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-thank you so much, judy. this was such a lovely andthoughtful introduction. and also, thank you so muchfor so much warmth and support and just wonderfulconversation all year. and thanks to liz cohen forher generosity in so many ways, and to everyone else atthe radcliffe institute for this incredible fellowship. it's been not only massivelyproductive, but also just a really inspiring time.

i feel so lucky to be surroundedby fellows as brilliant and as kind as all of you. and huge thanks to sharon,and rebecca, and mervy, and katie for makingthe fellowship run so amazingly, andalso for having the answer to everything. it's pretty incredible. and thanks to you allfor being here today. so judy you mentionedthe unamericans,

which is my first book. it's a collectionof short stories. and it took me 10years to write, and that was, like, working allthe time kind of obsessively. and because of thesubject matter, i ended up doing anenormous amount of research in many countries. and so today ithought i would talk about how i putthe book together,

and then also just about howone goes about researching and writing a collection offictional stories, all of which are grounded, in one wayor another, in history. and throughout the talk,i'll read from my book. and then we can open it upinto a larger discussion. so i begin withthis deep interest in exploring this trianglebetween east european politics during the cold war,jewish american liberalism, and the effect thatthese two things had

on contemporary israel. and so it's no surprise thatthe stories in my collection moved from mccarthyera los angeles to contemporary tel aviv, tocommunist era prague and back again. but beyond that idea,i really had no idea what themes would connectthe stories or how-- or even if-- the whole bookwould come together as a whole. and the truth is that ifelt like i kind of had

to keep these crazy blinderson the whole time i was writing these stories, and just not toworry about any of that stuff. and to just trust thatonce i finished writing, the work itself would start totell me what these themes were. and that is basicallywhat happened, although it took a long time. and once the storiesthat ultimately made it into this book weredone-- and i should say there were so manystories that didn't make it

into the book and that endedup, like, in a secret drawer that i hope no one ever looksin because they're so bad. but once the stories that madeit into the book were there-- and i remember havingthem all printed out. and i put them onthe floor of a room. and every day i would kind ofgo in and stare at the stories and shuffle them around. and i was trying to figure outboth the order of the book, but also how these were allthreaded together thematically.

and what i realize is thatthey weren't put together by a particular place or by aparticular voice, as so many of my favorite collections are. they move around the globethroughout almost a century of history. and they're narrated by womenand men, younger, older, american, israeli, and european. but rather, in the length therewas this underlying question that was just sort ofthrumming beneath the surface.

and the question was, what arethe complicated and sometimes devastating effects thatone person's attempts to improve the world can haveon the people closest to them? and so that's what thesestories are really about for me. so first of all, i'll turnto the stories in israel. i've spent a lot of my adultlife going back and forth between the us and israel. i used to work for anonprofit there, and also at an immigrationabsorptions center

for ethiopian andrussian immigrants. and the first connotation thatthe word "unamericans" has, i think for most of us,is the mccarthy era. but as i worked on thebook, i became so interested in this complex meaningthat the word unamerican might have to this currentgeneration of israelis who are forced to contend everyday with their country's very messy but incrediblyclose relationship to america. so for example, inone of my stories

i have an israelisoldier who deeply resents having to defend asettlement filled with brooklyn born religious families,but still pines for a chance to visit the us for himself. and i also foundmyself exploring this idea of unamericannessin terms of privilege. so for example,in another story, i have a workingclass israeli narrator who has been living inthe us for a decade.

and he doesn't atall feel american. whereas his wealthyamerican wife can just globe trot throughout the middle eastwith utter confidence and ease. and so that feltreally interesting for me to think about,the way that money works into that idea. and so what i wantedto do, as i said, i'll be reading a bitfrom my book as i talk. and so i wanted to read froma story called "a difficult

phase," which is about ayoung israeli journalist named talia who's stationed inukraine and whose career and ultimately her life isupended by america's most recent economic crash. and i'll just read a couplepages about her life in keiv. and everyone can hear me, right? i just got up and startedtalking, so-- ok, good. so her name is talia. and here we go.

"when are you comingback," her parents would ask duringtheir weekly calls. they thought she wasinsane for wanting to report on the verycity her grandparents had worked so hard to leave. the moment taliaheard their voices she felt as if she'd beenyanked across the mediterranean and transported back home. her father on the porch,listening to the radio.

her mother always besidehim, shelling fava beans or peeling beets. her two sisters chasingafter their toddlers while their husbandsrelaxed on the lawn. things are workingout here, talia would tell them, wonderinghow just having them on the end of the linecould make her feel as defensive as she'd been at 16. and the truth was thatthings had been working out.

talia had wantedto be a reporter since she could remember. and it had stunned her,sitting in her cubicle in kiev, that her life wasactually unfolding the way she'd fantasized. she'd started at the jerusalembureau of an american paper right out of college doingwhatever grunt work was needed, filing, fact checking,going on coffee runs when the intern was busy.

but her english was nearfluent, and after years of begging and badgeringthe bureau chief, he finally started giving herwork, as if the very behavior that had gotten hersent to the corner as a child was the thingthat garnered his respect. it was true, hesaid, that she was living in one of the hardestcountries to find staff jobs. no one ever left theirpositions at the israeli papers. and reporters fromall over the world

competed for workat the foreign ones. but with her languageskills-- probably the one time her slavic literaturedegree made her more employable-- he'dlobby the higher-ups in chicago to send her to kiev ifthings got bad enough to need someone on the ground. that was four years ago,in the fall of 2004. and talia rememberedsitting in the flickering fluorescent-lit conferenceroom of the jerusalem bureau

watching it all unfoldon tv, the election fraud allegations, ushanko'sterrifying, ever-changing face, and holding onto a shameful,selfish hope for things to keep spiraling. she'd always felt so enviousof the other reporters at her paper in jerusalem. none of them israeli,all of them cabbing over to the bar at theamerican colony hotel every night afterwork as if living out

some vintage fantasy. they were all smart. they all spoke the language. many had relatives thereand knew the country even before they were hired. but there was something soromantic about the way they saw their jobs, sinking intochairs in the garden bar, press passes stilldangling from their necks. immediately launchinginto thrilling tales

at how they were thisclose to danger that day before pausing and taking ahandful of the free cashews on the table. even her bureau chief-- whomtalia genuinely admired-- still acted asthough he was playing the part of thedaredevil reporter, always driving himselfinto the territories, traveling with aseparate passport through lebanon and syria asif relentlessly performing

for a rapt imaginary audienceback home in chicago. it had always botheredtalia, listening to them debate her country's politicswhen it was implicitly understood that the momenttheir brushes with danger went from being this closeto way too fucking close, they could leave. but then she was giventhe same opportunity to be lifted from herlife and plunked down in a place to whichshe had an even

flimsier connection than manyof her coworkers had to israel. and she found herself guiltyof that same excitement. anyone would havefelt it covering the demonstrations, of course. but she'd been just asamped in the months that followed, sitting in thestuffy, windowless media room in the district courthouse or transcribing at her desk for hours, eatingmeal after meal of crackers with chocolate spread.

as if everythingtook on a significant she'd never feltback home, the thrill of living on the otherside of the glass. i'll stop there. so as i keptworking on this book and was workingon these stories, i kept thinking about thisnotion of unamericanness also for my easteuropean characters. and those characters aredissidents and academics,

banned artists and writerswho risk their lives for their politics andtheir mother countries only to come tothe us, where they have to reinventtheir identities and where they're treatedas anything but american. and i kept thinking aboutthis really complicated emotional impact thatthe fall of communism might have had for mycharacters during that time. like, what is it liketo dedicate yourself

to a cause-- for thesecharacters in this case, it's defeating communism-- that,in the course of world events, is ultimately successful, andtherefore it comes to an end? and i wonderedwhether some people might have had a nigglingfeeling of nostalgia for this incredibly bleaktime simply because they held a significant place in it. for so many of my characters,their entire sense of self is shaped by theirpolitical work.

and i felt like i wasspending so much time just trying to understandtheir political lives. and i wanted to explore howhaving lived under surveillance in eastern europe influencestheir lives once they immigrate to america, wherethey quickly realize that not only are theyno longer being watched, they're not even being noticed. and so i wanted nowto read a couple pages from a story that's inconversation with this idea.

and the story is set in thisfictional college town in maine where a former czech dissidentnamed tomas is teaching. and he has a supremelyfractured relationship with his ex-wife, katka,and their daughter, daniela. and he has just learned thathis daughter daniela-- who is in her 20s-- has writtena play about their family, and that it's going tobe produced off-broadway. and he's just a disaster. and he is massivelyparanoid and terrified

that the play is going toexpose him and his shortcomings as a father. and so he strong-arms hisdaughter into a weekend up in maine so that he canget his hands on the play and attempt to revise it. so that's the story. and i'll read a few pagesas he prepares for her visit and looks back on theseearly years in america. and the story is called"the quietest man."

and you can all just picture meas a paranoid, middle aged man as i read. so, "the quietest man." ok. and so, again, daniela is thedaughter and katka is the wife. daniela was two whenkatka and i separated. she was bred on a lifetime ofher mother's tales about me. katka, i imagined,would begin by saying that i was the onewho dragged her

to america in the first place. in prague, we had writtenanonymously with our colleagues for the journal, thechronicle of our time. we wrote by hand. the government had a record ofeveryone who owned typewriters. and late at night, i'd sneakinto different university buildings to type the materials. every time we finished anissue, we'd distribute it to people we knew, whothen passed it along

to people they knew, untilwe have thousands of readers throughout the country. but when the governmentstill managed to link me to a typewriter, iwas brought in for questioning and fired from my teaching post. at the time, katka hadseemed like the lucky one. she was on maternity leave thatterm and so avoided suspicion. but it was my name peoplechanted outside the university. it was my name that madeinternational headlines

and reached the deskof saul sandalowski the american professorwho campaigned to get me a visa and a teachingjob to avoid imprisonment. she'd tell daniela about packingour entire flat in three days before boarding the longflight to the states. she'd talked aboutthe brick faculty apartment thatawaited us in vermont, boxy and carpeted and new. a million times nicer than ourflat back home, but dimly quiet

without our friends crowdedaround the living room, chatting away the evening. she talked about how myassistant professor's salary barely covered our rent. and she'd talked aboutworking the early morning shift as a janitorat the college, mopping the same mahoganyclassrooms i lectured in, emptying the garbagecan full of my students crumpled napkins andpaper coffee cups.

katka came from a longline of intellectuals. she was the one who wassupposed to be offered a professorship in america. her father had been shippedto a psychiatric prison for writing his ownanti-government pieces when katka was still a baby. and an enormous partof her childhood was watching her mother devoteherself to getting him out. i remember katkaback in university,

and trying to impressher with my big ideas, only to realize thepolitical books i was reading for the first time were oneshe had already dissected and gleaned anunderstanding of years ago. there was somethingso romantic-- almost exciting-- about watchingthis brawny college girl reduce my ideas to a lumpypile of porridge, making me feel not like arising star at the university, but what i knew ireally was deep down,

a skinny kid from a familyof uneducated dairy farmers. a big part of mehad always believed i was destined toride her coattails. i could see how hard themove to vermont was on her. i could see it in the wayshe closed into herself when i dragged her to cocktailhour at the provost house. the way even meeting me fora quick lunch before class made her anxious. the woman who had once stoodoutside party headquarters

chanting "ststb equalsjust the gestapo" was suddenly afraid to orderat the campus sandwich shop because she didn'tunderstand the menu. at this point, katka wouldsay the transition would have been difficultno matter what, but that i certainlydidn't help. she'd say even when i washome i wasn't really there. at the dinner table, or liftinga crying daniela from her crib, i always seemed to be silentlyworking on another essay.

how i ducked into my studyat every possible moment, how birthdays andanniversaries slipped into a murky, irretrievableplace in my mind. but how i never seemed to forgetthe dates of saul sandalowski's dinner parties. and she would be right. but those dinners! saul with his floppy,wheat-colored hair and shirt sleeves rolled to his elbowsclamping a hand on my shoulder

as he led me inside. his stone house onseminary road, so amazing and grand i always got lostlooking for the bathroom. i was the honored guest, theman with the stories scholars and journalists andphilanthropists wanted to hear. and so, over glasses of wine,i told him about the two stb officials waiting outside thepolitical science department. "tomas novak," one had said. and i had said, "whydo you need to know?"

and they dragged me intoa black service car. it was late april,sunny but cold. and as we pulledaway from the curb, i saw people outsidethe university staring away orfeigning conversations so they wouldn't be witnesses. in the headquarters,the officials led me down a long hallwayinto a windowless room with white walls and a steeldesk with a green-eyed,

round faced man behind it. he calmly asked me to namethe other writers involved in the journal. i refused. he asked again. he asked again and again,so many times that the hours began to blur, andi couldn't tell if we'd entered the next day. all over czechoslovakia,writers were

breaking down and naming names. but did they really believesleep deprivation would crack a father with a newborn,i joked to saul's guests. though i remembered themoment i'd started to cry, sitting in that hardbackchair as i recalled stories of people broughtin for questioning and never heard from again. the lights were bright. and one of the chair legswas shorter than the others,

so i felt as if i wasperpetually sliding off. and every time inodded into sleep, the man would slam his deskdrawer shut, jolting me awake. but i continued to refuse. and when one ofsaul's guest would ask where that bravery camefrom-- as someone always did-- i'd tell them we all had areserve when we needed it most. i believed that,though sometimes i wondered if i couldever depend on it again.

when i was finallyreleased, word spread. and i became famousamong other writers. they called me the quietest man. yet, as i circled saul'sliving room with brubeck on the stereo and little salmoncrudities being passed around, i understood i could finallyname the names of the chronicle writers without consequence. so i told them about katkanovak, my brave, brilliant wife, who unfortunatelywasn't here

this evening because wecouldn't find a sitter, i lied. when in truth, she really wantedto leave the apartment anymore. my wife, who, forthe four days i remained quiet in theinterrogation room, was anything but. with a newborn on herhip, she led rallies outside the university,marching through the streets and up to a podiumin wenceslas square. she spoke withsuch force that she

persuaded an american reporterto write a piece about me. so while people with lessevidence against them were jailed, enough supportcame through that my family and i were givenemergency clearance. and when i describedkatka to saul's guests, it was like she wasback up on the podium, drawing so large a crowdthat children climbed the trees to glimpse her. but then saul'sdinners would end,

and i'd tiptoe intoour silent apartment and find the new katka inbed with the lights off. "you awake," i'd whisper,a little drunk off the wine as i ran a finger alongher pale freckled arm. "no," she'd say, rolling over. and it was only hourslater as the sun came up and i walked her through campusthat she'd unlock the lecture hall with her chunkyring of janitors keys and say, "imagine eating alonewhile i was at dinner parties."

that's how katka was. she'd pick up aconversation i thought had ended eons ago withoutever reintroducing the topic. "i'm not saying we go home. i know we can't," she'dsay. "but maybe new york. somewhere," she'd said,"with people like us." somewhere that didn't feellike the edge of the earth. but before i could answer,the first students of the day would breeze pastus as if we were

no more significantthan the chalk boards and long woodendesks that filled the room. katka continued to push theidea of moving to new york. but things were changingfor me at work, and fast. katka said i was being selfish. i told her i was workinghard for all of us. she said i owed it to ourdaughter to be home more, that if i didn'tconsider her feelings, she'd leave me andtake daniela to stay

with her cousin in queens. i begged her not to, butthere was a secret part of me that wanted herto go, that longed to be free from theresponsibility of my family. i wasn't ready to leave vermont,not when i felt my life there opening up wider and wider. of course, i didn'treally expect a woman with no money and nextto no english to leave. and it was only when imade the first custody

drive down the taconicthat it actually felt real. of course, i didn't expectkatka to find steady enough work cleaning houses in newyork, or that she'd parlay it into her own businesswith a dozen employees. and of course, i didn't expectthat three years after katka left, communism would collapseand the work i dedicated my life to would be done. that the dinner discussionsat saul sandalowski's would suddenlyrevolve around bosnia,

and that a young female serbwould become saul's newest honored guest. and i certainly didn'texpect that same woman to win tenure over me. that my 30s and 40swould be about mastering the delicate tricky danceof pleading for adjunct work up and down the east coast,albany, durham, burlington, and now for the pasttwo years, in harpswick, maine-- which, if katkahad thought of vermont

as the edge of the earth,would have made her feel she'd fallen off completely. so thanks. and the other thing that iwanted to talk about today is family history and theway that those elements worked their way intothe writing of the book. and judy mentioned this essay. and i have to say themost exciting thing. so i had wanted to talkabout this woman from antopol

that i had met at this friendof a friend's party in haifa. and this was back in 2000. i had just graduated college,and i was living in israel. and then i walked in here togive a talk, and i met a man. and david and kitty-- whoi just met 20 minutes ago-- and their family is fromthe village of antopol. and they brought the book. so that was really exciting! so, it was just likei wanted to cry!

i felt so emotionalright before this talk. so it's just so incredible. and so thank you so muchfor bringing this book. and there aren'tthat many of them. yeah. so i would like to talka bit about this book. and as judy had said,so i had met this woman. and you know, iwas at this friend of a friend's party in haifa.

i think the only personi knew at the party was the friend who'd invited me. so i had no one totalk to at this party, and this is how thisinteraction happened. i was standing bythe dessert table just kind of eating dessertsand having no one to talk to, feeling embarrassed. and then i went to the kitchento have something to do. and i met thiselderly woman who judy

mentioned in her introduction. we started chatting, and i thinkit was about 30 seconds of me trying to chat with her upwith her in hebrew when she was like where are you from? and i said america. and she said, no, no, no. where are you from? california. no, where are you from?

we got to antopol. and i found out that thiswoman was from antopol. and it was genuinely one ofthe most extraordinary moments of my life. i come from of a bigfamily of storytellers. and so growing up,i had just relished these tales of all of thesetimes before i was born. so i had heard aboutthis battered vw bug that my parents had livedin before i was born,

and then when i was little. it was nicknamed "blue"after the joni mitchell album that i just remember onrepeat my entire childhood. and then before that, thegeneration before that, my grandfather had been reallyactive in the communist party. and i had heard so many storiesfrom my mom and her siblings about those dinnertimevisits from the fbi. you know, always rightat dinner time, always these two men in thesestiff brown suits

asking my grandfather ifhe had a moment to talk. those were the storiesthat i heard so many times. and then as judy mentioned,i had also heard stories about my namesake,my great grandmother molly, who had come fromthis village of antopol. and who had basically had toleave her entire family behind, went to work in thesweat shop that was run by another cousin of ours. and she didn't make enoughmoney to send her family over.

but besides that,i just knew nothing about where molly was from. and i knew nothingabout this place. and it was just thiskind of dark place that no one in myfamily talked about. and even the funniestrelatives just kind of didn't know how to twistthat into a good anecdote. and so nobody talked about it. and i had spent allof these years trying

to summon an image ofthis place or that time, and i didn't know how. and so meeting that womanand finding that book was incredibly life changing. and it's funny, because i mean,i'm only here for the term. so i don't havethe book with me. so the fact that the book ishere while i'm talking about it is pretty mind blowing. and so i wanted todescribe it a little bit.

so as judy talked about,it's a yizkor book. it's a memorial book. it's a memorial book basicallyfrom all of these villages that were basically justdestroyed during the holocaust. and so there arethese books that are published byformer residents, or by aid societies asremembrances of communities and of people lostduring the holocaust. and it's this enormous,i think really carefully

and beautifullyput together book. you can just feelthe careful bindings and in the thicknessof the pages that people just put so mucheffort into creating this book. and one of the things that iloved the most about this book and that captured me themost were the accounts of the villages partisanfighters, teenagers who escaped the ghettosduring world war ii, and joined theseunderground resistance

movements in the forestssurrounding antopol. and growing up in the states,i had known very, very little about the partisans. but in israel i wasliving there that year and working with teenagers. and i was learning that it wasbasically an essential part of the school curricula. and that was sointriguing to me, that in israel they weren'tteaching the holocaust

just as a story about victimsand about innocent lambs being led to the slaughter. but rather that, amongthese tales of the camps and the ghettos that theywere teaching in the schools, there existed thisother narrative that was being taught,which was the story of jews fighting back. and to the russianof the chechen kids that i was working with thatyear at the absorption center,

the lithuanianpoet abba kovner-- who was a partisan fighter whowent on to live in israel-- was considered a nationaltreasure to them. and they were readinghis poems in class. and growing up in the states, ihad never heard of abba kovner and for so manyyears, i had just wondered about all ofthese people from the past. all of the people who had stayedantopol, and all of the friends and the neighborsand the relatives

that molly had left behind. and i did really feel thatsuddenly finding this book, it was as if i finally gotaccess to these stories and into these voices. and i became obsessedwith this book. i carted it around withme everywhere that year. it was really theyear that i first started planting the early seedsof what would become this book. and really drawingon my family history,

whether they were themccarthy era stories or the liberalism of the 70s. and i suddenlyfelt like i sort of had the access andthe authority-- i thought-- to be able towrite about this place and time as well. and it would be soperfect to tell all of you that i read all ofthese books and that it was incredibly helpfuland illuminating for me.

but the truth is that i foundthis bookstore in tel aviv that wasn't far from where i worked. and it was on allenby street. and it was behind thiselectronics repair shop and the sephardic luncheonette. and i would go in thereevery couple days. it had this seemingly endlessresource of jewish history books in english. and the guy, the owner, i wouldalways stop and chat with him.

and i remember he waskind of large and balding, and his clothes were so rumpledthat he kind of resembled an overstuffed drawer. and i remember he lookedat me one day and he said, i have never met anyone with amore depressing taste in books. and i thought, that is true, ok. but i have to say-- and you too? judy and i share that. so i had this depressingtaste in books.

and i just read, andread, and read everything that i could find about partisanlife all around that area. and it would be so perfectto report now to all of you that i had finished thatwhole stack of books that i got from thebookstore on allenby street with this really sharp andnuanced picture of antopol. and that i finallyfelt like i had the knowledge and theauthority to write about this farawayplace and time.

and then on weekends,i went and hung out with this woman inhaifa and we drink tea and bonded and swappedstories and became friends. but the truth is is that inever heard from her again. and i think that, to her,i was the american girl who showed up at a party,cornered her by the sink, and asked way toomany questions. which is fine, and that's true. but i will say that everythinghad just felt so clear when i

was reading that antopol book. because it's so enormous. and it's so detailed. and it contains sucha myriad of voices, that i had reallywanted with everything to believe that it wasthis pillar of fact. but the more books that i readand the more research that i did, the more my doubts grew. because suddenly, puttingall these books together,

all of these inconsistenciesstarted to come out. so i had read a dozen bookson partisan life near antopol and still i had questions. in fact, i had more questions. so one person wouldrecount subsisting solely on blackberries andmushrooms in the encampment they set up in the forest. another person livingin the same forest during the same chillyautumn in brutal winter

described the weekly villageraids, pillaging bread from peasants kitchens,livestock from their farms, potatoes and turnips andonions from their gardens, all cooked over a fire in theirmakeshift outdoor kitchen. one writer mentionedthis plethora of weapons that he and his partisanbrigade stole from peasants in nearby villages. another person again, livingin the exact same forest during the exact same time,described the one snub nose

revolver that the brigadehad to gingerly pass around and the spent bullets thatthey had to pry from the forest floor to reuse again and againbecause that was all they had. and you know i haveto say that i've never believed that it's afiction writers job to create an exactreplica of the past. i deeply, deeplybelieve that it is not. i don't think thatwe should be trying to create a diorama fora reader to step into.

i think we have civilwar reenactments. i think we havehistorical home tours. and it doesn't needto happen in books. and it definitely doesn'tneed to happen in fiction. but i think that itis my responsibility to learn everything about theworld that i'm writing about, and to try really hardto become an expert. because i think that, inorder to truly understand my characters and to try to makethem feel real and empathetic

to my readers, ihave to understand the politics and the historythat influenced who they are and influenced their decisions. and that's the onlyway that i know how to make the imaginedfeel authentic, which is what i'm trying to do as a writer. and the question is, what ifthese details don't add up? and what if, despite monthsor years of research, i remain uncertain as to wherethe truth actually resides?

and how else can i gleanfacts about a village when there's no one left in thatvillage to answer my questions? i've always lovedthis idea that memory isn't a precise duplicateof the original. that it's not, instead,it's this continuing act of creation. and whenever i thinkabout memory in that way, i envision all ofthese partisans from belarus whochose to relive some

of the darkest moments in theirlives for the sake of a book. and i can't believe that itcrossed any of their minds that one day, more than70 years after the war ended and they'd left the woods,that an american writer would be comparing details fromone book against another, neurotically worryingwhether blackberries really grew rampant in the forestin the autumn of 1942. i can't believe it. but rather, i imagine thatby writing these books,

or by allowing biographersto write about them or people to interview them,that they were attempting to make senseout of a harrowing history and trying to kind of controlit and shape it through language and through telling the story. and i think thatas a writer it is important to focuson the blackberries and these other kind of details. but where these factsdon't jibe, no matter

how deeply i research,no matter how many books i read andarchives i visit, i think my job as afiction writer is not to impose order ona host of disparate and often contradictoryfacts, but rather to adhere to thedeeper emotional truth of my characters. so whether they ate blackberriesor whether they ate turnips, and whether they carrypistols, rifles, or sticks,

they were living, hunted,in a freezing forest with no anchor to the livesthat they had once known. and what does that feel like? and what does thatdo to a person, both there in the forestand-- for the lucky ones-- when they trudged out, filthy,exhausted, and bone thin? what does that do to someone? and i have to say that i'vecome to this realization over, and over, and over.

it has hit me at some pointin every single story i've written, all the storiesthat made it into the book at all the stories thathopefully will never make it anywhere. and it's the advicethat i would give to anyone who's writinganything kind of based in real life,which is, nail down the facts to thebest of your ability, and then mine them for truth.

and once you've done that,you've earned the license to make the rest up, and that'swhy they call it fiction. so i'll just witha flash fiction piece that i wrotethat was inspired by all of this research. and this piece ultimatelybecame a longer story in the collection. maybe you've heard this story. 1942, and a winter socold my grandfather

watched hot soupfreeze in a bowl. he was living in theforest with other teenagers outside antopol. maybe you heardabout the weapons he robbed from nearby peasants. maybe you heard aboutthe sticks of dynamite he set alongmilitary rail routes, waiting for them tospark and explode. maybe you heard about the bearhe chased out of the woods.

when i was a kid we'dspend summers in tel aviv, squeezed into hissweaty kitchen, picking at a bowl of grapeswhile my mother fixed us lunch. he had a deep tanand a big voice, white hair parteddrastically to one side. he liked to sit around inhis undershirt and sandals and tell stories, stories i halfbelieved, but still repeated to my friends likegospel of secret missions and near escapes.

and always, always at somepoint, he and my father would argue. my mother and i could neverpredict what set them off. it was like watching abarometer rise from zero to 80. and suddenly, it wasas if the two of them had taken up all theoxygen in the apartment, and my grandfather wouldstomp out to the patio. and my father would say to us,"he's always been like this. the war is over 70 years,and still he's in it.

he hate everything." and my mother would say,"nahum, calmed down." and my father wouldsay, "i am calm." and then she'd giveme the look, and i'd pack up our uneaten lunchand take my grandfather around the block to the park. "i worked 40 years at theshoe store," he'd say to me. "i turned it into a franchise. you tell your father that'slooking forward, not back.

and i don't hate everything." he didn't walk the streetsso much as patrol them. "i love my apartment. i love the heat. i love you. i love this park," hesays, gesturing wildly. i watch filipino womenpush the very young and the very olddown the path, watch two teenagers, barefooted inbedouin pants, chase a frisbee.

"i love this bench," he says. "it's our bench." but then he startspopping his knuckles like he does when he's antsy,and i know this can't go on. "but i don't love thatsquirrel, he blurts. it's nothing but arat with a fancy tail. and those kids, they'relazy at frisbee. why aren't they in school? give me that bag," he says.

and when i do, he lays out ourlunch-- boiled eggs and pita and fruit salad-- and says,"i don't love the berries at supersaul, they're mush. i ate better ones that yearin the forest, no joke. all winter it was potatoes,potatoes, potatoes. but come summer,blackberries were everywhere. see? that's me being positive. give me a napkin.

give me a fork. give me that stick over there,"he says, "it's a good one. you see this? long and so straightthat at night, they might mistake it for a rifle. hold it up like this, andno one can ever hurt you." thanks.