Feminist Shtetl Horror: An Interview with Elizabeth Schwartz

MA: Yeah, I very much enjoyed the sick sense of justice in the first one [“The Rebbe’s Prayer Is Answered”]. It made me laugh; it just felt like the perfect dark joke.

ES: Well, I thank you for that. I do want to go on record as saying I’m a big, big pickle person and we are pickle fans. I think that’s why I spent so much descriptive time talking about what for me is the perfect pickle, because I’ve had just the most dreadful awful ones along the way. And that is not a metaphor, by the way!

MA: I was very inspired by the Angela Carter connection—- I encountered Carter when I was about 17. It’s that age where you’re sort of just understanding your power as a woman and the world’s power over you as a woman, and Carter helped me to understand my own relationship to fairy tales and folklore. I was wondering a little bit about your relation to that and how you really perceive these stories. Because for me, folklore is pure horror in a way that’s instructional, that’s telling you “Stay on the path and then you won’t get eaten by the wolves.” Whereas I think for fans of Carter, folklore becomes a little bit different.

ES: It was the same age for me. It’s funny that you say that, because as you were describing folklore in those terms, I’m thinking, you can say that about most religious texts. I think that there is definitely a controlling aspect of making sure that people have a very clear sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s so interesting that we both had that revelatory introduction at about the same age, because I think there’s something about being in your late teens as a girl, as an imminent woman, when the world starts treating you as a woman before you yourself necessarily think of yourself as one. What I found revelatory about Carter’s work was that it made me pause and think about all of the folk stories and fairy tales that I slavishly read as a child and realized my absence in them. There are plenty of princesses, of course, but the princesses are happy when they are rescued and married. I’m not anti- any of those things [rescue or marriage], I just think that Carter was the first person who really gave me a sense of agency in that folk-tale world, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

MA: I found a similar lack of representation myself when reading folklore. One of the things I noticed about The Sweet Fragrance of Life was this pervading feeling of class, and how it was impacting each of these characters in different ways, whether it’s status or money or even your life being ping-ponged between whoever could afford to take care of you. The issue of social class isn’t always present in horror, so I found that pretty striking. Were you conscious of that as you were writing?

ES: I did do that on purpose. I would say more than class, it’s caste, because there is a group of people in all of these stories who are, to varying degrees, pariahs in general society. Certainly “others,” not part of the mainstream overall culture. And even in the second story where the girl’s family is temporarily wealthy, I just find it so fascinating how a marginalized group will find within themselves a caste system. As a Jew, I find it really interesting to see that these Jews are discriminating against other Jews, or these Jews are discriminating against women. It’s a really interesting artificial construct of class, caste, and I find it very disruptive to what should be a real civil community.

MA: It feels something like a mechanism for coping with oppression.

ES: Maybe. I think that’s a very generous way to refer to it. I am highly critical of it. I just feel that it is something that needs to be brought out into the sunlight where I don’t think it would necessarily receive a positive reaction.

MA: I’d like to turn to the language of the book: I’m curious about the link between the oral tradition of folklore and the survival of Yiddish. In my own study, Yiddish has been referred to as a language that didn’t die out on its own, but that was the victim of attempted murder. It was a language that was systematically eradicated. I’m interested to learn about your work with Yiddish in the context of your career as a musician. Where do you feel that you sit within the survival of Yiddish? I find it so interesting that you have insisted that your reader acknowledge Yiddish alongside English [by publishing the translations side-by-side], no matter which is their first language.

ES: I didn’t do the translation, the publisher did the translation, and he’s based in Sweden. Sweden has this small group of protected languages, one of which is Yiddish. That governmental policy seems to share my own feelings about Yiddish culture and yidishkayt. There is a certain defiance in my embrace of this culture, because I do feel that it’s going to take specific efforts to keep it from dying out. Obviously several millions of Yiddish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust and their descendants who might’ve also spoken or known Yiddish were never brought into the world, but I think certainly in the United States, after World War II, there was a particular recoil from this language of the victim. Not coincidentally, that is when people started saying “We’re going to speak Hebrew, and this is the language of strength and life.” It’s a little deracinating to lose that part of ourselves.

MA: Where do you see yourself personally within that? Is that something that you feel emotionally responsible for, the survival of Yiddish, or is it more of an intellectual responsibility?

ES: You know, I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t think that everyone is responsible for doing it, but I think once you make this choice to do it, then you are taking on a responsibility. And in many cases, that’s joyous. In many cases, it’s a little grim. I perform in a lot of places where there are no Jews left. And I know it and the people bringing me know it, and it’s the elephant in the room. But I feel like any opportunity to blow on the embers is a good one. Only complicated by being a woman.

MA: Yes, I’m intrigued as to the role of gender — it plays such a strong part in your fiction and in your music — and I’m wondering how you reconcile writing in a tradition that maybe doesn’t automatically make space for you? I think it sort of links to performing Jewish music in places that did systematically eradicate the Jews.

ES: First and foremost, I’m a feminist and I think that these stories were fueled more by that. This was just the context in which I set them, because I know this world. Having dealt so many times with feeling silenced or feeling marginalized as a musician, I am sure, is the foundation of my writing these stories.

MA: In my own research in Jewish horror, gender is one of the things that I wasn’t immediately looking at, which, as a horror scholar, I really should have been. Horror is one of the most gendered genres. One thing that I began noticing over time, especially with your book, is that Jewish horror is not really a space that has opened itself up for women yet. It’s always men who are agonizing over whether to create the Golem or not. It’s men who are tormented by dybbuks. Women are very much relegated to the feminine places — the horror comes from specifically feminine things like pregnancy and marriage as big sites of tension. So I found it really refreshing when reading your stories that they confronted womanhood in a way that felt so much more honest to me: the fear of it, the excitement of it and of then having to live with the horrible burdens of it. I suppose my question is: What does horror mean to you, and where do you feel your feminism and your religion and your practice sit within a genre that is not always as open to new approaches as it could be?

ES: Well, that’s for sure. I think for me, when I was your age, I would say [that I was most concerned with] agency and equity. But there’s something that happens to a woman when she becomes middle-aged — and I say this is someone who has seen a lot — there’s invisibility. There was this great funny video called “The Last Fuckable Day,” where these actresses were sitting and talking and congratulating each other, “Oh, you turned 40, congratulations! This is your last fuckable day! And now you’ll just be taking grandmother roles.” It’s interesting how much of that is related to our visibility. How invisible older women are — and not in a way that I find restricting; in many ways it’s quite liberating. At the same time, there is always this need to find accommodation in a man’s world. I don’t think my stories so much recreate this universe, as find justice for these marginalized women within a marginalized culture.

MA: There is a sense of crime and punishment in a lot of horror, but then I think sometimes the genre can be so anti-woman, that this sense of justice can get somewhat warped and misplaced when it comes to gender.

ES: I reread Hans Christian Andersen’s original “Little Mermaid” because we all know the Disney version and without giving too much away, I wanted to [keep the original in mind] to inform my third story. I was interested in the whole idea of sirens because of the kol isha issue [a prohibition in Jewish law against men hearing the voice of a woman singing], and I presented a paper at a Yiddish conference in Stockholm about the silencing of women. It’s certainly not [just] a Jewish thing [to be suspicious of women’s voices], it is really a global, historical, many centuries-old tradition. But his [Andersen’s] story is so dark, and in his story, the Little Mermaid’s reward for giving up her voice is not to live happily ever after. She dies and becomes sea foam, with the chance that in three hundred years, her soul will ascend to heaven! And for him, this was a romantic story — that’s a horror story! How can you improve that?

MA: Yeah, it goes back to that notion of folklore being cautionary and sometimes, I guess the caution is to just avoid men altogether.

ES: Yes, but I think many of these myths and legends are the opposite. Maybe it’s to curb men because so many of these things — the banshee, the sirens, in Russian the rusalka — all of these perils, these things that connote death, are coming from women. So you have to be really cautious. Is this going to be a meek and obedient helpmate for you who is virtuous, and all of these good things, and will bear your children, and keep your home? Or is this someone who will potentially turn into a monster and kill you? So I think that there is just such an inherent distrust of women. In the third century, there was this Talmud commentary about Solomon’s Song of Songs: he wrote to his beloved “Let me hear your voice for your voice is sweet” but it was mistranslated as “Your voice is indecent” and that was sort of the beginning of this ban on a woman’s voice. It’s such an interesting deep dive; it will only make you angry and want to write your own stories. I grew up in a pretty matriarchal home, so I never experienced that kind of overt sense of “This is your place in the world and you have to get married, that’s the number one thing and don’t try and be successful in this or that.” It really has been my experience as a Jewish artist, that I have found more silencing, specifically because I’m a vocalist. I found that more silencing in a way than in other aspects of just growing up as a woman.

MA: I found it very interesting just how interdisciplinary your practice is and I’m always very excited when I see people exercising their talents in so many different fields. What struck me about your practice was that there was a feeling of the ephemeral throughout your career, focusing on things like music and food, stuff that exists only in the moment. What made you decide to go to prose which is a little bit more concrete?

ES: I know what you mean. I actually didn’t make the decision for that. It’s really getting back to an earlier part of our conversation when we were talking about the conservation of a vanishing world and culture. That world interests me more than a specific medium. So I will express it through as many ways as I can explore. I’m not always necessarily laudatory about the culture, and I do have this distinction as a woman traveling in these worlds. When I met my husband, [pioneering klezmer revivalist] Yale Strom, he was telling me about his travels, during which he went to the Eastern bloc countries in the early eighties, this was Stalinist times, and he had these great adventures. I thought, well, I could never do that! I would get two feet down the block and I’d be raped and murdered! There are journeys that men can have that we cannot have, and I don’t see the world changing to accommodate that. There’s a certain way that women have to be on guard. I think as Jews too, we have to be on guard. And it’s just compounded when you are a Jewish woman. And getting back to that sense of invisibility among older women, it sometimes makes it easier to be a fly on a wall. You can’t do that when you’re a young woman that could be somebody’s proverbial dinner.

MA: Do you think you’ll stick to prose and write more in the future?

ES: I have a couple of ideas that I have been kicking around, and I haven’t yet decided if I will write it dramatically or as prose. I wish I were disciplined about writing. I’m really more the kind of person who has this sudden flash and says “Oh, I have to write this down,” and it may take some time after that. A Hollywood screenwriter once gave me this wonderful permission structure, about forty years ago: if it takes me a month to write something, that’s three weeks of thinking and then one week of writing it down. I like to cogitate and think about where I am going next. I don’t want to do anything without intention and, dare I say, passion, or at least determination. So I’m not one of those people who just writes every day and sees what comes out. I have to be inspired.

MA: Are there any Jewish stories that jump out to you as things that you could see in your own creative future?

ES: I’m interested in maybe a multi-character situation, which is quite a challenge because it would be like being a one-woman Shakespeare; you have to really be able to inhabit all of these different characters. But I’m thinking about it. I also had a bit of a revelation. Two years ago, I found out that my father’s Romanian family, the Schwartzes, were Sephardic Jews. My parents didn’t know they were intermarrying, but I’m Ashkenazi on my mother’s side. I’m wondering, having now traveled to Spain many times, this most recent time with the knowledge of being descended from Sephardic Jews, if that’s an area, a territory that I want to mine. Again, I think what behooved me with this book is knowing so much more about the Jewish experience of and history of Central and Eastern Europe that was not specifically just related to the one big horrible event – the challenge for me would be “How do I do that [write about Sephardic Jewish history in Spain] without making it about the expulsion?” I don’t know yet.

MA: I did find it very interesting that you wrote these horror novellas that center around one of the most terrifying things to ever happen, without making them only about the Holocaust itself. In my own research into Yiddish folklore, there’s a tendency to portray the pre-World War II moment as a time of relative innocence, which makes the Holocaust appear as a complete and total rupture. In your stories, there’s a sense of pervading horror, that it was always there. It was within the communities.

ES: First and foremost, I don’t believe that a Jew is required to keep exploring one — granted, the seminal — aspect of our history and culture. I mean, we’re the first Abrahamic religion, Jews have been around in one form or another for a lot longer than the twentieth century. So I didn’t want to specifically write about the Holocaust because I think the readers come to my stories already knowing enough that they can bring that almost subconsciously to their understanding. So in the second story, which is set in the pre-war years, I really was so fascinated by the denial, the wilful blindness which certainly in my country [the United States], we are [currently] right smack dab in the middle of. It’s a rationalization of what you’re seeing, telling yourself that you’re not seeing it. I mean the whole story in many ways is a metaphor for the rise of the Nazi movement and I just… I’m angry, irrationally, I’m angry with the people who saw what was happening and insisted that it wasn’t what they were seeing. That, to me, is more of a horror story than anything that you or I could create. It is the equivalent of sitting in the movie theater and saying “don’t go up to the attic!”, “don’t open that locked door!”, because we know what’s going to happen.

MA: I always find that there tends to be a primary and secondary emotion in horror. The primary emotion is almost always fear. That’s what makes it horror. I find it an interesting idea that perhaps the second emotion in your work is anger. I think that’s a very empowering way to write horror, not out of sadness or just pure abject fear, but out of a sense of seeking justice and out of a sense of almost fixing mistakes and screaming “don’t go into the attic”, even though things can’t change.

ES: And I literally have an attic in my story. I feel like I was not particularly generous: no one escapes in my stories, because that, if anything, is my commentary on the Holocaust. Really no one survives, or those that do survive are, you know, not the protagonists, because I really think I don’t want to be fueled only by rage.

MA: It could be a productive emotion.

ES: Yeah, I guess so, it may be on the page, not necessarily in my working life. I do think that people who write do so from a place of wanting to understand human nature, but I think people who write in this genre are perhaps not consumers of self-help books and “how to make the world a better place”.

MA: I find that the horror genre splits into those that are more cathartic stories and those that are an almost nasty and nihilistic type of horror, where no hope can be found. The second type is something that I really struggle to engage with emotionally. But I always feel a sense of catharsis in the tragedy of horror. Most of these people will die in the same way that we’ll all die, but only some of us get to survive the horrifying scenarios. What makes it horrifying is that we don’t all get to.

ES: I think that that’s a good metaphor also for twentieth century Jewish experience. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Jordan Peele film Get Out? There’s nothing Jewish about it, but it is about someone going into what I would, as a Jew, call the white world, also the world of the primary owners of the universe, and I just find that really inspiring as an ethnic writer, too. But I think he gets away with a lot more ridiculing white culture than I could get away with. Although maybe I’ll do that next time, we’ll see. One of the reasons why I sat down and wrote [The Sweet Fragrance of Life and Other Horror Stories] is because I, as a reader, was looking for exactly this book, and I couldn’t find it. And I hope it encourages other people to kind of explore this space, including you. Thank you.

To find out more about Elizabeth Schwartz’s body of work, head to https://www.elizabeth-schwartz.com/.