"Maybe none of us is aware of our true significance"
A Conversation with Novelist Richard Zimler
I’m kicking off The Tendril in the spirit of collaboration by sharing a conversation I recently enjoyed with critically acclaimed novelist, Richard Zimler.
About a year ago, a dear American friend of mine who is an avid reader, a lover of great literature, and familiar with my work wrote down the name Richard Zimler in our chat room on Messenger. He mentioned that Richard lives in Portugal, a country that my Brazilian spirit often flies to when the dark Nordic winter sets in. Richard is a novelist whose works have been published in 23 languages and been bestsellers in 13 different countries, including the USA, UK, France, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and Portugal. You can learn more about Richard here.
The name stuck with me, and I ordered his latest book, The Incandescent Threads, as it seemed to grapple with the question of what connects us to histories that our families have sometimes tried to bury. How do we know without knowing? What drives us to begin searches that will likely never end and continually recount that searching (for some of us in writing) in ways that, family, friends, and our future-obsessed societies might warn us, is like going down a rabbit hole?
Happily, Richard and I are now in touch with one another. I hope you enjoy reading the conversation between us, below. It is long, but no longer than an article in The New Yorker, and this one is certainly up to scratch, so please stay with us.
A note: This is the first texted conversation in the series Voices Between – The Creative Conversations, an initiative of my non-profit Stories for Society, established in 2019 with the purpose of giving rise to a force for peace by building a global network of established authors whose life stories, work, and commitments demonstrate and engage the impact of intolerance, extremism, and war. Motivated by the memory of the Holocaust, the conversations explore a wide range of topics and literature. You can listen to previous recorded conversations here.
JULIE: The characters in The Incandescent Threads live in the shadows of the Holocaust. Strange as it may sound, coming from the granddaughter of perpetrators, I could often identify with the dilemmas of the characters who relate their stories of love and life around the two Holocaust survivors, Benjamin Zarco and his cousin, Shelly, who, together, are at the novel’s fulcrum.
I’ve read many survivor accounts, but The Incandescent Threads does something different in an entirely captivating and engrossing way. Richard, by way of introducing your work to us, could you tell us what the differences are? What did you set out to do in this novel?
RICHARD: Of course. The project started out as a short story about an elderly Holocaust survivor who suffers a psychological crisis following the death of his beloved wife. He hides away in his house in the New York suburbs and refuses even to open his mail or answer the phone. His name is Benni Zarco, and he was a young boy when he and his parents were forced into the Warsaw ghetto. His mother and father and everyone else in his family – except for his cousin Shelly – were murdered in the death camps. During Benni’s crisis, his adult son Ethan comes to his rescue. Part of what intrigued me about the loving struggle to bring Benni back into the world was Benni’s refusal to talk to his son about the deaths of his parents and other relatives. I have had some familiarity with this form of silence because I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York and had friends whose parents were survivors. I was always disturbed by how most of them never spoke about their experiences in the ghettos and camps – not even to their kids. Their unwillingness to speak of the past seemed both mysterious and dangerous back then. In my story, I wanted to explore its consequences – for Benni himself, of course, but also for his son and wife Teresa, as well as their dearest friends. A great deal of despair and remorse inhabit Benni’s refusal to speak of all he has lost, but he is also motivated by a fierce desire to protect Ethan and everyone he loves from his legacy of suffering – to protect his son from the ghosts who still visit him daily, so to speak.
When I finished writing the story, I thought that Benni and Ethan’s relationship was deeply moving, so I became eager to go further. Also, I found Benni extremely witty and charming, which always makes a person attractive to me. But I felt as if I’d said all I wanted to about this particular crisis. So how to continue…? A revelation came to me a few weeks later. In Ethan’s narrative, he describes his mother and a number of family friends in memorable ways, so I became eager to know more about them – and to learn how they interacted with Benni and his cousin Shelly from the end of World War II up to the present time. In that way, the novel became what I call a mosaic – six narratives written by five different people (Ethan’s narrative becomes the first chapter, and he also writes the final one) about the two charismatic, courageous, secretive, eccentric, and often maddeningly stubborn cousins. Of course, each of these people has his or her own unique perspective on the two cousins. But structuring the book that way seemed exciting to me because I knew that it would force the reader to put the six narratives together – to join them into a complete mosaic. And when a reader is forced to do a little work, I think they enter into the narrative more deeply and emotionally.
For various personal reasons, my favorite of the six perspectives is written by George, the former Canadian soldier who helps locate Benni in Poland after the end of World War II. He becomes Shelly’s lover shortly after leaving the Canadian army and moving into a small apartment in Montreal. George is half-Navajo and half-Jewish – and extremely intuitive. But he is also desperately traumatized because while he was serving in the armed forces, he helped liberate Bergen-Belsen. He did all he could to help save the starving prisoners and get them medical treatment, but he sometimes failed. That failure comes to seem unforgivable to him, and he becomes crushed by guilt – so much so that the dead and dying from Bergen-Belsen come to inhabit the drawings and paintings he makes on the walls of his apartment. When, in 1947, Shelly asks him to return to Poland with him to try to find any relatives of his who might have survived – especially his younger cousin Benni – George refuses. How could he possibly go back to the country where millions of Jews were murdered in death camps? And yet, he ends up making that sacrifice for Shelly. And what the two young men find changes their lives forever…
I should also probably mention that I’ve written five novels about different branches and generations of the Zarco family. These novels aren’t sequels – they stand on their own and can be read in any order. The Incandescent Threads is one of them. Near the end of the book, Benni reveals to Ethan that he is in possession of a letter written by their Sixteenth Century ancestor, Berekiah Zarco, who is the narrator of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, my first novel. The letter explains the mystical tradition in the Zarco family that helped Benni find the courage to crawl his way out of the Warsaw ghetto through one of the underground tunnels.
I call this group of novels my Sephardic Cycle. For me, it’s a kind of immense palace, with five different doorways leading inside (one for each of the novels).
JULIE: I cannot wait to read them! Still, I cannot help but return to the term ‘the incandescent threads.’ For those of us who have deepened ourselves in our family stories, especially those connected to the Holocaust, this idea seems intuitive. Can you elaborate on how you came to use this term and how this novel bears out its meaning?
RICHARD: I’ve been very influenced by Jewish mysticism – kabbalah – over the last thirty-five years, ever since reading the works of one of my heroes, Gershom Scholem, a German-Jewish scholar who almost singlehandedly made this esoteric tradition accessible to general readers. One kabbalistic idea is that there are no accidents or coincidences. I don’t think I believe that, but, like Benni Zarco, I believe that there are almost invisible linkages between disparate events, as well as between the past, present, and future. To describe this idea, Benni uses the term incandescent threads, and he believes he has seen them on at least two occasions – once, for instance, while walking in Lisbon in the neighborhood where his Sixteenth Century ancestor, Berekiah Zarco, had his home. This term is unique to Benni and me – I didn’t find it in any of my readings about kabbalah. But it seemed a poetic way of describing the gossamer linkages between all we see and experience. To give you an example of Benni’s usage of the term – and my own – this interview we’re doing now was made possible, in part, by my grandparents finding the courage to leave Poland in 1905 and start their lives over some four thousand miles away in New York. If they had stayed in Poland, they’d have surely been murdered in a death camp, like their parents and all their siblings. Hence, I’d never have been born. Once I was born, I had the good fortune to grow up with a mother who was an avid reader and who kept the books of Gershom Scholem on one of her bedroom shelves. If I hadn’t found them there one lucky day in 1989 and started reading them, I’d never have written The Incandescent Threads or created my Sephardic Cycle. So, I’m quite certain that there is a metaphorical filament – an incandescent thread – stretching through Benni into my childhood home all the way back to the town of Brzeziny, in central Poland, in 1905. And along the way, the thread passes through Gershom Scholem’s office at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to Provence in southern France, where kabbalah began in the Twelfth Century.
JULIE: Yes, and those gossamer linkages have a strong presence in some of the most moving words in the novel, spoken by the character Ewa Armbruster, a Christian piano teacher who hides Benni in her farmhouse during World War II. “Maybe none of us is aware of our true significance,” she says, reflecting on the ways in which Benni has unexpectedly enriched her life. There is a healing in these words that is a part of the overall healing process in this novel, which paradoxically requires that things are broken up and broken down. It works in a mosaic of voices, in pieces, as you say. Both Shelly and Benni are taken to the brink – or take themselves to the brink -- to come to terms with their painful pasts, their loss. Were you aware of this dynamic when you were writing it?
RICHARD: Yes, you’re right. The two main characters and those around them experience healing, which is one of the themes that gives force and direction to each of the chapters – and that shapes all the mosaic pieces, so to speak. For Benni and Shelly, healing – or redemption – takes many decades and involves a grueling struggle, in part because of having suffered so deeply at a young age but also because of the guilt they feel at having survived. Unfortunately, many Jews and Roma experienced an enormous sense of guilt simply for remaining alive. And to use your term, that guilt sometimes broke their spirit – and shattered their confidence in the world. They invariably asked themselves: Why am I still here when so many wonderful people were murdered under the most awful circumstances imaginable?
Quite unexpectedly, Benni is able to free himself from his guilt near the end of his life, in a moving scene that takes place at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, when he is with Ethan and his three grandchildren. It’s there, observing those beautiful young people studying a Hieroglyphic inscription, that he has a moment of sudden enlightenment – a kind of satori. He is overwhelmed by the feeling that even his times of deepest despair led him to the moment of joy and grace in the museum. Benni bursts into tears because this sensation of absolute triumph is too deep and powerful to be contained. And he feels himself freed – immediately and irrevocably– from seventy years of intense guilt.
As I wrote the novel, I became especially interested in these moments of insight and liberation – and how our interactions with our loved ones can sometimes summon them. I suppose this is a function, in part, of my being 67 years old and having had the good fortune to be married to a wonderful man over the last 45 years. It seems to me now that one of the most important things we can do in life is to help those we love –even strangers – lead an authentic and fulfilling life. What is the point in doing anything less?
An example of this from the novel: it’s Benni’s unshakeable devotion to his wife Teresa – and his frustration with her self-loathing – that finally enables her to escape the destiny of failure and bitterness that she has inherited from her mother and follow her passion for music. As for Ewa Armbruster, she probably has the most unexpected realization of all the characters: after World War II ends, she realizes that her relationship with Benni has saved her from the lonely and purposeless life she’d been living. She senses that she will be able to look at herself in the mirror over the coming years because she was finally able to summon her courage to defy the Nazis and their Polish collaborators. Yes, she saved Benni Zarco, but he also saved her!
JULIE: You will shortly be visiting The Gothenburg Book Fair to launch the Swedish edition of your 2019 novel, The Lost Gospel of Lazarus, which I have also recently had the pleasure of reading and which, unexpectedly for me, swept me away. I say, unexpectedly, since, like many in today’s secular societies (of which Sweden is one of the world’s foremost), while I am familiar with the biblical stories of Jesus’ life, and I appreciate their importance to Western culture and literature, I am skeptical. So many atrocities have been committed in the name of these biblical stories; and, in an age of science, I ask myself what we should believe in that can help humanity out of the stressed state it finds itself in.
Yet in this novel, you captivate us with the idea of a lost gospel, the story of Jesus’ last days according to his boyhood friend, Lazarus, whom, in an arresting early chapter, Jesus raises from the dead for reasons that the novel reveals towards its end. You bring us into a time, a place, and a culture, a Jewish culture, that we rarely encounter in other renderings of this story, which is, after all, at the heart of the Christian faith. A speaker I recently listened to said that a Jew cannot be a Christian, but a Christian must be a Jew to be a true Christian. The Lost Gospel of Lazarus made me understand what he meant.
Can you elaborate on what motivated you to write this story in this way?
RICHARD: You’re quite right – we rarely come upon any characterization of Jesus as a Jew. That seemed both unrealistic and unfortunate to me – after all, he never renounced his Judaism. And, as you point out, everyone who is a Christian lives by some very ancient Jewish traditions – including, of course, the Ten Commandments. Jesus was, in fact, a Jewish healer, preacher, and rabbi, meaning teacher. He was most decidedly not the blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian that we see portrayed everywhere. He never in his life even heard the word Christianity. That religion was, of course, founded only after his death. Also, the movement for justice in the Holy Land that he tried to lead was in the tradition of other, earlier Jewish revolutionaries. So, when I started this project, it seemed to me that it would be important to give back to Jesus his Judaism – and to restore it to Lazarus and the other New Testament figures as well. But I had a big problem: how to clear my mind – and the mind of readers – of two thousand years of Christian iconography and doctrine? Eventually, I was able to accomplish that in an unexpected and surprisingly simple way: by using Hebrew names for all the characters! Yeshua ben Yosef (Yeshua, son of Yosef) isn’t the Jesus we have all learned about in the New Testament or have seen in Hollywood films. Just as Eliezer ben Natan isn’t the Lazarus with whom we’re familiar and Yohanan isn’t Saint John.
Happily, readers have told me in dozens of emails that this strategy worked for them extremely well – that the Yeshua and Eliezer that they discover in the book are largely free of their previous notions of those two figures.
Two of St. John’s statements about Lazarus also helped me to write the novel. He wrote in his Gospel that Lazarus was Jesus’ beloved friend and that Jesus also knew Lazarus’ two sisters. So, it seemed reasonable to me for the two men to have been friends from childhood. While writing the novel, I also made an important discovery – that Lazarus or Eliezer – could be Yeshua ben Yosef’s refuge. In my novel, Yeshua goes to him when he needs the support and solace of someone he trusts entirely. He knows that Eliezer loves him as a soulmate and will make no demands of him. Of course, it is very hard for Eliezer to do that – to love and support Yeshua without asking anything of him. It implies a great sacrifice. And that is precisely the sacrifice that Eliezer makes to help Yeshua continue his mission.
Maybe I ought to mention here that the novel also has another, slightly stranger origin… One of my older brothers died of Aids in New York in 1989. It was a huge trauma for me. His name was Jerry. He was only 35 years old. His funeral was the worst day of my life. I didn’t begin to feel any relief until I returned home to Berkeley and my husband Alex. Shortly after that, I dreamt that Jerry had come back to life. He was walking across the patio of a stone mansion where I was apparently a guest. With a rush of relief, I thought: Jerry’s returned to life – everything will be okay now! I dashed out of my room to join him, but he didn’t greet me with excitement or affection. His face was mournful. I discovered that although he could talk and although he recognized me, he was unable to show any emotions other than sadness and disappointment. His incomparably sorrowful face was the same one that he had shown me over his final weeks in the hospital – the face of a young man who had been cheated out of life.
The dream returned to me several times over the next weeks and then vanished from my life until 17 years later – when I was caring for my elderly mother in 2006. On that occasion, my dream encounter with Jerry started me thinking about what he would have been like as a middle-aged man. Soon, the New Testament figure of Lazarus entered my mind. To try to learn more about the connection between Lazarus and Jerry, I re-read the New Testament, which I’d studied at university in the 1970s. I also began reading every book I could find about daily life in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. It was during this period of research that I realized what might have been obvious to me but wasn’t: that Lazarus’ story represented my greatest wish, which was to bring my brother back to life. And the moment that insight came to me, I decided to make Lazarus the narrator of a novel. I thought it would be fascinating for me and the reader to continue his story after the crucifixion of his beloved friend. After all, what happened to Lazarus after he suffered that enormous loss?
JULIE: That is a very moving story of a novel’s evolution. Kabbalah seems to be very alive in your life.
The portrayal of Yeshua, Jesus, in this novel is its daring. Through Lazarus’ eyes, we encounter a being (Jesus) who is sensuous with a strong physical presence, down to his smell, that is irresistibly attractive to Lazarus. At the same time, we encounter a mystery, a transcendental being, that cannot be contained or explained. The novel comes down hard on the stories of Jesus and those closest to him that emerge following his crucifixion, which exclude this duality and abuse the real flesh and blood historical Jewish prophet for their own purposes. Who is Jesus, and who isn’t he in this novel?
RICHARD: I’m not sure there is any one answer to your question, because he appears differently to each of the main characters. To Yohanan (St. John), for instance, Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) is a miracle-maker with divine powers – the transcendental being you speak of. To his mother, Maryam (Mary), however, he is a beloved son involved in a dangerous mission – a son whom she would do anything to protect from their Roman rulers and other enemies. In my opinion, Eliezer (Lazarus) sees Yeshua as his closest friend – a soulmate. Yes, Yeshua is a mortal man and not without his faults and frailties, but also a special being for whom Eliezer would make any sacrifice. Imagine having a best friend from childhood who is so charismatic that he attracts followers wherever he speaks! Imagine the responsibility to help him that that would imply! But Eliezer is terribly torn. He desperately wants to help Yeshua, but he must keep his distance from him in public because he doesn’t want to put his children at risk. So, Yeshua is also someone who inadvertently creates a crisis for Eliezer.
I was also keen on presenting Jesus as a mystic because it seemed to me that he spoke in a metaphorical and highly symbolic language. When he told his followers that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, for instance, that was one way of reminding them that divinity resides within us, not in some geographic place out in the world. And that if we are to have a paradise on earth, we shall have to create it ourselves.
In the end, I think each reader will make his or her own interpretation of Yeshua. And of all the other characters, as well. That seems perfectly fitting to me. After all, each reader uses his or her intelligence and sensitivity to complete any good novel.
JULIE: To this reader, the character of Jesus is a fearless and unwavering force opposed to totalitarianism. To my mind, the story is deeply relevant in a contemporary context. What do you see in The Lost Gospel of Lazarus that speaks to all of us living in a time when the sanctity of humanity, our freedom, is everywhere threatened by dark forces?
RICHARD: Yes, the Jesus in my novel is a fierce opponent of totalitarianism and, in particular, of fundamentalism. In part, I emphasized this aspect of Jesus’ teachings because of my understanding of the history of Jewish mysticism. You see, insightful mystics from throughout the Jewish diaspora have always maintained that the most meaningful stories in the Old Testament are poetry, not prose, and since they are poetry, they are open to interpretation. In short, there is no one truth. There are different levels of truth – and different levels of meaning.
For instance, we can interpret the story of the Exodus literally – that Moses used a magical formula to part the waters of the Red Sea and lead the Israelites to freedom in the Promised Land. But we can also interpret this story more symbolically – as a way of encouraging us to journey from slavery to freedom in our own lives – to break free of all the forces that would hold us down and prevent us from being the people we want to be.
Fundamentalists do not believe in different levels of meaning, however. For them, there is only one truth – and it is the literal one. And they believe that if you disagree with them, you ought to be silenced or killed. This seems to me one of the great evils of our time. And one of the great evils of the time of Jesus as well, for it always leads to a kind of tribal mentality – of us (the good guys in possession of the truth) against them (the bad guys). I think that if we are to overcome the great social problems of our age – racism, misogyny, homophobia, and the shameful gap between the rich and poor, for example – we must free ourselves from this tribal mentality. We must recognize – as Jesus did– that our destinies are linked together and that we all deserve respect, understanding, and kindness.
JULIE: Language in this novel seems to me to be a mirror of the struggle between tribalism and universality. It plays an extremely important role in the plot of the story. Judea is a fluid, multilingual environment in which Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and other languages are spoken, with countless different accents. Knowing or not knowing one or another language or speaking it with a certain accent has consequences for the characters’ fates.
Clearly, you are an author with a heightened sense of awareness of language as a bearer of cultural divisions as well as cultural understanding and intercultural fluidity. Where does this come from?
RICHARD: One of my discoveries in doing research for this novel was that the Holy Land of 2000 years ago was a multicultural society, with Romans, Jews, Greeks, Phoenicians, Nabataeans, and other ethnic groups all living in close proximity. Each of these peoples had its own language, of course, and it gave me great pleasure to have Lazarus think in his two favorite languages – Greek and Aramaic. He greatly appreciates what each of those languages has given to him. And he adores Alexandria, the cosmopolitan Greek city where he did his apprenticeship in mosaic-making. I did a great deal of research into ancient Greek and Aramaic terms to be able to create a realistic narrative, and I ended up with a Lazarus who adores playing with language and expressing himself poetically. It’s something I love about him.
I think my fascination with language comes from having moved to Porto, Portugal in 1990. I had to learn Portuguese very quickly in order to give my classes at the College of Journalism. It was a nightmare because I’d never studied Portuguese. That first year, I gave my classes in an embarrassing mishmash of English and Portuguese. I was all too keenly aware that I wasn’t able to communicate in an efficient and grammatically correct way, which made me very anxious and often gave me insomnia. It took me three or four years before I could give good classes in Portuguese. Now, after 33 years in Portugal, I’m pretty much bilingual. In fact, I write my children’s books in Portuguese and novels in English. And I love moving back and forth between the two languages. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment to be able to write well in both languages.
Learning a second language is a kind of mind-expanding drug because it creates new and startling ways of thinking and reasoning. It gives us different perspectives on the world and ourselves. I know, for instance, that I am a very different person now than the Richard Zimler, who could only speak one language – more worldly, open-minded, and nuanced.
JULIE: Finally, both The Incandescent Threads and The Lost Gospel of Lazarus are intergenerational stories told in the voices of generations that follow the main characters (Incandescent Threads) or told for a younger generation (Lazarus tells his story to his grandson).
In both of these stories, you are saying something about the importance of intergenerational storytelling for healing and hope. Can you elaborate?
RICHARD: That commonality between the two books has never occurred to me, but you’re quite right! And I think it has to do with the main characters I chose (or who chose me!). I say that because much of the focus of any novel I write comes directly out of the protagonists. So, I think that this passing on of knowledge to children and grandchildren comes from Benni and Shelly in The Incandescent Threads and Lazarus in The Gospel According to Lazarus. Once I knew who they were and learned about their periods of suffering, I realized that they would very much want to create a more compassionate world for future generations – and would also want to pass on the important lessons they learned. How could Lazarus not want to tell his children and grandchildren about the wondrous soulmate he had and who was murdered for trying to lead a spiritual revolution? He would desperately want to transmit some of what he learned from Jesus. In part, so that Jesus might still live in some way – and remain a force for good in the world. As for Benni and Shelly, their children and grandchildren are their final triumph over Nazism. Every time Benni looks at his grandson George, for instance, he sees hope and triumph and a past that has finally been healed.
JULIE: What a fascinating discussion! Thank you so much, and good luck at the Gothenburg Book Fair where you will be launching The Gospel According to Lazarus in Swedish (Lasaros evangelium, cover below). Where can readers attending the fair meet you?
RICHARD: You can find my schedule via the QR code, below.
28/9, 18h00 – 20h00. I will be at the 24/7 reunion in the entrance hall of the Bookfair.
29/9, 09h00 – 12h00, I will be at the stand for my publisher, Lusima Books. The stand is B04:62. We will have a small press conference, as well.
30/09, 14h00 – We will have a book launch for The Lost Gospel of Lazarus at the Lusima Books stand, B04:62
At other times, I can be reached through my Swedish publisher, Inger Midmo: +46.73.985.65.62. Or readers can message me at my own email: rczimler@netcabo.pt
I appreciate this subject matter. I'm a retired Anglican priest.