AUTHORS CORNER
Conversation with…Joshua Henkin: Jewish memori BY EMILY BURACK
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) – Joshua Henkin’s fourth novel, “Morningside Heights,” is the story of many things: a marriage, a changing neighborhood in New York City, an incurable illness, and love and families. The plot centers on Pru, who grows up Orthodox and meets Spence, a largely secular Jewish professor – he’s a young superstar Shakespeare scholar teaching at Colum-bia. Pru is Spence’s grad student, but they fall in love, marry and have a daughter. In his 50s, Spence starts becoming forgetful, and is diagnosed with early-onset Alz-heimer’s. The novel, then, hinges on the question: What happens when the person you married becomes a different person? Henkin himself grew up in Morningside Heights. His father, the professor and human rights law scholar Louis Henkin, provided the emotional impetus for the novel; he died at 92 after battling Alzheimer’s. In a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke about the need for writing emotionally autobiographical fiction, growing up in New York City, his father’s view of Judaism as a “Reform Orthodox Jew” and how there
shouldn’t be easy takeaways or messages from fiction. Below is an edited transcription of the conversation. Jewish Week: “Morningside Heights” is as much a portrait of this woman and the path her life has taken, but also of their marriage and of how how the disease not only impacts the person who is sick, but all their loved ones. What drew you to telling a story of early onset Alzheimer’s in this way? Henkin: Even though Alzheimer’s is the tagline, I don’t see it as a book about Alzheimer’s. I really see it as a book about marriage. When my father was sick, my mother started to go to a class at the JCC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for caregivers. My mother is very much not a consorting-with-strangers kind of person. I was interest-ed in what her situation was like that she felt that she’d be happy to talk to people whom she might not have anything in common with – except for the fact that they’re all caregivers. So the book started
out as a very long short story that took place entirely at the JCC. And by draft 20, the JCC was gone. But I wrote 3,000 pages over the course of eight years, and I found the book in there. There are a lot of mistakes along the way. That’s just how I write.
How did you get from a story at the JCC to the whole novel it is today? I tell my grad students that you should never write a story about a ball rolling down a hill because if you write a story about a ball rolling down a hill, it’ll roll down the hill. And I’m obviously speaking metaphorically, but I think that that was a challenge for writing a book about Alzheimer’s: If the book is taking place now, and it’s a realist fic-tion book, then unfortunately the medicine of it is not in question – you know what’s going to happen. And so what was interesting was what it was like for his loved ones to experience his illness. Especially for Pru, she’s someone who hitched her wagon to this star, and what is it like when he declines for her. In a weird way, it’s harder for her than it is
for him because he doesn’t really under-stand what’s going on. Whereas her identity is so tethered to him, and she really has to invent herself. … I was interested in exploring that. I was struck by how we learn more of Spence’s childhood on the Lower East Side as he loses more of his mind, and he starts speaking in Yiddish. IWhat is it about the end that brings us back to the beginning? In my experience with my father, the shortterm stuff recedes fastest and the long-term memories recede most slowly. …Circling back to his Yiddish upbringing, was really important to me. In this book, Spence is deeply secular, a red diaper baby, Yiddish was his first language. Pru grew up Orthodox in Ohio. It’s the reverse of my own parents: My father was the son of an Orthodox rabbi who grew up on the Lower East Side, my mom was much more secular. But I used to go with my father to the Lower East Side every Sun-day to visit my grandfather when he was old. And there’s something about that trans-formation. The book is about Morningside Heights, but it’s also about other neighbor-hoods. The transformation of the Lower East Side from this sort of old Jewish Mecca to hipster bands has been interesting to me. Coming back to that Yiddish of Spence’s felt like a way to bring the book full circle. The title is obviously a neighborhood on the Upper West Side, where Spence and Pru lived, – but it’s also very Jewish New York. What does it mean to you to tell specifically a New York Jewish story?
(AUTHOR PHOTO: MICHAEL LIONSTAR)
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| JULY 23, 2021
Writing that kind of story comes naturally to me, just because I’m a New York Jew [laughs]. I’m 57, I was born in 1964. I grew up in Morningside Heights, I lived there for 18 years, then I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I lived in Berkeley, California, I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then I moved back to New York in 1999, with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and we moved to Brooklyn. But that too, is interesting! Brooklyn is where everyone escaped from. My older relatives are like, you moved to Brook-lyn?! The New York Times Book Review of the book captured something about the book’s relationship to the city, even though I wasn’t consciously thinking [about it]. Flannery O’Connor once said that fiction writers have to have a certain measure of stupidity. Some come by it naturally, others have to cultivate it. But I think we’re really proceedjewishledger.com
