I was invited to attend the Toronto International Writers Festival and what a treat! It is fascinating to see how other people in different countries do things. Some you can hope to learn from and possibly replicate, others you know you won’t be able to, such as having your office and green room in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel…

The opening night was a heart warming event with Diana Athill and Alice Munro in support of Pen. The audience had paid $100 for the cocktail and talk and it was a full house. The two grand ladies of letters were funny, honest and obviously enjoyed meeting each other. The words “short stories” were not mentioned once and I wondered when, in the UK, people would realise that a short story writer is not simply someone who still has to grow up to writing long stories. Munro won the Man Booker International but is not eligible for the Booker! at least for the moment. You can listen to their podcast on the Globe and Mail website.

The next day, with Orhan Pamuk, the mood was quite different . He started with a 20 minutes reading of his new novel, The Museum of Innocence, followed by an interview. He was charming, tongue in cheek, thoughtful but became icy cold when asked about politics. Why is it that writers who come from “difficult” countries can’t simply talk about their novels. It’s journalists who ask political questions about topics that are simply not in the books. And no he does not regret expressing the views he did but was not going to be drawn onto that terrain. As to talking about his assassinated friend, the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink whose photo was on the stage, he was simply not the subject of a talk show. I felt sorry for his lovely interviewer who was looking more and more uneasy. I also felt sorry for his translator whose name he simply did not mention but explained that it did not reflect the amount of work put in by him and other people to make the English text his own. He talked beautifully about writing about a town, either as an outsider regretting what’s missing or an insider tracing a personal map of all the places relevant to the author’s own story. He dismissed writers who say they are led by their characters whereas his novels are carefully plotted. He was there, as in his books, perfectly in control and most brilliant to watch and listen to. I had once dreamt of having Pamuk in conversation with either Amos Oz or David Grossman but I doubt this will ever happen. Pity!

I attended an interesting event trying to bring in new technology to the book festival. The room was set up cabaret style and the young woman I sat next to didn’t seem overjoyed by my company. She had probably hoped for a handsome stranger not a middle aged lady. People were invited to tweet about the session as it went along, a bit like thinking aloud in writing, their tweets for all to read on a screen. There also was a journalist from the Toronto Globe blogging live on the event. The discussion was all about Peep culture as opposed to Pop culture, writers blogging in character, etc… The most interactive moment of the session was still when people were invited to get up and learn how to open a coconut. That’s also when I finally chatted with my neighbour. Then a band riffed to screened You Tube videos, a woman being spanked, a kid bewildered by anasthesia, Susan Boyle… That’s when I left. Probably not one to bring home, apart maybe for the coconuts.

The festival went on with a mix of readings and round tables. Readings are a serious affair, with 4 or 5 authors (novelists, poets or even non fiction writers) reading for 20 minutes or so each and an interval in the middle, no questions or discussions. Some writers love it and are very good at it, others tell me they don’t see the point of it. I think the odd mixing enables to introduce new voices or genres. It can also be a sort of best of the festival. Maybe one to try at JBW… I would love to hear what people think. I was only at the festival for a few days but heard an impressive of international authors such as Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Boualem Sansal, Colm Toibin, Sherman Alexie, Iain Pears, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters, Tash Aw, John Irving, Michael Ignatieff and, of course, Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood.

I was impressed by the relatively young average age of the audience and so were my colleagues from New Zealand and Australia. There were even some amazingly stunning Punks complete with Mohicans and studded jackets come to meet David Byrne who was talking about his Bicycle Diaries. Students go in free although apparently most of them don’t take advantage of the offer and will buy their tickets. I also learnt a new term: “toilet review” as practiced by my of my colleagues who will shut herself up in a cubicle after an event to hear what people say about it. In that case, it was after AL Kennedy’s superb show “Words” and the review was enthusiastic as it should be.

Back in the UK, I was greeted by Amanda Craig’s blog giving some advice to festival organisers. Her list of dos and don’ts makes sense and I hope we don’t suffer from too much of the faults she attacks. The question of how much a writer should be paid is a difficult one. We tend to think we help an author promoting a new book but it must be said that even established writers today receive advances which become pityful if divided by the time it’s taken them to produce their new work. I always try to put myself in the author’s shoes and make sure what we offer is worth coming to JBW. It may definitely not be the payment but hopefully the pairing with another writer, an attentive audience, a good and well-prepared chair and, of course, good book sales. Definitely for me the most exciting part of devising the programme is the matchmaking between authors. I was delighted to know that AL Kennedy and Shalom Auslander or Sarah Dunant and Amy Bloom are still in touch. And at our next festival, I look forward to conversations between Susan Neiman and the Chief Rabbi, Philippe Sington and Frank Tallis, Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer and last but not least, Michael Arditti and … Amanda Craig. If you have not yet read her wonderful Hearts and Minds, rush and get a copy.

Last week end I attended one of the loveliest book festivals in the UK: Small Wonder, THE short story festival which takes place at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s beautiful house, close to Lewes. So many things make it special: it’s location close to the Sussex coast and in the undecorated barn of the Bloomsbury set’s country home, the beautiful garden where one can wander, read, chat or nap during the leisurely one hour intervals between sessions and it’s very essence: it is THE only short story festival in the UK.

I’ve always loved the form, the tightness of a story that has to evoke a whole world or tell a full life in just a few pages. The French poet Charles Baudelaire said that writers wrote long stories only because they were incapable of writing short ones and Grace Paley said life is too short for writing anything longer than short stories. I’ve heard Etgar Keret tell how everytime he would start a story, he would think that he was embarking on a long work of fiction, something on the scale of Lord of the Rings, to be done after just a few pages. One of my most exciting reads recently has been a small volume by David Eagleman, Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlife, each one amazing and surprising in its depiction of the many possibilities awaiting us after we die.

I did not attend every event in the festival but the ones I did were thoroughly enjoyable. My first one was a reading from Liver by Will Self on top form. The beauty of a short story festival is that the length of the texts makes them suitable for reading out loud, something extremely pleasurable, especially by someone as gifted as Will, it takes us back to our childhood. It reminded me of Daniel Pennac, the author of the Belleville Quintet, remarking that all too often once children know how to read on their own, they get deprived of that intimate moment with a parent, leading more than one child to reject the exercise altogether. This is why, as he explains in Reads Like a Novel, he used to read aloud to his secondary school pupils to reconnect them with the pleasure of stories and books. The Small Wonder evening ended with a late night event in a gorgeous Arabian tent I would have loved to go to if I did not think I would fall asleep on the scattered mattresses and cushions. Children’s books were to be read aloud, unashamedly taking the audience to its early years.

The next day would have felt like a marathon anywhere else than at Charleston. I was not the only person attending all the sessions. So was the lovely Tania Hershman, whose collection of short stories, The White Road, I so enjoyed, and who came to JBW last year. She likes to start from a true story, often with a scientific slant. She is also the person who best captured the illusion of being fully bilingual and the trials of not living in one’s mother’s tongue.

Erica Wagner read a very funny story by Margaret Atwood and wondered at the reasons why the UK won’t give the same credentials to the short story as other English-speaking countries will. Since her days as Booker judge, she is still campaigning to include short story collections in the selection. Paradoxically Alice Munro who won the Man Booker International Prize cannot be entered for the Booker Prize in the UK! All too often the short story is considered just a stepping stone towards writing a “proper” long novel and many publishers will only publish collections after an author has made his or her mark. It was obvious there were many would be writers in the audience, some of whom had attended of the writing workshop, and this was reflected by the number of questions about the process of writing itself. (Which did not exclude the question to Will Self about his flamboyant shirt and why he had chosen to wear it….).

Esther Freud read a powerful, partly autobiographical, story about a young writer’s visit to PalFest, the festival that takes writers to the West Bank. Earlier that week, I had gone to listen to human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh at an event in London. His account of the  pain of living in Ramallah today was painful to listen to, the thwarted hopes, the huge gap between the two sides, each one dehumanising the other, made for a difficult experience. Still, as I told him, I hope that one day he will come and talk to the JBW audience. If festivals only exist to talk to one’s own, I don’t see the point of going on organising them.

Going back to Small Wonder, AL Kennedy read a story part of Freedom, an anthology commissioned by Amnesty International to commemorate the Declaration of Human Rights. She gave us a lesson in putting oneself into somebody else’s shoes, not necessarily the most sympathetic person. It was the story of a young woman soldier in Iraq, inspired by the Abu Ghraib scandal, who finds herself transformed into a torturer. As always with AL Kennedy, the story was spare, funny and tragic all at once. I got a chance to chat to Alison afterwards and found out that she and our friend Shalom Auslander with whom she did a session two years ago are still in touch and that he’s had a second son, Mazel Tov! Creating connections is another raison d’etre for festivals.

Hephzibah Anderson, Kathy Lette and Christopher Fowler took part in a balloon debate in which each had to defend his own favourite story. I like the balloon debate format and one may appear at the next JBW. Something has to be thrown out of the plummeting balloon to help it regain altitude. The speakers battle it out to convince the audience that it is not their story or idea. HG Wells won over the Kama Sutra and a story about a teenager’s efforts to have his first sexual experience. I’ll let you guess who was supporting which.

Ben Okri introduced us to his new invented form the Shoku, a mix between a short story and a haiku, a very short short story with a strange dream like quality. I told him the very exciting news (for us) that for the first time ever JBW would commission new writing and asked him whether he would agree to come, he was very encouraging and said that, if he could, he would gladly do. Indeed we are planning two events of unread and unheard before stories. The first one will be our opening night, a Purim Spiel with a twist on the 27 Febuary and the following Saturday, an exercise on the flimsy line which separates fiction from non fiction. Watch this space to learn more about future developments and the names of participating writers.

Michel Faber gave us an idea of the unbelievable treat it is to be given a new story. He first talked very movingly about his experience as a writer, his delusion after the huge success of The Crimson Petal and The White and the discovery of the literary circus. This was followed by his powerlessness confronting the war in Iraq and the impotence of the writer at changing the world. As a result, he went through a dark period of reclusion. Having finally gone back to writing and accepted Diana Reich’s invitation (the magical force behind the festival), he felt it his duty to write a story which he introduced by saying that it may never be heard again or read anywhere as he had no intention of publishing a new collection any time soon. It was the moving story of a man whose marriage is falling apart but who is trying to at least salvage his relationship with his young daughter. It was just perfect, a real gift, all the more beautiful as it was totally unexpected. He then read us a hilarious excerpt from The Fire Gospel, a book on the vacuous quest for literary fame and money, a short pastiche of some recent overblown bestsellers and a satire of religious fanatics and gullible believers.

I hope this will make you want to read more short stories and, if need be, reevaluate this underestimated genre. Against my strongest determination, I came back with a pile of new books to read I don’t know when. Small Wonder was also the occasion of the launch of a new website, Spoken Ink, which will enable its subscribers to listen to the best new writing. Hopefully they will have convinced Michel Faber to include his story.

First of all, I have to confess that I am a huge fan of Margaret Atwood. I still vividly remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale and being completely gripped by it. Since then, I’ve read almost all her books and the “almost” is only explained by the fact that for the greatest part of the year, my reading is dictated by my work.

Yesterday evening I went to the launch of her new novel, The Year of the Flood, a loose sequel to Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood is a writer who thinks of the business of being a writer. Today it is not enough to produce wonderful books and hope the public will love them. You have to be a performer, to sell yourself and we, festival directors and events organisers, are part of the problem. For someone like her, with myriads of adoring fans round the world, this meant the invention of the LongPen which enabled her to sign her books from the comfort of her own home. And yes, apparently it works but yesterday, she was signing for real. 

On this occasion, she showed us how she had rethought the traditional book launch. No mere reading or interview for her but ” a dramatic and musical presentation” of her novel, the promotion of a new book and a fundraiser for a good cause (in that case the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). The event took place in the Church of St James, Piccadilly.  It felt very much like a wedding. There was a sudden hush of anticipation and, eventually, Atwood walked up the aisle, last in a procession holding magical blue lights to the tune of a choir already on stage. She started by explaining this was the beginning of a three months tour but that she was offsetting her carbon footprint and would try to be vegetarian for most of the time, in tune with the topic of her novel, a dystopia on a world destructed by man’s folly, a world -she warned us- that we have partly brought upon ourselves.

Atwood sat in one corner of the stage, playing the narrator, while three actors played the different parts and a choir sang the hymns sung in the book by God’s Gardeners, a religious group devoted to the preservation of all plant and animal life. The result was thrilling and the audience really felt part of a very special and unique event. Judging from the queue of people at the end, it certainly also translated in hefty book sales (and yes, I did buy my copy even if it will now have to wait until March for me to be able to open it).

Now why am I telling you this story? I would obviously love to invite Margaret Atwood to JBW. There are enough themes in her book which should resonate with our Jewish audience: the Golem-like genetically spliced creatures which pullulate in this future world, the effort to repair the world (Tikkun Olam) by the Gardeners and our duty to the poor planet we live on, the role of religion, the idea of pure and impure foods (and by the way we are still awaiting news of Jonathan Safran Foer’s participation in JBW to launch his book on “not eating animals”, could vegetarianism be the new kosher?…). But I guess that by March, Atwood will be resting at home, deep into her next novel, so no hopes there.

No, her launch was an answer to a question any literary event organiser will ask him/herself: how do we present fiction? There is something terribly unfair in the exercise. Here is a writer, who has been sitting at home for months, lonely and free, suddenly forced to face the whole world and bare it all. We want the story and what is behind it. As with DVDs, we want to see the making of which is so fascinating.

Should we do Dickens-style straightforward readings? It can work when the author is enough of an actor to give an amazing performance and I have witnessed some of these but only too rarely. Most of the time, we seem content to have writers discuss their books. They usually end up explaining what is not fiction in a work of fiction, an exercise in paradox if there was one. They walk a fine line between revealing too much of the story and whetting their potential readers’ appetite. I have seen interviewers who had not read the book, maybe as a way of protecting the audience -who would not have read the book either- from too knowledgeable questions… I have also seen usually academic interviewers lecture the audience on the writer’s work while the poor author sat slightly dumbfounded and wondering what he was doing there. No one describes this better than Amos Oz in his latest novel, Rhyming Life and Death, and I could not feel but amused that it was the book he launched on his first ever visit to Jewish Book Week!

I did enjoy the performance at St James but I would lie if I said I did not prefer listening to Margaret Atwood’s excellent interview by Mark Lawson the day before on Front Row. Of course, in an ideal world, I would have loved to have both, one after the other.

And let’s not forget, as one of my friends said, a small independent publisher without Bloomsbury’s means, ” I cannot imagine what I would do if any of my authors came saying they want a book launch with a choir and actors!”.

But we will go on thinking about the best way to bring you literature. We all remember the success of the reading of Zangwill at JBW a few years ago (listen to the session) and we are planning more spoken words events but probably with new specifically commissioned material. So do watch this space for exciting developments and, in the meanwhile, let us know what you prefer when it comes to fiction: authors’ interviews, readings, Q&A or reading groups?

PS: I’ve just finished reading the most wonderful novel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, short-listed for the Booker Prize. Do read his interview and definitely read the book! I do hope I will have more to tell you about it in the future.

This summer I finally did something I had always wanted to: I visited the place where my father spent the war.

My family left the Ukraine in the early Twenties and eventually settled in Paris. In 1942, they still had not acquired French citizenship. My grandfather had made his way up in real estate and developed good connections. This is what saved him, my grandmother and their two sons. A friend tipped him off just before the infamous Raffle du Vel d’Hiv, when most foreign Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. They promptly left town with just their clothes on their backs (it was July). A friend of a friend was renting him out his farm in Creuse, not very far from Limoges, in the unoccupied part of France. Amazingly  my grand-father went to Vichy to register as farmer. A few months later, the whole of France was occupied and yet, nobody gave them away.

I grew up hearing about this place. My grandmother who loved to embellish things called it “le chateau” while my father told us about their two cows, the crops they planted, all the hard work involved in working the land. He was a young man then who had just been expelled after one year at medical school because of the racial laws. He was very strong but had always lived in the city. At first his brother stayed in Limoges during the week to finish secondary school but spent most of his time on the farm writing poetry.

Sadly my father died without taking us to Drouillas but this summer, a wedding in Dijon and one in Arcachon meant that we would be driving through that part of France I had heard so much about. My uncle gave me the directions and amazingly we managed to find the hamlet which is not even marked on the map. Then came the search for the farm itself.

There was one for sale more or less where I’d been told it would be.  The place did not seem to have changed much since the time. Most of the house is actually occupied by the barn and hayloft. The living quarters were fairly small with no bathroom of course. We managed to get in through a broken window. I did not make it upstairs, not trusting the crumbling stairs and kept back by the thick layer of spiderwebs. But was it really the right house?

We met a young woman who lived nearby. She did not know anything about the past. But she was keen to tell us her own story. She was an environmental saint:  grew all their food, had a dry toilet, was planning to home-school the children and actually building a new home, made of straw, for the whole family (after all her children might never be able to leave home in the new economic conditions) or, as a shelter for battered women. I tried to show her the irony of my family forced to live from the land, made good environmentalists by the War, but she did not show any sign of interest.

As we were ready to drive off, not entirely sure we had identified the right farmhouse, we met an old lady who looked at us curiously. And the miracle I had not entirely let myself hope for happened. She was a young girl then and her mother had just died but she did remember my family, particularly my father, the doctor (even though he was hardly qualified after just one year!), those foreign Jews, probably the first and last ones she ever met in her life and how kind they were. Over a glass of lemon syrup and cookies, she told us a story I had often heard too of how, towards the end, as the Germans were angrily retreating, everybody would go and hide in the fields, how, not very far from there, at Oradour, the whole village was rounded up in the Church which was then set on fire.

She had never moved away from that house where she had been born. She was very happy to have met us. And she did confirm to me we had been looking at the right house.

I had never felt closer to my father.

It is easy for people in the UK to criticise the French and what they did or did not do during the war. But who knows what would have happened this country. There were stories of abject cowardice and hatred but also of remarkable courage on the continent. In Drouillas, they were all in it together, the resistance, the men hiding from forced labour in Germany and those nice foreign Jews who were trying to blend in.

This is probably why I loved Suite Francaise so much. Irene Nemirovsky was able to show the full richness of emotions of a people who has lost its bearings. When I read David Golder, I felt endless tenderness for him, because I couldn’t help but making parallels with my grandfather I never met but who like Golder, spent his life trying to make money to escape the shtetl, the Bolsheviks and eventually the Nazis. And because, after all, this is the Jewish Book Week blog, I can say how deligthed I am to finally devote a session to this great writer with her biographer Olivier Philiponnat , her translator, Sandra Smith, and last but not least, her daughter Denise Epstein.

There are certain places which only seem to exist at certain times of the year, lending them an almost mythical quality. For me the Royal National Hotel is one of those places, it’s the centre of the world for 10 days of my year and then immediately fades away until the following February. Except this year…
When I arrived at the hotel in July for the Marxism festival, it was like stepping into a slightly different reality. The place was again a buzzing hive of bookish activity, with intense debates pouring from the rooms, occasionally jostling against lost-looking Belgian tourists in the lobby. Only now, the audiences seemed to eat less, drink more, be comprised of far more 20 year olds and wear many more kefiyas than we ever see during the February season. Kefiyas here are like hats at Ascot –officially optional but you’ll never really fit in without one.
My first session was on how to fight for women’s liberation today with editor of The Socialist Review, Judith Orr and Guardian columnist, Zoe Williams. Both panelists spoke brilliantly. I especially love hearing Zoe Williams speak. She manages to combine taking her politics seriously with being incredibly funny, all the while being so articulate that I find myself quoting her verbatim at dinner parties.  Here she spoke about the inevitable symbiosis between Feminism and Socialism (without Socialism, Feminism is just an insidious club where rich women help each other out). Questions at the end of the session were in a whole different format; in this world, after the panel have spoken, audience members have up to 3 minutes each to ask a question OR make a statement. This, more than anything else, astounds me. At JBW the microphone would have been wrestled away from the questioner after a minute and a half, especially if there was no hint of a real question. Our system suddenly seemed a little intolerant.

The first audience member to approach the mic fully exercises her 3 minute right and also exploits the lax approach to the question/statement dichotomy. This Australian woman expresses her disappointment with the range of Feminist books written in the past few years, focused, as they are, on issues around beauty or modesty rather than any serious social concerns. The next speaker spends her 3 minutes responding to the Australian woman and suggests that she read Sheila Jeffreys’ The Industrial Vagina. It’s the kind of title that might be generated by a random title generator if you were to type in the key words ‘socialism’ and ‘feminism’. I laugh until I realize that I am the only one in the room of 200 people laughing and that this book is, in fact, a real book. I text my friend Adele a summary of the situation, because she will find it funny too and I will feel less like a bad feminist but Adele responds immediately to say that Sheila Jeffreys taught her at university and she’s actually read the book (which is about the global sex trade.) That stops me laughing and now I really feel like a bad feminist.

The next session I go to is Michael Rosen’s. It’s a little like the shtick I’ve seen him do at JBW but alongside the jokes about growing up with smatterings of Yiddish around the house he also talks about his parents forays in the Communist party. He manages to recreate a sense of his childhood which makes his humour utterly charming and silly until everyone, not just the kids in the room are rolling around laughing.

Once again the kids ask all the best questions of the day. My favourite comes from a boy in the second row who asks Michael if he is happy. Only a matter of years until that turns into a 3-minute self-referential statement.
Afterwards, I go straight into the main session that night (if I can impress a notion of hierarchy on the proceedings); Alex Callinicos & Slavoj Žižek on what it means to be a revolutionary today. The debate was unlike any I had ever heard. I’m used to ideological debate (and I grew up in a socialist youth movement) but no one had ever actually talked about dismantling the state out loud. More overwhelming than the discussion itself was Slovenian philosopher, Žižek, who is one of the most compelling speakers I have ever seen. He turned what could have been a dry polemical debate into a fascinating examination into the human capacity for humour amidst darkness (and so much more).
As I was leaving I walked through their bookfair and noticed a familiar face at the signing desk. The face which each February enquires of all JBW writers whether they had considered the light of Jesus was now asking the same question to this cluster of Atheist writers – a reassuring constant.

I’m still doing my publishers’ rounds and collecting lots of interesting suggestions.

What’s interesting is the challenges that come out of these meetings. The first one is the question of the Jewish author. Now for most publicists it’s quite obvious: we are a Jewish book festival so we invite Jewish authors. Right? Well, not quite.

I hate inviting authors simply because their mother was Jewish. It makes me feel very bad. I would lie if I said we never do it but we usually try to find another excuse for having them. But this is not always easy to explain or justify. Actually you think we invited this author because he is Jewish but, no, we did because he writes about ethics, a very Jewish concept. In good faith then, why did we not invite another author who writes on the same topic and is not Jewish?… In some cases we have, but we must confess this is rare. Are we right to do so? Should we or not concern ourselves with these questions? How Jewish do you want your JBW to be?

The whole thing puts publicists who don’t have a Jewish radar in a difficult position and I can’t blame them.

Now the other situation is when there are no obvious Jewish connections but publicists are desperate to get their author a gig or we so love the book or the writer that we try to find a solution. We like to call it lateral thinking and I love it. For instance, what about a book by an Irish matchmaker and an Indian novel about arranged marriages. The challenge now is to find the book on a similar topic by a Jewish author so we could have a fantastic and fun session. The only thing that comes to mind at the moment is Fiddler on the Roof but inviting Sholem Aleichem might be problematic although I’ve just found out 2009 is the 150th anniversary of his birth. Or we could invite an author writing on the failure of marriage born out of love, proving the point that arranged marriages are a lot more successful and that certain things are better not left to chance…

Then here is a different challenge: I’ve read the most fantastic little book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and fiction writer. You may have seen the reviews (all unanimously enthusiastic) and the books in your local bookshop. It is an amazing feast of creativity, 40 tongue-in-cheek stories that still make you think. In some of them, God is a He, a She or a They. Sometimes there is no God at all. But they are all incredibly clever, funny and surprising. One can say that his exploration itself is Jewish if none of the suggested possibilities and so is he. Unfortunately for us he is based in Texas but we would still love him to come over. If not, maybe we could have late night readings. Well, we are exploring but in the meanwhile you can listen to his interview.

I had another treat recently. I went to listen to Susan Neiman at the LSE. She is a moral philosopher, the Director of the Einstein Forum and the author of the recently published Moral Clarity, A Guide for Grown Up Idealists. Her talk was on heroes and heroism. She made the very interesting distinction between Achilles, the romantic hero with a tragic destiny and Ulysses, the enlightenment hero who succeeds thanks to his intelligence, the cosmopolitan wanderer who eventually returns to his aging wife. Heroes don’t have to be martyrs although we like them to be as it gives us excuses for not following in their footsteps. She also raised the question of a culture which prefers victims to heroes and the danger of legitimacy coming from the world did to you rather than what you did to the world.

She mentioned some of her heroes, among them the little known Rosenstrasse protesters, 6000 courageous non-Jewish wives of Jews in Nazi Germany who demonstrated against the arrest of their husbands and obtained their release, 25 of them actually coming back from Auschwitz. There is a monument in these women’s memory done by the East German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, the grandfather of Julia Franck we recently blogged about, author of The Blind Side of the Heart.

In a bit more than one hour, Susan Neiman could only cover a small portion of her very rich book which I highly recommend. She has agreed to come to JBW and will definitely be a speaker not to be missed. Until then, why not tell us who are your heroes?

GDA

We are often asked how organising a 9 day festival can take us all year. Let us first say that we do not work full time but only 3 days a week, only going up to 5  in the period when we finalise the programme and then 7 in the run up to JBW itself. We promised you a look behind the scenes, here it is.What are we up to now? Mostly gathering information about possible speakers. We have written to publishers, we’ve got the catalogues but it’s always nice to meet face to face.

I went for instance to see Barbara Schwepke, the founder of Haus publishing in London. Her lovely office is on top of a boutique bookshop, very close to Sloane Square, selling mostly Haus books but not exclusively and a charming venue for small events. It is well worth a visit.  The place is so tiny that the furniture in her office is either antique camping chairs and tables which you imagine were familiar to the likes of Livingstone or a spectacular triangular desk (ideal for brainstorming) which was assembled in situ. Haus started with an interesting concept: short biographies, the kind you would read to know the essential about a major historical figure, while still displaying on your shelves the huge doorstopper you bought but never found the time to read… Since then, they’ve also published travel writing, general non fiction and are now launching into fiction in translation, Barbara’s old passion.

In these extremely difficult times, a small outfit like Haus can thrive because of very low costs and overheads. Contrary to the big publishers, they cannot afford to pay large advances to their writers or spend huge amount of money on marketing but they are also happy with small print runs. So knowing her readers and reaching out to the right audiences is essential, which makes taking part in a festival quite useful. Interestingly Barbara also sings the praises of Amazon at a time when bookshops won’t take risks and can definitely not stock all that is published in the UK.

She tells me of a forthcoming and very exciting biography of Clarice Lispector by Ben Moser. The Brazilian writer was famously described as looking like Marlene Dietrich and writing like Virginia Woolf. They will also be publishing one of her novels. Now we have to contact the author and decide what is the best format for the event: a talk on Lispector, a conversation between Ben and other writers who admired Lispector such as Cixous, readings of her work? This will all be decided in the coming months.

Barbara also tells me about a fascinating project: the publication of a series of books on the peace conferences of 1919 to 1923. There will be one book for each of the 32 delegations attending, published over 3 years. We may do an event around two of them: Chaim Weizmann: The Zionist Dream by TG Fraser and The Ashemites: The Dream of Arabia by Robert McNamara. This is the kind of long view project which might appeal to Jonathan Freedland.

A visit to Penguin is a completely different experience. First of all, I love going there because it is my ideal bike ride through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, down Green Park and along the Mall. Their stunning very modern offices are on the Strand over several floors of eerily quiet open plan desks but we meet in the break up area with very highbacked pods and a gorgeous view over the South Bank.  I see the lovely ladies from their various divisions who tell me about the wealth of authors we’d surely like to invite to JBW.

I find out that Marina Lewycka’s new novel We are all Made of Glue has an eccentric old Jewish emigre as one of her main characters. I look forward to reading it. We’d love Marina to come but unfortunately she apparently spends part of the year in New Zealand now so we just have to hope she’ll be in the UK at the beginning of March. William D Cohan’s book House of Cards, How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism will be published in paperback. A former investigative journalist and investment banker, he won the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The Last Tycoons. We know we definitely want to address the recession at the next JBW but at a time when we expect sponsors to be much less generous, we are not sure we can bring him over from the US; maybe we’ll be lucky and he’ll have planned to be in the UK at that time. Another possibility is Rupert Isaacson whom I heard at the Hay Festival. Penguin will most probably fly him back to the UK from Dallas to talk about The Horse Boy, the amazing story of his autistic son and how he reacted positively to shamans and horses and the tough but healing trip they took to Mongolia. I know he is a most inspirational speaker and, when I heard him,  he did joke about his Jewishness making him prone to feeling guilty. But when we know we’ll have fewer sessions next year, is that the right one for us? Then there is the republication by Penguin Classics of Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (with an introduction by Norman Lebrecht) and The Chosen, something definitely to be celebrated. Norman Lebrecht is full of ideas and we definitely want him on board. Sadly, there will be a new novel by Naomi Alderman but too late for us, snif!

I have been and will be talking to many more publishers. The pile of books to read is getting higher and higher. Then there are also the emails from writers getting in touch directly, often because they are self published. I wish I could say yes to every one but, unfortunately, it’s impossible.  Next year’s festival will be slightly smaller so we have to be very careful in our choices and combinations so you, our audience, have the best possible experience. We want to bring you the authors you love but also take you to the ones you’ve never heard about and that we have discovered for you. The only thing we need is your trust.

I found myself at the Goethe Institut for the first time ever. I felt a little guilty that it was the first time ever.
The event which drew me there was a conversation between A.S. Byatt and Julia Franck, a German novelist whose new book, The Blind Side of the Heart has just been translated into English (along with 28 other languages). There are two kernels to the story, the first pertains to the book’s German title, Die Mittagsfrau, or ‘The Midday Witch’, a dark folktale about a mother who warns her son that if he does not behave, the Midday Witch will take him away. He is frightened into good behaviour but the witch comes anyway and takes both mother and son away. The other narrative propellant is the abandonment of a small boy by his  mother in a train station in Eastern Germany shortly after WWII, an event which occurred within Franck’s own family. From there the story spirals backwards, unravelling the mother’s own troubled childhood. As Franck spoke, it became apparent that not only the book, but also her life possessed a fairy-tale quality of being simultaneously enchanting and totally terrifying. Read Norman Lebrecht’s review of the book.
AS Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book also mines themes of enchanted childhoods, this time Edwardian, an era sometimes considered the golden age of childhood.The book draws on E.T.A Hoffman’s classic tale, The Sandman and the protagonist, Olive Wellwood writes fairy stories and so gives rise to an imaginative cast of children who enact the stories in their puppet theatre.  You can read a review of the book from The Spectator.
It was a fascinating event, and both books jumped to the top of my enormous  ‘must-read’ list. It was also interesting to be at an event where I wasn’t privvy to the subtext. I’m sure many events at JBW also have this quality; a secret language referred to, which may baffle outsiders but reinforce a sense of identity to almost everyone there. My knowledge of German language and folk tales not re-told by the Grimm brothers is barely discernable.  Last year I went to a launch of a book on Kafka. In his introduction, the writer of the book explained that Jewish and German Culture were symbiotic and synonymous with High Culture at that time. All educated Jews, including Kafka, used German. After the talk I introduced myself to the writer, telling him I was from Jewish Book Week. He proceeded to tell me an anecdote from the time spent doing research on his book. Quoting a newspaper editor, he stopped and asked if I spoke German. I opened my mouth to say ‘No, not at all’ but, suddenly thought, I would appear less-than-educated, or even less-than-Jewish and found myself nodding, saying ‘Yes, of course.’ And I got what I deserved; a five minute anecdote entirely in German (with an added Yiddish joke at the end.)  I say ‘joke’ because the intonation suggested it, and I , appropriately, or inappropriately laughed. Since then, I’m quite open with my lack of German at these sorts of events.
I had another first this week, a Royal Literary Society event. This was with Elaine Showalter, who has just written A Jury of Her Peers, a study of American women writers. The event was a little tense at first as all the speakers were stuck in the tiny lift on the way up to the lecture theatre. The fire brigade came and rescued them and Professor Showalter, unshaken, talked wonderfully, and funnily about American women writers and the Brontes. We discovered that although Jane Eyre revolutionised the female literary community in the US, and of course made a great impact here in Britain, American men never read it, or if they had, never mentioned it, disregarding women’s writing in general as frivolous. Even now, women’s writing in the US is still not taken as seriously, whilst two male writers who share a writing style will frequently call themselves a school or a generation, something she wishes female writers would do more. You can listen to an interview of Showalter talking about her new book on Radio 4.
Now, how to get them all to the next JBW…

I was very excited to have been invited to a lunch in honour of Anne Michaels at the residence of the Canadian High Commissioner. I must first confess that I have not read Fugitive Pieces. However hard you try, you will always be caught out having missed out on a masterpiece. A lifetime of sitting at home and not doing anything else than reading would still not be enough so I have stopped feeling guilty. And I won’t pretend that having seen the film (which I highly recommend) could ever replace reading the book.

BUT I had read the Winter Vault and loved it. I read it too fast, in two days spent mostly on trains and by my mother’s bedside. It is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. It is unique in that you would not change or cut a word from it. You can see why it takes Anne Michaels years to write a book but, then, what a gift she gives us!

So I was really looking forward to that lunch. There she was, lovely, gracious and totally unassuming. The High Commissioner’s wife told me the story of how Fugitive Pieces won the Orange even though its publisher had not entered it for the prize. Luckily, at the eleventh hour,  someone told Lisa Jardine, who chaired the judges, about it and she read it in one night and decided to call it. We sat down to lunch. There were not many of us but I still found myself very far away from Anne but in lovely company. I finally had a chance to talk to her briefly over coffee, tell her how much I had loved the book and invite her to JBW. She took the compliment as if it really meant a lot to her and did not say no to another trip to London for us so fingers crossed.

In the evening I went and listened to her talk at the South Bank Centre. She read beautifully from the Winter Vault and was interviewed by Lisa Jardine. The novel is about dispossession, displacement and the impossibility of rebuilding exact replicas. She focuses on three such impossible reconstructions: two are caused by the building of a dam, one is the temple of Abu Simbel and the other the St Lawrence Causeway. How can a religious place keep its spirituality when it has been dismantled? Houses, graves, communities are part of the landscape they inhabit and cannot be simply removed and put back alike a few miles away. The other impossible replica is Warsaw’s old town, rebuilt on the rubble, as if copies of buildings could help the living forget the dead.

Grief, shame and loss at the core of the story. In the end it is about forgiveness and hope, only one drop of it is enough, it is so potent.

Anne Michaels also talked a lot about her relationship with her reader, her duty not to waste a word as a form of respect, the way she will pace the book to make her reader feel as well as think, to take him or her through difficult concepts and hold him or her close through hundreds of pages.

She certainly held me and I do hope she will come back to London for us. You can listen to her interview on Woman’s Hour.

Then last Thursday we had our own event with Zoe Heller and Patrick Marber at the British Library. If you missed it, you can now listen to the audio. They felt obliged to start by discussing Zoe’s Jewishness. This is I suppose to be expected when you take part in a Jewish Book Week event. Yet I almost felt like intervening and saying it did not matter. JBW is not about whether an author is Jewish or not but his/her relationship to Judaism. The Believers deals with faith in all its forms whether religious or political. One of the characters, as in Michael Arditti’s novel, rediscovers her Jewish roots and joins the Lubavitch. To me, this is what made the book relevant to JBW.

It is always fascinating to hear writers talk about the process of writing and in this case, also of adapting a book for the screen. I really enjoyed reading The Believers and wonder what the film will be like. Zoe seems to specialise in very strong women who don’t always elicit the readers’s sympathy. Audrey has often been described as a monster; she is irritating but I think her very flaws make her human. Zoe promised that there will be no such character in her next book. And Patrick revealed that he had just finished the script for Saturday by Ian McEwan, so another treat to look out for.

The week ended gloriously with a wonderful tribute to Harold Pinter at the National Theatre. The cast was more than impressive, with such great actors as Henry Woold, Jude Law, Henry Goodman, Colin Firth, Jeremy Irons, Sheila Hancock, Michael Sheen, Eileen Atkins and many more who read from Pinter’s poems, plays and Nobel Prize speech. The theatre itself was packed with actors, writers and members of the public come to give the great playwright a final applause.

We have been thinking of paying our tribute to Harold Pinter at JBW. We would do something different, inviting writers, film makers and actors to talk about his multifaceted personality, mixing anecdotes, tributes and readings. Tell us what you think of the idea. We have got our first programming meeting tonight and will tell you all about it next week. We’d love to hear back from you.

 

PS: I wasn’t invited to the Orange Prize Awards (sniff, sniff) but Tania Hershman was and we invite you to read her blog. She was commended for her lovely collection of short stories, The White Road, but things did not go as she expected…

 

The last two weeks have been very busy. First there was the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Awards, a lovely party in an art gallery in Mayfair. The company was brilliant and the food delicious.  The prize went to The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, translated by Michael Hofman. The novel based on the author’s experience in the camps has been compared to Primo Levi’s writing.  Published in East Germany in 1971, it was recently rediscovered and published here last year by Granta, sadly after Fred Wander’s death.  

The following week I was invited to the Muslim Writers Awards, a much grander affair: 600 people at a seated dinner at the Hilton Park Lane. There was a slightly akward moment when I was given a pink dot to stick on my clothes but I was promptly reassured that this was the VIP treatment. The award ceremomy opened and closed with prayers and there was no alcohol in sight but all the talk was about showing the world that Muslims can be writers, a positive force for good, not just terrorists. One felt the pain and irritation at being stuck in stereotypes. Shelina Zahra Janmohamed who hosted the first part of the evening was funny, lively and went on to win the Non Fiction Award for her book Love in a Headscarf. The fiction award (sponsored by the US embassy) went to Kamila Shamsie for Burnt Shadows. To find out more about the awards, do visit the website. It was a fantastic evening, I learnt a lot and hope they did get some coverage in the mainstream press, they deserve it.

Then Hay-on-Wye, the most fantastic festival, particularly when the sun is shining as it was this year. I only went the second week-end and what a feast it was. I listened to many fabulous speakers. I hope we will be able to bring you some of them such as Reza Aslan who explained brilliantly the difference between Jihadism and Islamism, Rupert Isaacson on the moving story of his autistic son, Stanley Greenberg on advising the great and the powerful and, hopefully, my friend Agnes Desarthe.

I was delighted to see Agnes at the Hay Festival, brilliantly interviewed by Philippe Sands. I have always been a fan of Agnes, ever since the wonderful Five Photos of My Wife. At the time I worked at the French Embassy and had had the pleasure of welcoming her at the Institut for a conversation with Anne Fine whom she translated into French (she also translated Virginia Woolf). It was also the occasion of my first visit to Jewish Book Week where she had launched her book.

Chez Moi is the story of a woman, Myriam, who opens a very special restaurant. She has no money and her restaurant doubles up as her home. She washes in the kitchen sink and sleeps in the dining room. Her restaurant is a utopia, a place to feed people food that will nurture them. Her first clients are two philosophy students who can’t afford to pay more than a few euros and whom she welcomes with open arms. We gradually discover that Myriam had a life before, a husband and a child and that she literally ran away with the circus…

The French title of the book was “Mangez-moi”, judged too sexy for an English audience.  “Eat Me” was a reference to Lewis Carrol. Like Alice, Myriam feels she is always the wrong size in the wrong place. She is a misfit trying to fit in and the success of her restaurant is that it becomes a haven for others. “Eat Me” is also the act of the mother feeding her baby. There is nothing more generous, more maternal and giving than feeding others. Myriam’s menus are full of brilliant and original ideas, they make people think and feel in new ways.

I won’t say more because you have to read this delicious book. You will find it most nourishing and will be suprised by its many layers. Here are a few questions I asked Agnes ahead of her visit and her answers.

- Myriam’s restaurant, Chez Moi, is a healing place for her and for others. How did you come to write this wonderful tale?

First to heal myself, I guess. I had been very disappointed by the literary world, having been member in a jury for a huge literary prize and witnessing all the shady scheming behind it. I just thought “why would anyone want to write a book when nobody seems to care wether it’s good or not. One should better cook! “
But then I don’t know whether Chez moi is a tale. I seem to have a problem with reality, When I read a book that’s supposed to be realistic, I think to myself: “What a strange vision this is!”. When I write, I try to be as close to my sensations, and my perceptions as possible, but then noone believes it.

- Chez Moi is a novel about hunger and the need to be loved. At the core of it, is the image of the bad mother. Why do you think this remains such a taboo?

I had no idea it was a taboo. I thought sleeping with a teenager was the taboo part of the book. But that seems to agree with everyone.
Bad mothers… I don’t know. We all are, aren’t we, never good enough. Myriam thinks she’s a bad mother, but that’s not what I think about her.
What is poignant in this character is that she lost access to motherly love. It’s there, somewhere in her, but she doesn’t know the way anymore.
Maybe it’s such a taboo because love has, what a shame, become a moral value.

-You are both a writer and a translator, how do the two nurture each other?

Tranlating enables me to explore parts of the lexicon and syntax that would otherwise remain dormant in me. By putting my feet in someone else’s boots, I accomplish travels that I would never have been able to make with my own shoes (always too small, always hurting).
And being a writer, I take writers seriously. I know writing is hard work and that if one chooses to write in a certain way it’s not only because he or she doesn’t know any other, but because that’s the way he or she wants it to be.

- What tip would you give to a would-be writer?

Let go of yourself, lose control!

Agnes Desarthe’s new book “Le remplacant” is not yet available in English but I hope it will be. It is a very personal essay about her substitute grand-father, the man her grand-mother married after the death of her husband in the camps, it was originally going to be a book about Korczak, both men having decided to look after and love children who were not theirs. Above all, it is a reflexion on the mystery of good which is so much more interesting than evil…