‘AT ITS HEART, I think, is the most profound leap of empathy that any book asks of a reader – which is to feel not that you are reading it, not that you are receiving it, not that you are simply re-enacting it, but that you are a character inside of it.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is talking about the Haggadah, one of Judaism’s key texts, a new edition of which he has spent the past six years editing. Foer remains a novelist first and foremost, but his detour from the pure self-expression of fiction is now years long. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published seven years ago.
Since then, in addition to developing his new Haggadah, he has published a book on our relationship to meat, Eating Animals, as well as Tree of Codes, a project that involved him literally cutting words from the pages of one of his favourite books, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, to whittle a new story of his own.
Over the years, Foer has been fond of using the phrase “a bird is not an ornithologist” to respond to questions about the mechanics of the creative process. A writer writes, he says, in the same way that a bird flies: without conscious choice and without needing to be able to explain what’s involved. But he’s been working in a different vein more recently.
“Editing the Haggadah has been more like being an ornithologist,” he says. “It was a very deliberate process involving a lot of earnest thought about this very important document.”
The Haggadah is a user’s manual, in Foer’s phrase, for the Passover Seder, a meal each spring at which families retell the story of the exodus from Egypt. The Haggadah is read from beginning to end, unfolding the story, prayers and songs of the ritual, and urging discussion among those at the table. There have been thousands of editions.
“My original vision for this Haggadah was that it would be brightly lit and maximal and a real reinvention,” he says, “a kind of departure from the way it has been done historically. But the project changed really dramatically over time.”
In the early stages, Foer had drawn together upwards of 20 writers and artists to contribute to his Haggadah. But in the end he stripped things back to a small group of collaborators: novelist Nathan Englander, who re-translated the Hebrew text; Mia Sara Bruch, who provides a timeline of Passover and the Haggadah throughout history; designer Oded Ezer; and four commentators who make brief interjections at key points of the exodus story from four perspectives: political (Jeffrey Goldberg), psychological (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein), rabbinical (Nathaniel Deutsch) and youthful/playful (Lemony Snicket).
On the one hand, says Foer, the Haggadah is the quintessential Jewish book. The Passover Seder is “the last thread” tying many Jews to their religion’s ritualistic heritage. On the other hand, he stresses that the story of Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt is the most universally recognised story across cultures, with a central message of freedom from slavery that speaks to a whole host of contemporary concerns.
“The point is for the conversation to be as expansive and inclusive as possible,” he says. “It’s tempting to look at the really big examples – things like genocide. But we have to try with open eyes to recognise slavery in all of its different forms. Only good comes from expanding your definition of slavery and your circle of empathy or compassion.”
There are much more overtly political Haggadahs than Foer’s, including feminist and vegetarian editions. But while his has no such programmatic content, he is clearly fired by the idea of the Haggadah encouraging social and political engagement.
This seems to be closely intertwined with questions of family for him. His father – a “militantly atheist Seder leader” – used to set homework to ensure everyone would be prepared for Seder. And the kind of conversation he remembers from his childhood Seders “is the thing I think is most worth perpetuating and that I want to create for my family Seders when they’re at my house”.
Family concerns also hover behind Eating Animals, published in 2009. Foer started writing that book when his wife was pregnant with their first child, in order to resolve his uncertainty about eating meat before decisions about food would have to be made on their son’s behalf. So the years that have passed since the publication of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close don’t represent a political turn in Foer’s work, or a lasting decision to step away from fiction. On the contrary.
“I’m more and more conscious of being drawn towards fiction,” he explains. “I’ve written a couple of hundred pages of a couple of different books, and I’m now working pretty much exclusively on fiction. I really am desperate to get back to making things only for their own sake, to writing without a purpose.”
In recent years, Foer has watched as other artists have immersed themselves in his books. Both of his novels have been adapted for the cinema, most recently Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was released last month in a version directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. Foer had no involvement in the screenplay and is full of praise for those involved in the film, but he finds himself a bit discombobulated by the process.
“It’s awkward for a pot of reasons, maybe the most important of which is having to revisit material I wrote a while ago.” He pauses.
“It’s a bit like having your nose rubbed in your own crap, you know? I left something somewhere and now I’m being forced to pick up an intimate relationship with it again.”
Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, is published by Hamish Hamilton
