A Landsman Returns: Questions for Peter Charles Melman
8:38 AM PDT, July 18, 2007, updated at 4:20 PM PDT, July 18, 2007
 How many bookstore employees dream about coming back to their store as an author, on tour for their first book? Peter Charles Melman is getting to do just that. With his debut novel, Landsman, out this summer, he's made appearances as some of the bookstores he once worked in--"poorly," by his own admission--including our excellent Elliott Bay Book Company here in Seattle, where he used to introduce visiting authors as he was himself introduced last night.Landsman is a boisterous, sometimes brutal, and full-hearted tale of a Jewish hoodlum turned soldier in the Civil War, but to his large audience of family, friends, and former colleagues Pete passed on no doubt the best testimonial he's going to get, from his 4' 8", 90-year-old grandmother, who told him, after expressions of great pride in her grandson's achievement, "And that is the horniest book I've ever read!"  I had the chance to meet Pete earlier this year at BookExpo and asked him a few questions about his first book.Amazon.com: Landsman is your first published novel, but I know it's not the first you've written. Is it the first time you've written about history? What drew you so far into the past? Melman: Actually, you're right, my earlier manuscripts had very little to do with historical fiction. And yet, there I am a couple years ago, working at a small bookstore in Brooklyn, when I come across a line in Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic claiming that several thousand Jews fought for the South during the Civil War. I was absolutely thunderstruck; the idea of a Jewish Confederacy had simply never occurred to me. As a Jew born in New York but raised in Louisiana, with an undergraduate degree in history and doctorate in English-Creative Writing, and a tendency to write some pretty voluptuous prose, which lends itself well to period pieces, I knew suddenly, without question, that I was the man to write this book. It's one of the few creative assurances I've ever experienced. Amazon.com: How do you find a balance between research and invention when you are trying to capture a historical period? When do you leave the facts as we know them and start making stuff up? Melman: With Landsman, I decided early on that I'd outline the plot thoroughly, before I wrote a creative word of it. With my previous work, I'd let my writing dictate where the story was heading. I'd follow interesting paths and digressions I allowed myself to take. And while there's a nice organic quality to writing this way, I'd inevitably find that I’d written myself into too many corners. This time, I wanted to have a very clear idea of what I was getting myself into. And for me, using historical research as a backbone for the novel really helped ease the pressure of plot determination. Still, I wasn't worried about history commandeering the novel's narrative element altogether. While I paid as much homage to fact as possible, I knew my greater loyalties would remain with fiction. I say this because although you're at constant risk of anachronism, using the imagination alone while writing historical fiction is, for me, the most exhilarating part of the whole process. Amazon.com: You have a lot of fun with your language. Were there favorite sources from the time that helped you capture the voice of the Civil War era? Melman: Certainly Edwin C. Bearss and Willie Tunnard's A Southern Record: The Story of the 3rd Lousiana Infantry, C.S.A. (1866) was crucial in helping me gain an authentic sense of battlefield life, as was Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter (1936) when it came to ante-bellum New Orleans's seedier underbelly. And Elliott Ashkenazi's edited The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon: Growing Up in New Orleans, 1861-1862 was instrumental in helping me construct Nora Bloom, there's no question. But for the vernacular of the remaining characters, I relied almost exclusively on the ear I gained while living all those years in Louisiana. As to these characters' mentality as a whole, though? Well, that was old-fashioned empathy, I guess. Amazon.com: There's plenty of room for heroism in your story, but not much on the battlefield. How did you like using the war (and a soldier fighting the Confederacy) as a backdrop for a tale of redemption? Melman: Frankly, I had no real desire to write a Civil War novel. For me, the spiritually redemptive arc of its protagonist was always far more intriguing. On a global level, I'll admit that one of the novel's aims was to explore the involvement of Jewish soldiery for the South during the Civil War, true. The moral ironies of why one minority--a minority into which I myself was born--might fight to maintain the enslavement of another, proved too altogether human a subject for me to ignore. Ultimately, though, I hope Landsman serves to take the Southern, Civil War-era Jew beyond the province of villain, victim, or saint, and to place him squarely where he belongs: into the realm of flaw and decency of which we're all understandably a part. I say this because to deny the grosser elements of Jewish-American history is to deny the very most human elements of Jewish-American history. That many of my characters--Jew and Gentile alike--are depraved, that they swear and sin, is testament to the frailties and moral subjectivities of every single one of us. And while it's while certainly a worn trope in fiction writing, that we're subsequently capable of redemption at all I quickly discovered to be the book's true focus. I think it's important to consider, then, the title of the novel itself. The first pronunciation, "landz'men," essentially defines a farmer, someone who lives and works on land. Certainly, my protagonist Elias Abrams can be described as such, born as he is for a love of the land. But it's the second meaning and pronunciation, "länts'mn," the one that I most often say when people ask me, that truly defines the novel. It comes from Yiddish, and means "countryman" or more specifically, a Jew who comes from the same district or town. Now I called the novel Landsman because of the double-entendre, but as idealistic as this may seem, I'd like to believe that, in the Yiddishe sense, we're all archetypically landsman, in some form or another. Amazon.com: You write about a small but substantial Jewish community in Louisiana that played a significant role in the Confederacy. What's your sense of the history of Jews in New Orleans and the South? Melman: Here, as much as any other aspect of the novel, my research obviously needed to be as accurate as possible. For this, I'm particularly indebted to Bertram W. Korn's American Jewry and the Civil War, Robert Rosen's The Jewish Confederates, Irwin Lachoff and Catherine C. Kahn's The Jewish Community of New Orleans, and Elliott Ashkenazi's The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840-1875. From what I discovered in these texts, as well as from my own experience, Jews participated at every level in the ante-bellum South. In the 18th century, Sephardic Jews numbered in the thousands and among the most respected citizens of cities like Charleston and Savannah. Then, after the cotton industry began to exhaust the lands of the eastern seaboard, these Sephardic Jews followed the cotton trade westward once the Louisiana Purchase opened up new, fertile territory. By the time the Civil War began, after the waves of immigrant Ashkenazi Jews arrived from places like Alsace and Germany in the 1830s and '40s, the Jewish population of New Orleans numbered at approximately four thousand. Overall, these Jewish arrivals were well-respected for their education, knowledge of Old Testament scripture, affiliation with the much-admired ancient Israelites, commendable work ethic, and most of all, for their willingness to accept traditionally Southern ways. Tragically, that they were white in a society predicated on degrading African-Americans eased their transition into the daily affairs of New Orleans, there’s little doubt. It's also important to note that many of these Confederate Jews were assimilationist by nature, though New Orleans did house several synagogues at the time, one of which was absolutely massive. To get a heightened sense of the Jewish place in the Confederate South, one need only consider Judah Benjamin. West Indian-born, married to a Creole Catholic woman, prosperous in sugar cane cultivation, and one of the most brilliant senators the country's ever seen, under President Jefferson Davis, he would eventually ascend to the position of Secretary of State, the Confederacy's second-in-command. And while Benjamin was certainly the exception to the rule, he's representative of the kind of mentality found not just among most Confederate Jews, but, at the risk of sounding like an apologist for the abhorrent institution of slavery--which I'm not, obviously--anyone who's ever fought for a place they called home. --Tom
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About this blog
Mix one part casual anthropologist with two parts avid reader, add the occasional culinary inspiration and a penchant for haiku, and what you end up with is Anne Bartholomew. When she's not working her way through the books on her nightstand, Anne tests new recipes and wishes she could write like Billy Collins.
Dave Callanan is a full-contact reader. A quick glance at him immersed in a book will always reveal the title's genre. He grins broadly with comedies, furrows his brow at dramas, and nervously bites his lip during thrillers. It's no surprise that even on a crowded bus, the seat next to Dave is rarely taken. Daphne Durham: Rarely seen without a book, she reads while walking to work, at red lights, and before the movie starts. She keeps a "just in case" book in her purse for emergencies (like an extra long line at the grocery store). Reading taste ranges from literature to pure trash. Jon Foro is not ogling you; he just wants to know what you're reading. A word freak since age six when he ordered his first Big Boy Book with a coupon clipped from the back of a Cheerios box ("Hardy Boys 53: The Clue of the Hissing Serpent"), Jon enjoys ancient history, literary stylists (Nabokov and Amis), true-life adventures & nature writing (Abbey, J.W. Powell), and books about bears. Lauren Nemroff insists on carrying her own bag (purse, suitcase, backpack, or beach bag). Not because she thinks chivalry is dead, but because it usually contains several pounds of books. The contents: new fiction, the latest art and photography books, mysteries and thrillers, a section of the Times book review, and a vintage Amazon bookmark (ca. 1998). Tom Nissley knew he wasn't like the other kids when they assigned Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native" in 10th grade and he spent dreamy afternoons in Wessex with Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye (Eustacia Vye!) and then came back to school to find that everybody else thought it was "boring." Once called "the Cameron Crowe of the food world," Brad Thomas Parsons balances his pursuits equally between all-things literary and culinary. He has interviewed Mario Batali, Danny Meyer, Ina Garten, Anthony Bourdain, Giada De Laurentiis, and Marco Pierre White, along with Jon Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Don Rickles, Sarah Vowell, and Chuck Barris, among others. He is a regular guest on Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen where he offers commentary on trends in cookbooks and food lit. Other Contributors: Heidi Broadhead and Paul Hughes have just started raising their first child, Silas, amidst piles of well-loved books. In utero, the little guy heard a steady stream of plays (including Macbeth and King Lear more than once) and poetry (by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara). Now Silas is more likely to have Entertainment Weekly, the Sunday New York Times, or some random blog post read aloud to him, as his parents try to catch up on sleep and rejoin the world. (Until he can read on his own--and hopefully not even then--Silas will not be exposed to the NYT Sunday Styles section.) Mike Smith reads a lot about geology, languages, and British history, and is working his way through an ad hoc self-made syllabus of British literature to cover up the gaps from his feckless undergrad days. As an adolescent he read way too much Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Alistair Maclean. He is a staunch supporter of the Oxford comma. Jeff VanderMeer's sense of adventure is so strong that as a kid he hoped he’d lose his eye in a tragic accident so he could wear a pirate patch. Maybe that's why as an adult he likes fantasy, SF, horror, magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, and whatever-you're-calling-it- over-smokes-and-coffee-this-morning. An author inspired by everything from Nabokov through Hindu superhero comics and Hong Kong cult action films, he has been known to write about squid, frogs, and fungus. Once, he wanted to be a marine biologist, but only so he could putter around in tidal pools. |
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