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(JTA) — Sooner or later throughout my studying of Zachary Solomon’s debut novel, “A Brutal Design,” I wanted to lookup Duma, the utopian city-state the place the novel is ready, and see if it’s a actual place.
It isn’t, however it’s richly imagined: Duma is an “experiment within the desert” the place “alternate ideologies might be put into observe with out menace.” Its idealism is expressed in its structure — modernist residence blocks, plazas and factories that seem to attract on Twentieth-century actions like Bauhaus and “Brutalism,” the minimalist, utilitarian design pattern that emerged within the Nineteen Fifties.
However Duma is just not what it appears, as Solomon’s Jewish protagonist, Zelnick, learns quickly after he arrives hoping to take a job as an architect. Like Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” or Aldous Huxley’s “Courageous New World,” Solomon’s novel is concerning the sinister aspect of social engineering. Duma seems to be a spot that recreates the evils of a world it’s meant to switch — together with antisemitism, racism and a strict caste system.
Set in what might be an alternate timeline, “A Brutal Design” joins a rising style of Jewish “speculative fiction” — assume science fiction with out aliens, time journey or something you couldn’t discover in the true world. It’s a style that ranges from Franz Kafka’s absurdist fables to Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel, “He, She and It” to Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Extra just lately, the Israeli-born author Lavie Tidhar has written novels a couple of future, post-Israel Tel Aviv (“Central Station”) and an alternate Jewish homeland in Africa (“Unholy Land”). “Different Covenants,” an anthology of Jewish alternate historical past tales, was printed in 2022.
Solomon, 34, says he’s obsessive about fashionable artwork, structure and the Jewish situation. Writing about an alternate actuality, he instructed me, allowed him to “experiment with these concepts and see the place they take us in a manner that’s rather more troublesome to perform than when you could have characters which can be strictly actuality primarily based.” He welcomed the problem.
Solomon grew up in Miami and attended Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has lived in Boston, Brooklyn and Columbus, Ohio, and was a contributor to Jewniverse, a web based almanac of Jewish tradition and historical past. (Jewniverse was a mission of 70 Faces Media, the Jewish Telegraphic Company’s mother or father firm.) He acquired an MFA from Brooklyn School, the place he was a fellow of the Truman Capote Literary Belief.
He lives within the Hudson Valley along with his spouse, the novelist Mandy Berman, and their child, who arrived simply weeks earlier than “Brutal Design” was printed on Jan. 30.
We spoke final week concerning the persistence of antisemitism, the failure of Holocaust memorials and the way a very ugly library turned out to be the very best place to write down a dystopian novel.
The dialog was edited for size and readability.
The everyday debut novel is a bildungsroman — a coming-of-age novel. Or it’s a realist novel set in school or the creator’s early maturity. What drew you to dystopian, speculative fiction in your first printed e-book?
My first novel was, in actual fact, a couple of post-college pupil and neurotic Jew residing in Brooklyn and encountering artwork and, you understand, sexual frustration. However whereas I’m nonetheless pleased with that, I couldn’t get an agent for it. My second e-book was my try to write down the extra mature novel, but it surely wasn’t nice and I nonetheless couldn’t get an agent with it. So after six, seven years of writing books, I wrote what I believe is the truest expression of who I’m, which is a really unusual e-book that wears its obsessions fairly nakedly. I really like modern artwork. I really like structure. I can’t assist however write about Jews. I can’t actually get away from the Holocaust. For this e-book, I wished to attempt to write a e-book that might make me really feel the best way that I really feel once I see or learn or expertise a chunk of artwork: I wish to be freaked out. I like having a way of the uncanny. I just like the sense of the elegant.
Your e-book is ready in an imaginary nation in an unnamed decade, though it seems to be after the Holocaust. The primary character is a Jew whose dad and mom have been killed when he was a toddler in what seems to be an antisemitic pogrom. My query is, what does a Jewish dystopian novel add to the accounts of real-life dystopias that Jews have lived by way of, whether or not it was Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?
I wished to write down a e-book that was sort of historic, that has know-how from the previous, current and the long run. It references Nazism, but it surely’s unclear whether or not it’s the identical timeline. The e-book explores the inevitability of antisemitism that’s systemic and endemic, and I wished to see what occurs when that reality of life is just not tied, for example, to interwar financial issues for which Jews can be utilized as a scapegoat. I used to be experimenting with the thought of, what does antisemitism appear like with out historical past books?
I’m additionally working by way of my very own experiences of being a Jew on this planet. My grandfather, who’s a survivor, continues to be with us. He’s an extremely previous man. There’s 245,000 survivors left on this planet and yearly that decreases by 10-15%. Because the Holocaust turns into recorded historical past solely, the e-book is a reminder to verify a number of the overconfidence I’ve about my place being alive as a Jew. It’s extra tenuous than I believe most individuals understand. I skilled it to be extra tenuous. It looks like there aren’t any ensures, which I believe is bearing out loads over the previous few months.
Your metropolis of tomorrow, or every time it’s set, jogs my memory of Birobidzhan, the “Jewish Autonomous Area” arrange by the Soviets in 1928 to resolve their very own so-called Jewish drawback. Besides Duma seems to be an autonomous area free of charge thinkers quite than Jews.
Positively, Birobidzhan was on my thoughts. Deliberate communities, sort of ersatz utopias, and even firm cities have been enormous influences for me. The germ of this novel got here from a New York Instances Model Journal essay known as “Utopia, Deserted,” by Nikil Saval a couple of city in Italy known as Ivrea, which was the house of Olivetti typewriters. It was a deliberate socialist firm city that offered the entire facilities: free childcare, sports activities leagues, libraries and faculties. They introduced in these extraordinary main modernist architects and so lots of the buildings are hyper-modernist constructions. In my head, I used to be sort of recreating this city.
I grew up going to Disney World, and Disney World itself is this sort of freakish, demented utopia. However there’s a city known as Celebration outdoors of Orlando the place Disney staff have been going to dwell. Or consider Levittown on the japanese seaboard. The concept of those deliberate communities is so tantalizing. There’s a typical aim and you’ve got monetary safety and your children are taking good care of and you may experiment with new concepts, whether or not it’s communism or an alternate governing. It doesn’t simply must be a capitalist society.
And these locations have a lot promise and so they’re stuffed with hope and virtually each single time they’re destroyed from inside, whether or not it’s due to racism, like in Levittown, or greed or capitalism.
Your novel additionally made me consider one other place meant to be a utopia within the desert, the place folks scattered throughout numerous international locations all come to the identical place to dwell and work and have to talk the identical language, in what at first looks like a grand socialist experiment. I assumed: That appears like Israel. Did that cross your thoughts, that Israel was one other sort of — I hate to say this — failed utopia?
Sure, it completely did. I don’t write about Israel, however I give it some thought obsessively. But it surely stops there for me, and now particularly it’s too painful for me. I purposely didn’t make connections in my fiction to Israel. I’m avoiding it pointedly.
Solomon wrote elements of his e-book on the forbidding Ohio Historical past Middle in Columbus, “which regarded precisely just like the world I used to be making an attempt to create.” (Sam Howzit, Wikipedia/JTA illustration by Mollie Suss)
One other echo of Jewish tradition in your e-book is the theme of memorials. A personality in your e-book, Miriana, is making these grand artworks — together with one which particularly references Nazism —that every one appear vaguely like memorials. At one level you describe what sounds just like the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and picture a degree sooner or later or an alternate historical past when it will likely be stripped of its which means as a memorial to the murdered Jews. Do you mistrust the intent of people that make these memorials, and possibly how they’re acquired?
I really like memorials. I really like them as architectural or creative challenges. I really like them for, at finest, the sentiments that they will fill me with: harm and concern and the whole lot else. And I additionally assume they’re virtually uniformly all failures. There’s a component of fakeness to them. The concept of making one thing whose sole and first objective is to remind you of one thing else is an unattainable problem. that cliche from Theodor Adorno: There’s no poetry after the Holocaust. To me, it’s the identical precept. Individuals can have actually real experiences, actually extraordinary emotional responses to them, however I’ve by no means actually understood what the purpose of it’s, apart from to make oneself be ok with having that response. And I’ll be the primary to say that’s additionally a extremely cynical take.
Your hero, Samuel Zelnick, is enamored with the memorial artwork he finds in Duma, till he turns into disillusioned with their maker and realizes the motivations behind them are usually not what they appear.
He’s floored by them, partly as a result of he desires to imagine that his former professor, Miriana, is an ally in desirous to make the world a greater place and may be very anti-antisemitism, anti-fascism and when he seems to be at her artwork, there may be proof of it. There’s this sort of duality to memorials: You may very simply take a look at a Holocaust memorial and say to your self, “That is really an homage to the Holocaust and the way nice the Nazis have been at killing the Jews.” Granted, that’s not a typical particular person’s expertise, however it’s just like the fantastic line between modernism and fascism. In the case of excessive idealism about the best way the world needs to be, it’s very simple to slide from one aspect to the opposite aspect.
Clarify that a little bit bit extra for me, the place modernism and fascism come collectively and the place they diverge. I do know your protagonist strikes to Duma in hopes of utilizing his coaching as an architect to create “a very equalizing structure.”
I used to be struck by Le Corbusier, a sort of father of recent structure, who designed a constructing in Marseilles known as Unite d’ Habitation. And it’s not simply an residence advanced. It’s obtained Structure Classics: Unite d’ Habitation / Le Corbusier | ArchDailya rooftop backyard, faculties and docs workplaces. Ostensibly, you can dwell your complete life on this constructing and by no means go away. However like fascism, these modernist beliefs, these socialist beliefs, have this actually sturdy sense of the best way the world might be. It’s a utopian sense. What if we have been all equal? What if all of us lived in a spot the place everyone had the identical facilities accessible to us, the identical assets however there was no hierarchy, there was no class stratification? What if it was all excellent? After which I believe to myself, these buildings have been designed for a really perfect human kind, and that will get you occupied with the Aryan superb, the Nazis’ notion of reaching racial purity. When you think about equality whereas ignoring variations, you then’re veering very near fascism.
Are you a reader of speculative fiction? Have you ever checked out a number of the Jewish traditions of individuals writing science fiction? Considered one of your characters has the nickname Samsa, which was the identify of the primary character in Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” so can I assume that was an homage to Kafka?
I’m positively a fan of Kafka, particularly “The Trial” — and particularly the Orson Welles movie adaptation of it that’s simply lined with Brutalist structure. I noticed that and thought, “That is precisely what I need my e-book to appear like.”
However my love of speculative fiction comes from Etgar Keret, the Israeli author. I used to be given a e-book of his brief tales in highschool or school, and it was my first expertise with magic realism. Then I actually obtained into Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, the heavyweights of that style. After which I obtained to graduate college, and I moved to New York Metropolis, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Swiftly it felt just like the fiction of my youth. I used to be being taught Raymond Carver brief tales and John Cheever tales.
However I got here again to it. Unrealistic writing has the capability to make me really feel in ways in which that strictly realist writing can’t.
One other sturdy affect on this e-book was “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. Along with the existential dread, you even have a personality who’s deliberately experimenting with evil, saying, “Nicely, I’ve tried being good for some time and I’m curious to see what it will really feel like if I used to be dangerous.” That feels speculative to me. It’s really actual life, but it surely feels speculative to me.
In your acknowledgments you speak about writing a number of the e-book within the “huge and terrifying” Ohio Historical past Middle in Columbus. Inform me extra.
It’s a completely hideous, huge, monumental, Brutalist constructing.
These are all good issues to me. Sitting of their archive and writing on this chilly, echoey, inhospitable, deeply uncomfortable area, with the archivists and librarians giving me soiled seems to be for no cause — the whole lot about it was so excellent. I used to be capable of write my e-book in an area that was precisely just like the world I used to be making an attempt to create.
After which I might go to Bexley, a neighborhood in Columbus with a beautiful neighborhood library that was the whole antithesis of this Brutalist place — a homey, pretty, quiet room that might be like a palate cleanser.
Each constructing is a philosophy. Each constructing is an argument about the best way architects assume the world needs to be. And generally it looks like the architect wasn’t occupied with me in any respect.
is editor at giant of the New York Jewish Week and managing editor for Concepts for the Jewish Telegraphic Company.
The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the views of JTA or its mother or father firm, 70 Faces Media.
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