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203 Margins within the Margins: An Interview with Ruth Knafo Setton and Farideh Dayanim Goldin Derek Parker Royal In the fall of 2007, I was invited to Lehigh University to give a lecture on Philip Roth’s fiction as part of the Philip and Muriel Berman Center Lecture Series. My host was Ruth Knafo Setton, the Moroccan-born writer in residence at Lehigh’s Berman Center, the Professor of Practice in the University’s English Department, and now current director of the Berman Center. During my time there, I had the pleasure to talk with Setton about her own work—her first novel, The Road to Fez, was published in 2001—and the state of contemporary fiction. While she agreed with me that the past several years had witnessed a flowering of new Jewish American writing, Setton was quick to point out that the authors who were capturing all of the attention were of Ashkenazi descent. There was no one in this growing list of writers, she argued, who was creating from a Mizrahi or even a Sephardic sensibility. What is more, and ironically enough, most of America’s first Jews, as well as their representatives in the arts and media, were Sephardic. Setton explained to me that if Jews were still marginal voices in America, then she was part of a community that felt marginalized within that margin. I responded by inviting her to express her voice in the form of an interview. She agreed, and in early 2008 we began an engaging e-mail conversation that grew from a discussion of Sephardic authors to a full-blown exploration of her own work and aesthetics. Along the way, we invited Setton’s friend and fellow author, Farideh Dayanim Goldin, to join in. Goldin’s unique background as a writer— born in the mahaleh (Jewish ghetto) of Shiraz, Iran, to a family of Jewish com- 204 derek parker royal munity leaders and then later immigrating to the U.S.—provided a much-needed Mizrahi perspective and, along with the views of Setton, gave new meaning to my understanding of contemporary Jewish American writing. In addition to The Road to Fez, Setton has written a variety of poems, stories, and essays. Her piece of creative nonfiction, “Living between Question Marks” (2010), is a lyrical and evocative expression of what it is like to live between cultures, reside among diverse languages, and inhabit a space of memory and exile. She has recently completed a new novel, The Zigzag Girl, and is currently working on other works of fiction as well as a poetry collection. She shared part of her novel in progress, Darktown Blues, with me during our interview. Setton has received a number of fellowships, has taught as a visiting writer at several colleges and universities, and has been nominated for (and winning) a variety of fiction and poetry awards, including multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Goldin, a tireless advocate for Jewish women’s issues, is perhaps best known for her memoir, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman (2003), but she is also a prolific speaker, fiction writer, and essayist. Her moving “Conversations with My Father” was part of National Public Radio’s Hanukkah Lights special in 2008, and her stories and essays have appeared in collections such as Turnings: Writing on Women’s Transformations (edited by Louisa Igloria and Renee Olander, 2000), To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 (edited by Marjorie Agosin and Betty Jean Craige, 2002), and The Flying Camel: and Other Stories of Identity by North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Women (edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, 2004). She was recently the consulting editor for a special issue of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (devoted to Jewish women writers of Iranian heritage, 2009), and she is currently at work on her second memoir, Iran: My Homeland. Over the past two years both Goldin and Setton gave their time to discuss a variety of matters, including not only their own writing, but also the current state of Jewish American fiction, the place of the Sephardic and the Mizrahi literature within this community, their positions as women writers, the curses of “exoticism ,” and the in-between cultural status that seems to define not only a good part of their identities, but much of their art as well. Derek Parker Royal: Over the past several years there’s been increased critical attention given to the newer generation of Jewish authors...

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