So many stories
Jersey background, Jewish roots enrich NJ native’s fiction

by Judy Wilson
a freelance writer in West Caldwell.
Special to NJ Jewish News

Sidebar Article: Ordinary people
Easier to keep quiet

I have no problem being called ‘that Jewish writer,’” Scott Nadelson said, after the July publication of his second book of short stories, The Cantor’s Daughter. “I always tend to write about Jewish characters because that cultural stance is very much a part of who I am and how I see the world — but not my primary motivation,” he told NJ Jewish News in a phone interview from Oregon, where the New Jersey native has lived and worked for the last 10 years.

“Jewish readers may be interested in what I’m doing,” he added, but it is apparent that Nadelson’s books have a broader appeal: His first, Saving Stanley, won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for 2005. This year he was short-listed for Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

Nadelson draws upon sites familiar to New Jerseyans as a backdrop for stories about people with names like Berkowitz and Kaufman. “Jewish is like New Jersey — it works for me as a setting. There is always an otherness about [Jews], even though my characters are secular. They keep themselves apart…. Jewishness in some ways creates this view of life. I don’t know if I can articulate [it] but growing up in a Jewish culture, we internalize some of that,” he said.

Nadelson, who teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., has capitalized on the differences between life on the East and West coasts. “The slower pace is good for my writing,” he said. “It’s really beautiful out here. I’m getting some distance from the place I grew up. I never expected to write about New Jersey but pretty much since I’ve moved out here, having that distance has worked for me. But when you know a place as intimately as the place that I grew up, I have it in my blood as no other place.”

Born in Morristown, Nadelson grew up in Denville, with strong roots in the Jewish community: His mother was principal of the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County and the family belonged to Morristown Jewish Center.

Potential to change

In contrast to his first book, Nadelson said, “the characters in this collection resemble me less.” They appear to be adrift in the world without anchors, but he sees something admirable in the way they struggle with the fear “of expecting too much or failing to meet expectations” — everyone from the two alienated brothers in “Rehearsal” who try to reconnect at a family wedding after a six-year separation to the successful but friendless go-getter in “The Headhunter.” And balancing some of the more painful episodes is Nadelson’s wit and his occasional gleeful skewering of contemporary foibles (see excerpt). As a result, he is surprised that some reviewers have used words like “bleak” and “dark” to describe his work. “I like to believe there is some humor, some joy, [but] I started this collection after 9/11. This book is about grief and I had some personal grief in the mix as well.”

His characters, he said, “are not people who go easily into the future. I have hope for some of them. They have the potential to change, to make a new place for themselves, even if they haven’t gotten there yet.” He has a special fondness for the women he creates. “I really enjoy writing about female characters. A lot of my male characters — they’re more afraid to look at themselves…. Female characters are more self-aware than males, less passive, and they have more opportunities… They are more dynamic characters than the men.”

It is unusual for a newly published author to produce two short-story anthologies in a row —and acclaimed ones at that — but Nadelson has chosen to write short fiction rather than novels. “I love the form,” he said, adding that it would be hard for him to spend the time writing a novel. “I have so many stories I want to tell.”

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Ordinary people

DON’T BE DECEIVED by the title. The characters in Scott Nadelson’s collection of short stories The Cantor’s Daughter may be Jewish by birth but they are more universal than ethnic in their perpetual search for connection — with friends, family, and even strangers. Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who wonders whether he dare risk laughter by eating a peach in public — the messy business of life — Nadelson’s characters are not sure they have the courage to shake up the present and change their future.

“Look at me,” 16-year-old Noa Nechemia says wordlessly to her father in the title story. Traumatized by the auto accident that scarred him and killed his wife, the cantor moves around the house like a victim of shellshock. Noa “knew he didn’t see any life for them other than the one they were living, and never would.” Equally grief-stricken and perpetually angry, Noa engages in a series of self-destructive behaviors — drinking, shoplifting, promiscuity — all designed to punish her father for the emptiness of her life and, most important, to force him to notice her. Nadelson gets it just right: the irrationality of anger, especially in the young, and the way that being powerless paralyzes the will. And best of all, he makes Noa a sympathetic character despite her behavior. Generously, he also allows her a moment of self-discovery that seems both believable and satisfactory — creating not a bleak story at all but a forgiving one.

Nadelson’s characters work hard at tamping down their expectations for fear of being disappointed. In “Half a Day at Halifax,” two ordinary people, a man and a woman, meet on a Carnival cruise ship, both reluctant passengers: “Neither of them belonged on the boat. That was what they shared….They were so relieved to find each other that first night, at the edge of the dance floor.” She, a big woman uncomfortable in her body, has already tried her best conversational gambits on others, only to be met with blank stares. He, awkward and insecure, has no social conversation at all and only a barely formulated desire to make a connection with someone. What they have in common, however, is a pile of emotional baggage and a conviction that “it was better not to hope.” The situation has all the ingredients for a romance — think Deborah Kerr in An Affair To Remember –— but here Nadelson has something more complicated in mind.

“I’m really interested in ordinary people and ordinary lives — and the strangeness,” Nadelson said. In these stories, he makes the isolation and loneliness of the human condition seem both familiar and odd.

— JUDY WILSON

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Easier to keep quiet

JAMIE HADN’T SAID a word for twenty minutes or more, but neither of her sisters could have been surprised. She’d always been the quiet one, the one who disappeared during dinner conversation. “The sensitive one,” they’d said dismissively when she was a girl. Since she’d grown up, they’d continued to explain her in the same offhand, condescending way, now saying sarcastically, as if exposing not only Jamie’s pretension, but all the pretension in the world, “the artist in the family.” To prove it they’d point out her clothes, always casual and slightly frayed, her pale complexion, her closely cropped hair. She never reminded them that her schedule didn’t allow her much time in the sun, or that she had to wear a uniform to work so that when she was off she only wanted to wear what was most comfortable…. They wouldn’t have listened if she’d told them her haircut was fashionable in the city and quite expensive, the one thing she always splurged on. It had always been easier to keep quiet….

Karen couldn’t cook anything that didn’t require a ten-step recipe from the Kosher Gourmet Cookbook, an hour of preparation, seven different spices, a sauce so rich that three bites made Jamie full. She’d finished her whole plate tonight, two chicken breasts in a sopping ginger glaze, a heaping side of wild rice, a mound of curried yams, ate every last crumb only to keep her jaws working, to prevent any words from spilling out of her lips.

— From “Walter’s Girls,” The Cantor’s Daughter, by Scott Nadelson