Alison Pick: ‘I have a real hunger for Jewish themes’

Over several visits to Israel, including stints researching Ein Harod’s founding alongside the kibbutz’s historian, as well as meeting newly-identified relatives, Pick developed the story.

“They have an amazing archive, all collected in cardboard boxes,” she recalls. “There were these journals, women’s diaries mostly and also letters. And it seemed to me there was something unique about this angle, about telling the story of many of the early women, the pioneers.”

The book draws heavily on this material; a storyline about a kibbutz woman having to secure permission (and not getting it) to have a baby is not made up. “I don’t know how common that was,” she says. “But it was certainly something that happened, there were documents and diaries of women talking about that. On the one hand you don’t want to show the most extreme instance, but I thought it was interesting.”

Her fictional community is not Ein Harod, although given the subject she felt a strong fidelity to getting the facts as accurately as possible. “I wasn’t writing a textbook. I wanted to write about a small slice,” she says. “But from writing memoir I have come to feel that it is impossible to tell the full story about anything. Certainly one of the things fiction affords us is the ability to invent and imagine.

Venturing into the thorny subject of the Middle East is challenging for any writer — “in retrospect maybe I should have been a little bit more apprehensive” —but Pick chose to face the controversy head on, by unflinchingly focusing on the impact of the Jewish settlements on native Arab populations.

But although sympathetic to the Arab characters, she chose not to provide their perspectives. “When I was writing there was a huge cultural appropriation debate raging in Canada,” she says. “I thought a lot about that and it seemed to me the Arab characters were going to be an integral part of the story but there’s a line where their voices were not mine to speak from.”

The book came out last year in Canada, and she has spent months touring book festivals and speaking at Jewish Community Centres, receiving different feedback from every reader; to some she is a Zionist stooge, to others she is far to the left. “I’ve been surprised by the extent to which it is divisive,” she acknowledges. “I guess people are used to reading about the Middle East through a particular lens. I think fiction works to ask questions not to provide answers, certainly when I was sitting down to write it was with that in mind - to open the conversation further as opposed to writing some kind of didactic treatise.”

In Strangers, Pick tells three stories, running concurrently, with each perspective shifting the realities of the event slightly, like the television show The Affair. At times the readers know things the characters do not. “I find writing historical fiction such an incredibly rich and rewarding way to learn,” says Pick. “It was a time and a place I knew very little about before.”

She chose the structure partly because it was exciting to her as a writer— “it seemed like such a challenge” — but also because, having published a memoir, she is fascinated by the idea of there being one objective version of events. “In [Between Gods] I tried very hard to tell the truth and it turns out that everything I studied in post -modernism is true — you can’t,” she says. After it came out, she had repeated conversations with relatives who remembered events differently. “It became very interesting to me the different relationships all of the family members had to the same story, so it was at the forefront of my mind when I sat down to write a new book.”

Visiting Israel for the first time was a moving experience. “Everything people had said was true about the urgency and vitality and passion,” she says. “It sounds banal but there’s something about seeing it up close that was thrilling.”

Going from being impartial about Israel as a non-Jew, to an actively engaged community member with an emotional connection to it now has been a strange journey. “I felt at the same time extremely bound up in it and also aware that because of the complexity I was only getting a tiny little taste,” she says. “It’s certainly not a place you can understand by travelling there four times over the course of a couple of years.”

During her research she stayed on a kibbutz. “The idea of living communally is fascinating to me,” admits Pick. But the book is not rose-tinted about this life. “That’s one of the fascinating things to me, the way in which the ideology butted up against very real human emotions, and the way actions can fall short of our ideals.”

After writing about Palestine, Pick says her views remain broadly that all sides need to work towards a two-state solution. “On some subconscious level I set out hoping to understand something and the only thing I have come to understand is just the infinite complexity and the way in which the history just unravels and unravels and unravels and goes back and back and back,” she says. “So if anything my relationship to it is more uncertain.”

What has changed her relationship to Judaism, if not Israel, has been becoming a mother; something she explores to great effect in the novel. Converting while pregnant, she was “lucky” to go through many Jewish “firsts” with her daughter, from Shabbat to festivals or saying the Shema before bed. “All those things that were theoretical before have become very tangible through my relationship with my daughter, which is just such a wonderful thing.”

Ironically, for someone who grew up secular, this is Pick’s third book with Judaism at its core. “I had the idea this book would be something different, and when I sat down to write all the ideas were explicitly Jewish,” she says. “I think because I came to Judaism the way that I did I have a real hunger for Jewish themes. There’s almost something compensatory in it.”

That said, she can’t imagine life without Judaism now. “[Converting] was so difficult and fraught a process but also so incredibly clear in the sense of this is who I am, this is what I want to do. I have not had one moment of hesitation.”

 

Strangers with the Same Dream is published next week by Tinder Press