes between us. When we visit each other, or even speak on Skype, it is almost impossible to have a god-free interaction. I can ask my mother what she is cooking for dinner, and somehow her answer would involve the bible (as well as its many prohibitions and demands…) This can be exasperating as well as alienating too for an agnostic like myself. On the other hand, this personal sense of loss, a wound that will probably never seal, makes me write, write, write. Only in this way can I restore that extinct version of my mother.
Reading your Kabbalah essay, “The Magic Door to Judaism”, I feel you are turning a kabbalist. You seem to be under the spell of mysticism that is found in abundance in Hindu philosophy. Your clarity even in such matter surprises me and encourages to ask, “Are you slowly becoming a kabbalist?” I wonder if Russian Jews are more devoted than Jews from Israel.
Russian Jews, the ones of my generation and the earlier ones, who were brought up under Soviet regime had actually very little knowledge of their traditions. In fact, even when my parents just began converting to Judaism, they didn’t even know that Jewish religion forbids them eating pork… My parents were an anomaly even among other Jewish dissidents who were mostly secular. But my mother was always a believer by temperament, she just exchanged the religion of communism for that of Judaism… And my father, being a theoretical physicist, like some others of his peers was also predisposed to spirituality having confronted the enormous complexity of the universe in the course of his work. But generally, if anything Russian Jews are of the least religious of Jews as far as I am concerned. And in Israel, too, the majority of the citizens are secular, but they also have large Orthodox communities.
As to me, as I was saying earlier, I’m an agnostic. However, I must have unconsciously inherited something of my parents’ spirituality – a kind of magical thinking. This means I rarely believe in coincidences or trust the mundane to be what it seems. For me, just like for my ultra-Orthodox parents who always see omens in everything, life has always been a mystery in need of decoding. (This what drew me to investigate the subject of kabbalah in that essay.)
I cannot shake my conviction that the world is an intentionally composed puzzle as much as I’m not comfortable with it. But rather than believing in God, I ‘decided’ to believe in writing. I channel my spiritual impulses there. Like faith, writing infuses my everyday with purpose and pleasure. An ordinary occurrence becomes potential material (this is why I am rarely bored). A tram ride is an opportunity to collect dialogue snippets, to take notes about bodies and their language, whereas a taxi ride is an in-depth character study. The pleasure I take in watching films is amplified as I absorb lessons about plot development and characterization. I relish my desire to devour more and more books to extend the borders of my mind. Writing gives me some order, and through writing I also ‘organize’ the world, make it more coherent. Then, as paradoxical as this sounds coming from a writer often crippled by self-doubt, I also find writing grounding in a way that no other experience I have had can match (well, maybe only my marriage and motherhood). The self-sufficient solitude of the writing space, the temporary quietening and focusing of the mind that writing, not unlike prayer, affords are particularly precious to me in the face of the heavy assaults of parenting two young children and social media chatter that recently overtook our world. There is something transcendent about the act of writing.
How did you develop your reading and writing habits? Russia has given some great writers like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky etc. to the world. I wonder if they had been part of your creative life. Will you share your family background and literacy with our readers?
Yes, of course. And you’re absolutely right that Russia has much to do with my reading and writing habits; this is perceptive of you. I was born in a place and time where books were a natural habitat of the mind in the absence of other entertainment, and on account of their state-driven cheapness. In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s, even truck drivers were fond of referencing Tolstoy. In fact, I preferred their references to those of my teachers, who often divorced the texts from any irony, stripping them down to bare Tolstovskian moralism.
The Soviet Union not only popularized books (albeit, selectively – Tolstoy and Steinbeck were in; Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were banned), but it also bred graphomania. Much of the available literature was state-sponsored propaganda – the Soviet writers of whom the government approved received handsome salaries – and such books resembled each other in many ways. It seemed to many, then, that writing was easy. And profitable. Artless poetry, in particular, was a national disease – on an epidemic scale. So, when I wrote my first poem at the age of three (blue bird is in the sky/blue bird flies high) no one was particularly surprised. Or concerned…
Our home, however, was bookish even by Soviet standards, crammed with volumes of various collected works – Chekhov whom you mentioned, but also western classics such as Conan-Doyle and Victor Hugo. A sickly child, often bound to bed, I was mostly surrounded by (voraciously reading) adults and didn’t understand other children and their pastimes. I learned to read at four, and first tackled War and Peace at eight… I skipped the war and peace parts mostly, though, concentrating on the romance. In any case, my life, from early on, was bound with words-on-the-page. So it felt natural, also at around the age of eight, to begin inserting my own words to join the conversation with my well-thumbed friends living on our bookshelves.
But I also needed to write. To escape the pain and loneliness of my sickbed, the claustrophobia of our ever-expanding family’s ever-shrinking apartment, the tedium of ever-present state propaganda. In my pre-teen years, it seemed my mind, as it expressed itself in my notebooks, was my best refuge. Whereas during my adolescence and young adulthood, which unfolded in democratic Israel, my writing graduated from escape into the forging of identity. I had an embarrassing accent and scars from my childhood surgeries, I was tone-deaf and a failure at sport. I was a freak, I decided. So I wrote to compose a more attractive self. And I kept reading obsessively, now also furiously taking notes, with the hope that literature would improve my knowledge of the world and, even more importantly, improve me. My efforts paid off. At 16, to my great surprise (by then I’d lived just four years in Israel), I was accepted into a prestigious Young Reporter program at a national magazine and since then, I’ve been writing regularly – whether commissioned work or my own art. Journalism is a great school in discipline, something that is in my view essential to being a writer, and even though I stopped working as a journalist in early twenties, the habits remained. Just the same, I hardly ever went a day by without reading.
Someone says your prose is ‘Searing, honest and luminous.’ Your native tongue is Russian; you spent your formative years in Israel where Hebrew was the dominating language and now you are a writer in English. You slightly indicated the hint in one of the answers above that your mother would read Shakespeare in original as she drinks vodka directly. It is very interesting to know how you preserved Hebrew language, fighting with one of the best and creatively fertile languages at home in Russian, and a very possessive language Hebrew in Israel. It is interesting to know how you are searching for your Russian-Jewish identity in English instead of doing that in Russian you were born to, and Hebrew you were trained in. Please share your experiences with our readers on how you have ended as an English writer.
I migrated to Australia when I was 26. At the time, to say that my English was poor would be an understatement. At best, I could haphazardly articulate an order at McDonalds. So at first I continued writing in Hebrew. But it was utterly unsatisfying living in one country and writing to be published in another. My books are what you’d call ‘literary’, which really means they’ll never make me rich. And that’s fine as long as I get other forms of satisfaction from writing, especially contact with my readers and with other writers. But I had none of that after moving to Australia. So that’s how I decided to do what seemed initially impossible – to start writing in English.
To gain a new language, and I mean truly gain it – so that I could daydream in it, daydreaming being an essential activity for a writer – I moved to reading in English only. I spent lots of money on thesauruses and idiom books, and reading became tedious, as I didn’t skip any unfamiliar words, always checking their meaning. It could sometimes take me two days of reading for the protagonist to finish a meal, depending on the richness of the author’s vocabulary.
At first, I stuck to bestsellers – Memoirs of the Geisha, The Da Vinci Code, all that jazz. These books were more palatable for linguistic newcomers, being usually composed of recurring clichés and simply structured sentences. Once my language began improving, I moved to books that interested me more but were still relatively plainly written – biographies of writers, such as Colette and Anais Nin. The fact that they described their subjects’ struggles to forge their writers’ voices also helped me to maintain hope that one day I’d write again. Just in a different language…
Later again, as my vocabulary grew more expansive and my reading sped up, I turned to reading contemporary Australian authors to understand the physical and literary landscape I was seeking to inhabit. Coincidentally, I started with Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, Praise by Andrew McGahan and Luke Davies’s Candy, all semi-autobiographical novels about youthful experimentation with alcohol and drugs, and so I grew convinced that since I’d never used heroin I stood no chance of publishing a book in Australia… Fortunately, several forays into libraries later I discovered that Australian writers sometimes wrote about other topics too, and so I regained some confidence that changing my writing language was possible.
Initially, I’d write a story or a poem in Hebrew, then translate it into bad English, then discuss it with my friend, a Russian-born poet, in Russian as he helped me to improve my English versions… Sound confusing? Well, it was! Gradually, though, I developed my own internal monologue in English, and this marked the point where I could write even first drafts in this language. Still, in my 17 years of writing in English, I’ve never submitted any work for publication without first having it copyedited. (And I’m lucky with my editor – he gets my non-native-speaker’s errors. For example, when I write ‘the boy has asparagus syndrome’, he might be the only person to know that I mean he has Asperger’s syndrome!)
6, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Earnest Hemingwy, George Orwell were all from journalism. Now we can find some great modern writers from that schooling. And you followed same route but you candidly said that you gave up professional journalism in your late twenties but still your habit of recording every important thing in note pad confirms a journalist in you. How was your experience as a journalist ? Did it help you be a writer in long term? Why did you give up such challenging profession? By the way, how this career happened to you?
As I was saying earlier, I began writing when I was very young. Initially it was purely for myself, but I was too restless and ambitious for this to remain so. When I moved to Israel, during my high school I lived in a provincial town, Ashdod, where it was very easy to insert yourself into a local newspaper (as long as you didn’t mind being paid pittance!), because there was hardly any competition– mostly our town was populated by aspiring football players, drug dealers and beauty queens… So I got a part-time job at a local magazine, Waves of Ashdod when I was just sixteen years old. After some months of working there as a features writer, I gathered enough confidence to apply for a place in the prestigious young reporter program at a national youth magazine Maariv Lanoar. To my astonishment, I got accepted… I loved working as a journalist in those years, because I loved writing and now my writing was more ‘purposeful’ and even earned me a little bit of money. Then, my journalistic work also served my natural, writerly voyeurism. I gravitated towards risky subjects. I spent several days in a hippy rehabilitation house for teenage runaways. I interviewed so many drug users that I knew the best way to shoot up heroin without myself ever having tried a cigarette… As a young journalist, I did okay in building my professional reputation, but I didn’t do as good as an artist. As prolifically as I wrote, by literary standards I wrote badly. Journalistic clichés came to me easily. And they seeped into, then flooded, my attempts at fiction. After publishing my first book, a novel, at twenty – far too early – and realizing it wasn’t very good, it became clear to me it was time for journalism and I to part ways. Plus, by that time I already moved out of my parents’ home and needed a more substantial income. But I’m glad I had those years as a reporter. I learned then discipline as well as the art of listening, and both skills have served my writing practice since.
You said you wrote your first poem at the age of three and you struggled with Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the age of eight. You had books to read and vodka to drink in abundance. You seem to be a very good reader. I wonder who the authors were and what sorts of books have left undeniable impact on your life as a writer.
I must begin by saying that unfortunately for me, as a child, I had less access to vodka than to books! But on a more serious note, thank you.
The book that has impacted me the most is the novel I already mentioned earlier: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. This masterpiece of Russian literature, often compared to Goethe’s Faust, has shaped me both as a person and a writer. It is set in the aggressively atheistic Stalinist Moscow during one particular Easter, when the Devil and his crew of demons decide to visit the city and wreak havoc with its officials. That visit is the main plot, but the book has a labyrinthine structure, teaming with sub-plots, characters and themes. It is at once a wild political satire, a fantasy, a romance and a philosophical tract. I read The Master and Margarita first when I was ten and have since re-read it many times, in all the three languages I know. The book has meant so much to me for several reasons, particularly that I first read it while still living under the Soviet dictatorship; it taught me all I needed to know about the redeeming power of laughter in the face of the despicable. More so, the novel struck deep because in it Bulgakov stretched the form to its limits, breaking most ‘rules’ laid down in various writing courses. Most notably, Bulgakov gets away with overloading and disorienting his readers in every way by remaining highly entertaining. This encouraged me to write while trusting readers’ intelligence and adventurousness instead of trying to fit into their (imagined by me) comfort zones. It was as if Bulgakov was saying: The only rule in writing is – express your vision. As if, he gave me the license not to be bland. His continuous navigation between the past and the present also became fundamental to how I experience life and how I write. Finally, it is possible that Bulgakov is even responsible for my tragicomic worldview, which of course shapes how I write too.
At the risk of sounding like a Russophile, I’ll also say I adore Nabokov greatly. The strangeness of everyday is palpable in his works. I’ve never looked at cats in the same way again, for example, after reading how Nabokov’s character in The Gift ‘nearly tripped over the tiger stripes which had not kept up with the cat as it jumped aside’. Or here is a line from his memoir Speak Memory: ‘Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.’ I know that even if I read Nabokov every day, I’ll never be even ten percent as good a writer as him – his originality, erudition, wisdom and use of language are difficult to surpass. Yet I do hope that possibly some specks of his greatness would rub off onto my pages, so I keep reading him…
So far I discussed fiction, but in recent years I’ve been predominantly writing in the creative nonfiction genre and of course I try to read the best authors in this area to learn from them how to better my own work. I adore Francisco Goldman’s memoir Say Her Name. It just has it all! It is a linguistically brilliant, humorous and poetic, heartbreaking yet joyful love story written by a grieving widower. The loss and longing are visceral. The voice has just a faint waft of (skeptical) mysticism to it that I find appealing. The characters are fully alive; particularly, Goldman avoids the almost impossible – sentimentalizing his dead wife. Instead, she emerges loveable yet flawed and vulnerable. The structure is powerful, complex, circular, reminding me of, speaking of Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things. It was one of those books I hoped would never end.
Some of my other favorite creative nonfiction books are Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cust, anything Robert Dessaix writes, Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. All these books are written by deeply curious as well as idiosyncratic writers who filter whatever it is they investigate – the experience of motherhood, murder or, say, recent history of Germany – through their selves with candor and reflective analysis. On the other hand, the chilling masterpiece by Truman Capote In Cold Blood is also my creative nonfiction favorite and there Capote writes without inserting his ‘I’ at all.Yet he stayed close to the emotional urgency of the story by confidently inhabiting the perspectives of very diverse characters. The structure of the book is impeccable too. Capote is a master at knowing when to reveal or withhold information.
Finally, my most recent powerful literary crash is on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. I am reading diligently through his six-book autobiographical opus My Struggle which depicts Knausgaard’s life from childhood until his early 40s. It is Proustian in flavor and scope, and genre-defying. Knausgaard’s life story is punctuated by essayistic prose that can go for dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of pages, about anything from Dostoyevsky to the challenges of multiculturalism to the Nazi Germany. Reading this masterpiece has been an elevating experience—it made me want to be sharper, more candid, more dedicated to the art of writing, and generally invest more in my inner world.