In this three-part inter­view series, JBC’s Nat Bern­stein spoke with Adelle Wald­man, whose debut nov­el The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was recent­ly pub­lished by Hen­ry Holt and Co. In today’s install­ment, they dis­cuss Nathaniel P. and Jew­ish­ness in the post-racial meritocracy. 

Nat Bern­stein: Over­all, the media seems par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in your deci­sion to write from the per­spec­tive of a male pro­tag­o­nist — which I’m sure we’ll talk about at some point; my first ques­tion, how­ev­er, wasn’t Why did you decide to make Nate a guy?” but rather, why did you decide to make Nate a Jew?

Adelle Wadl­man: Oth­er than his gen­der — and the fact that he went to Har­vard, which I didn’t — in cre­at­ing Nate I tried to use as much of my own expe­ri­ence as I could, because it’s hard enough to do the male stuff: the tenor of his thoughts are so dif­fer­ent from the tenor of mine — and not just about sex or women, but even the way he thinks about his writ­ing and his career. I had to try to chan­nel this voice that might be sim­i­lar to mine but was also very dif­fer­ent, and because that was a chal­lenge I tried to use as many of the bio­graph­i­cal details from my own life as pos­si­ble just to make it eas­i­er. Being Jew­ish is some­thing I know, and it saved me from hav­ing to think hard about what it would have been like to grow up Catholic, the way I had to think hard about what it would be like to be a guy.

NB: So did you also attend a Jew­ish day school, and are your par­ents also immigrants?

AW: My mother’s a Roman­ian immi­grant; my father isn’t. I attend­ed a Jew­ish day school for ele­men­tary school, and then I switched to a dif­fer­ent school. So there are ways in which I altered Nate’s biog­ra­phy some­what. I sim­pli­fied it: it was eas­i­er to make Nate go to one school.

NB: There’s plen­ty else about Nate to focus on, to be sure, but there seems to be hard­ly any men­tion of his Jew­ish back­ground in reviews or inter­views about the nov­el. And you know, on one hand, his Jew­ish­ness comes across as a minor, almost throw­away detail of this char­ac­ter, but at the same time, Nate is so innate­ly Jew­ish; do you think that the Jew­ish per­spec­tive has been some­what glossed over in the book’s gen­er­al recep­tion? If so, what would you attribute that to?

AW: One of the things I real­ly want­ed to write about wasn’t Jew­ish­ness but the par­tic­u­lar world we live in today, where I think both reli­gion and eth­nic­i­ty — and race, too — mat­ter so much less than they used to, social­ly. For my par­ents, most of their close friends are Jew­ish. They prob­a­bly have a few non-Jew­ish friends that they’ve made over the years through work, but their friends from grow­ing up, from col­lege, from the neigh­bor­hoods we lived in — by and large the peo­ple in their lives have always tend­ed to be Jew­ish. And this is so dif­fer­ent from my expe­ri­ence, where for so much of my life my social life hasn’t been deter­mined by reli­gion. In the kind of world that Nate lives in — a sort of afflu­ent, urban envi­ron­ment — I think there’s a lot of seg­re­ga­tion of peo­ple that’s by class: it’s peo­ple who went to the same types of col­leges, came from mid­dle or upper-mid­dle class back­grounds. But there’s so much more mix­ing in terms of reli­gious and eth­nic­i­ty and race, and I think that’s sig­nif­i­cant; it seems like a big change from the way my par­ents’ life was to the way mine is.

A book I real­ly admire and read a num­ber of times while work­ing on my nov­el was Philip Roth’s Good­bye, Colum­bus. The char­ac­ter nev­er inter­acts with any­one social­ly who isn’t Jew­ish — of course, it makes sense, it’s the Six­ties. There are dif­fer­ent types of Jews, the wealth­i­er Jews and the poor­er Jews, but, oth­er than the peo­ple he meets at work, it’s a Jew­ish world — and that’s great, it’s not in any way a crit­i­cism of Good­bye, Colum­bus: I think it’s a sign of the times. But I want­ed to write about this moment, and I didn’t want to glo­ri­fy it. There’s a moment in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. when Nate makes a joke about Hannah’s (latent) Catholi­cism being the rea­son she doesn’t want to sleep with him, and she shoots back some­thing along the lines of, No, the rea­son is because you’re Jew­ish.” And Nate’s response is to infer that anti-Semi­tism from some­one like Han­nah could only be a joke, where­as some­one Catholic mak­ing that kind of joke when my par­ents were that age would have had a total­ly dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tion. That is the part of the book that I want­ed to explore — this mer­i­to­crat­ic, post-racial world we live in: I feel like Jew­ish­ness just plays out dif­fer­ent­ly in that envi­ron­ment. And for Nate, he’s not reli­gious, obvi­ous­ly, and it’s not some­thing he’s con­scious­ly using as a fac­tor when he’s choos­ing whom to date. And I think that’s kind of of-this-moment, too: there are all kinds of Jews, some more obser­vant than others.

NB: Is Nate per­haps using it as a fac­tor in choos­ing whom not to date?

AW: I imag­ine him being a lit­tle more indif­fer­ent. I don’t talk about this in the book, but I give Greer, the woman with whom he ends up, the last name Cohen, so pre­sum­ably she’s Jew­ish. (In my mind, she is Jew­ish, but I hes­i­tate to throw in infor­ma­tion that’s not in the book.) I don’t think he was — as per­haps his moth­er might have sus­pect­ed at moments, when he had a girl­friend named Kris­ten in col­lege — con­scious­ly avoid­ing Jew­ish women: I think it real­ly was a non­fac­tor for him. And I say that, per­haps, because I’m draw­ing on my own expe­ri­ence, where I feel like I’ve had boyfriends who were Jew­ish and boyfriends who were not Jew­ish, and it seemed to my par­ents that I went out of my way to date non-Jews, but that wasn’t the case.

NB: Do you think Jew­ish audi­ences read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­ers? Maybe in the same way that writ­ers (or aspir­ing writ­ers), or sin­gle Brook­lynites in their thir­ties, or the chil­dren of immi­grants might pick up on cer­tain nuances that the rest of us fail to perceive?

AW: I get such a vari­ety of respons­es, but I don’t know if I have a large enough sam­ple size. At a read­ing I did in Bal­ti­more, where I grew up, one of my mom’s friends asked if I had gone to Jew­ish sleep­over camp over the sum­mers — apro­pos of noth­ing: it was the first ques­tion after I was done read­ing. I was try­ing to fig­ure out if her impli­ca­tion was that if I had gone to Jew­ish sleep­over camp maybe my por­tray­al of sub­ur­ban Bal­ti­more would have been more flat­ter­ing. I guess I wor­ried about that. In my mind, I felt that the book, when it does go back in time, is sort of equal-oppor­tu­ni­ty”: it’s sat­i­riz­ing the Jew­ish world and also the WASP‑y stuff at Har­vard, so I hope that no one was offend­ed by that.

To me, there’s some­thing char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Jew­ish in the aspect of Nate that is so con­cerned with being a nice guy and doing the right thing. And it’s so iron­ic, because he often doesn’t do the right thing, if the right thing is defined as the kind­est thing. But I think that Nate’s con­cern about his behav­ior, while not exclu­sive­ly Jew­ish, is not unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of a Jew­ish man. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing; I don’t think it’s some­how enough with Nate to make him not be hurt­ful to the women with whom he gets involved, either. I real­ly did want to write about a man who has a con­science, who’s not a sociopath, and who has some kind of moral sense, and still he has trou­ble. I do think that’s char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, if not exclu­sive­ly, a trait of Jew­ish men.

Nat Bern­stein’s inter­view with Adelle Wald­man, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., is being pub­lished seri­al­ly online as part of the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s Pros­en­Peo­ple blog. Check back tomor­row for the sec­ond install­ment, in which they dis­cuss writ­ing about rela­tion­ships, com­pos­ing wit­ty epi­grams, and the com­plex­i­ties of cor­re­spon­dence with readers.

Nat Bern­stein is the for­mer Man­ag­er of Dig­i­tal Con­tent & Media, JBC Net­work Coor­di­na­tor, and Con­tribut­ing Edi­tor at the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and a grad­u­ate of Hamp­shire College.