Interview with Lev Raphael: Celebrating Thirty Years of Publishing

Lev Raphael has been publishing for over thirty years. He has crafted groundbreaking short stories, memoirs, novels, and literary criticism; additionally, he has written seven academic and Jewish mysteries, as well as important self-help esteem books (with partner, Gershen Kaufman). His work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages; it has been taught at colleges and universities around the country, analyzed in conference papers, academic articles, and books. Raphael was the first Jewish American author to tackle the subject of Second Generation Holocaust trauma. He has spoken at hundreds of venues on three different continents, including the Library of Congress, Oxford University, the 92^nd Street Y in New York City, and The Skirball. He left academia in 1988 to write full-time. He has been a reviewer for The Washington Post, Jerusalem Report, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Boston Review. He served as a long-time columnist at the Detroit Free Press. Raphael also reviewed for several different public radio shows, and he had his own book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, Julian Barnes, and many other authors. His first book, Dancing on Tisha B'Av, a collection of brilliant stories incorporating his Jewish and gay identities, received a 1990 Lambda Literary Award. This volume was followed by eighteen others, including Winter Eyes (1992); Journeys & Arrivals (1996); The German Money (2003), a 2004 finalist in Best literary fiction from Fore-Word Magazine; Secret Anniversaries of the Heart: New and Selected Stories (2006); Writing a Jewish Life: Memoirs (2006); and My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped (2009), reviewed in this issue of SAJL.

HBF:

Congratulations on your latest successful book, My Germany. You have been publishing fiction and prose about Second Generation Holocaust Survivor experiences for over thirty years, longer than any other American writer. What inspired you to tackle this subject?

LR:

Writers always tell family secrets, and writers always do what their families don't want them to do. In my family, the Holocaust was something that was talked about sparingly, if at all. I think like many survivors, my parents wanted to shield me and my brother from knowledge of the Holocaust, but of course, that made it more pressing and important than it already was in our family. In college, I was very lucky to have a very dedicated creative writing teacher who kept pushing me. She said that I was a talented author, and I would be published some day and win prizes, but my writing wasn't real. I didn't know what she meant. I was writing fantasy and things set in Irish pubs, which I'd never been to, but in my senior year I finally opened up to the core material of my life by reading amazing authors like Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Edith Wharton, and especially Henry James. The catalyzing moment in my career was reading chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. That's where Isabel Archer is sitting by the fire thinking about her life, and she realizes that instead of a life of freedom she imagined she'd find by marrying Gilbert Osmond, she's trapped in "the house of dumbness, the house of deafness, the house of suffocation." I read that at 3 a.m. in the morning, and I thought, "That's my house." I saw the opening. I didn't see where I had to go, but I saw where I should head. That's when I wrote something very short, about the war and my parents—a prose poem, really—and that just set me on the path. I knew this was something I had to write about. The door was open.

HBF:

Were you also the first person to write about being Jewish and gay?

LR:

Jewish lesbians led the way, like Evelyn Torton Beck with her 1982 anthology Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. Men were slower. I published my first story about children of survivors in 1978 in Redbook, but my first gay Jewish story came out...