novel, The Seventh Beggar, is inspired by an unfinished story of the Hasidic writer Nachman of Batslav. What is it about Nachman that you admire?

Given my Hasidic background, Nachman is of special interest to me, both as a personality and also as a writer. Born into Hasidic aristocracy—he was the great grandson of the founder of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov—Nachman was in line to inherit his uncle's seat, a wealthy and renowned court. In other words, his grandfather's devotees were prepared to crown him no matter who or what he turned out to be. Instead, Nachman turned away from what could come easily and embraced a life of struggle, complete with ascetic torments. He had a personal integrity that didn't allow him to accept the mantle of greatness without first proving himself; nor would he allow the movement, anti-establishment in its origins, to continue growing fat and complacent. He denounced his uncle's and other Hasidic courts publicly, and determined to reinvigorate Hasidism with its early promise. To avoid complacency, he refused to create a permanent seat of his own in which a proper court could flourish. The peripatetic nature of his court along with the high demands he placed on himself and his disciples kept his following small.

And at the end of his life Nachman turned to storytelling. But his tales weren't like the standard Hasidic homiletic tales; Nachman became a writer of tales good enough to rate with the best of fabulist literature. One aspect of the tales that electrified his disciples who first heard them was their recklessness. He committed himself to delivering the tales orally, without preparation and guidelines, and in front of large audiences. These were impromptu performances that kept his anxious disciples on the edge of their seats. No one could know for certain, including Nachman himself, whether the story would find its form and complete itself. Watching Nachman sweat, sway, wring his hands, and grit his teeth through long pauses must have been excruciating.

Do you hope your novel revives interest in Nachman's work?  

Unlike Joel, the protagonist of The Seventh Beggar, my interest in Nachman's work is literary not religious, and if my novel introduces his tales to more readers, that's just great. But I should point out that there is and always has been interest in Nachman. In Israel, for example there is a youth movement, attached to spiritual mysticism rather than to orthodoxy, that reclaims Nachman. On buildings, buses, and so on, there is grafitti that plays off Nachman's name as a kind of stutter. It's in Hebrew, but in English it would look and sound something like this: N Na Nach Nachm Nachma Nachman…

Tell us about Nachman's gravesite in Uman and the other research you conducted for this novel.  

I came close to visiting Uman twice in the last five years, once when I was in Hungary, but the plan fell through and then I questioned whether I ought to force the issue since I had already written the scene that takes place in Uman, and was rather pleased with it. But the real reason I was and continue to be anxious about visiting Uman is that I worry that it will end up being a banal tourist experience—indeed, I pass on this anxiety to Joel, after his disappointing visit to the Satmar rebbe in Monroe, NY.

Since my grandfather was a “heise” (hot, fervent) Bratslaver Hasid, I grew up with some knowledge of Nachman. As a child, I was always intrigued by Nachman's promise that he would yank out of hell every person who visited his gravesite in Uman, including the greatest sinner. If you believe in heaven and hell, that's a good reason to visit. Interestingly, as far as I know, my grandfather never made the pilgrimage, because a promise he made at the age of 8, on his arrival to Israel—that he would never leave the land—prevailed over his desire to visit.

I started reading Nachman deeply in graduate school, when I was reading Kafka and realized that there were similarities between them. Most of my research for the novel consisted of reading. I immersed myself in Nachman's primary work, and then read the biographies, moved onto the works he might have read, and so on.

You brilliantly employ various narrative devices in this novel. Please explain how you shaped this novel.

I can't say that I had a master plan. I just don't work that way. I begin with setting usually, then character, and then follow where the story takes me. In this novel, I was forced to reach for unusual devices, because (I don't really want to give this part of the story away) when you forfeit your main protagonist, you're forced to find ways to make the story carry on.

The structural intricacies in the book are also a response to Nachman's boldness. His work shows an awareness of form, the story within story, a box structure that becomes a maze that at least in narrative is not easy to work your way out of. Since the writer of the story that inspired my story is considered the first modern Yiddish writer, I went back and read, in some cases re-read, nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, the writers who came after Nachman, and felt myself very much part of a continuum. And I found I had a lot to live up to because the early Yiddish writers were brilliant, and brilliant in the face of challenge. On the one hand, they were fortunate in that they could reference biblical motifs and figures, Jewish cultural life—and in the original languages of Hebrew and Yiddish—and be understood; on the other hand, they had no literary models for what they were attempting. There had been no Jewish literary fiction before them.

I have a different set of challenges in writing about a world that even modern Jews think of as obscure, but when I come across certain passages of early Yiddish writers, Scholem Aleichem, Der Nister, and others, I find myself electrified and feel inspired to try.

The Seventh Beggar focuses on an Hasidic family, in which the two children bend some of the Hasidic rules and traditions. You yourself broke away from your Hasidic family when you moved to Manhattan and became a writer. Why did you embark on a different sort of life?

The writer's life turns out to be not so different from the contemplative life the men in my family live. Of course I am a female and therefore was never intended for either a scholarly or writing life. Questions of why and how are difficult to answer—I was a reader, a diary writer, a solitary, not easy in a family of nine—but all these explanations ultimately don't entirely explain the choices I've made. From a psychological point of view, I might explain that as a child I was very close to my father; I was considered his favorite, and on some level I probably knew that no matter what I did, he would never cut me off. His deep love may have given me license to pursue this other life. And perhaps my pursuit of a variation on his life is a kind of backhanded compliment to him.

Joel's sister, Ada, is a very appealing character, who finds her niche in her community adapting designer clothes to Hasidic rules of modesty. What is the significance of her work and her role in the novel?

The Hasidic male and female have very different lots in life; the male tends toward the more spiritual and scholarly; the female is the practical head of the household. Ada takes full advantage of her particular freedom to pursue her secular interests. One reason I gave her an interest in fashion is because it indeed reflects the Hasidic young woman's knowledge of fashion and design. Since from the age of three, the Hasidic female is expected to always be dressed well and with some formality—comparable to the way we think of dressing for the office—she soon learns to put herself together well. And most young women in that world learn to sew, which helps them create designs to best suit themselves.

As it happens, Ada serves to ground the novel in a more secular or familiar place and this is in part why the reader is drawn to her. She is comfortably familiar and more knowable than Joel. Furthermore, she offers another kind of creation, and in contrast to Joel's more ambitious attempts.

The novel concludes with a round of storytelling. Do you feel the art of storytelling is being lost in this high-tech world?    

Every culture (every individual probably), has an origin or creation myth, and most had or continue to have a re-enactment ritual at specific intervals. In the Jewish religious world, the daily Biblical readings in the synagogue ensure that the text is brought alive on a regular basis. These excerpts are arranged so that coinciding with the end of the Jewish calendar year, a full reading is achieved. On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, the readings begin again with Genesis, the story of creation. Examples of similar re-enactments in primitive cultures included fire celebrations, storytelling rounds, sacrificial rituals. Since The Seventh Beggar is very much about creation and creating, I felt it demanded finally a re-enactment of sorts, something that referred to my characters' origin stories. I decided to morph the bluegrass festival into a storytelling round to highlight the similarities rather than differences between people and cultures, the continuities rather than irrelevant archaisms. Summer festivals are variations on our communal celebrations of the past, and interestingly, despite our technological advances, we still engage in such rituals.

Talk about the significance of the robot, Cog, in the second half of the novel and of the Biblical language Her story is written in?

Comparing the work of the Talmudists, their attempts at knowing God's work, with modern man's interests in Artificial Intelligence provides the connection that indeed exists between ancient esoteric ideas and modern technologies. Works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and also the work of the alchemists who attempted to make gold are all on this continuum. And although JakobJoel is a student of robotics who works with computer technology, his Cog ends up being made with words, the way that 2001's HAL was made, and the way that Frankenstein was made, and even the way, according to Jewish mystical readings of Genesis and later the New Testament, the world was made: “In the beginning was the word.” JakobJoel's use of biblical language for Cog acknowledges his debt to Genesis.

In the end, no matter how far we've advanced technologically, significant world events, important lives, and outstanding work continue to be passed on as stories, whether oral, written, or visual. Which indicates that storytelling is still at the forefront of human life. This is a theme of The Seventh Beggar, and I hope an argument for the novel as a relevant form, for why storytelling deserves to hold a significant place in our culture.

But your novel isn't explicitly an argument for the novel because it breaks open the conventions of the novel, in effect, arguing against it, calling for a more fractured understanding of reality than the novel can provide.

The Seventh Beggar stretches the form of the novel to include both ancient and modern traditions, fables, fairy tales, as well as science fiction, it looks backward and forward, but I still think of it as a novel, though perhaps one that pushes the form to extremes. There have always been literary works that push the envelope, even before Ulysses. The traditional novel with its stately beginning and ending, its complete and complacently round story, hasn't been a credible representation of human life for a long time, perhaps it was never fully credible, therefore the novel as a form has to move in new directions in order to encompass the world as we find it now.

A CONVERSATION WITH PEARL ABRAHAM
August 2004, New York City.
Questions by Camille McDuffie and Celina Spiegel.