(Interview with Lynn Joffe, Vol. 78, #3, Spring-Summer 2023)
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
‘A fizzing, fulsome and fiercely funny heroine, and a novel charged with music, energy, bounce, juice and joy. Like a Jewish Molly Bloom, let loose on history. I love the way such a vast sweep of time and history is grounded in the grain and dirt of real life. I love that for all her boldness and bravado, there’s a very sweet, vulnerable side to Wanda, too.’
Fulsome praise, particularly when coming from the distinguished actor, author and social-cultural commentator Stephen Fry. Based on the premise: ‘What if the Wandering Jew was a woman?’, The Gospel According to Wanda B. Lazarus takes its eponymous heroine along a series of journeys through both space and time, commencing in Jerusalem at the start of the Common Era before going on to place her in multiple different places (real and mythical) and historical situations over the next two millennia. The result, as the book’s promotional description puts it, is “a bold and wild ride through two thousand years of myth and mayhem in a transgressive serio-comic work of literary fiction”. This strikingly original debut novel by Anglo-South African author, musician, stage, radio and television producer and copywriter Lynn Joffe was first published in November 2020 by Modjaji Books, going on to be short-listed by a number of prestigious awards. A second printing followed in May 2022.
Joffe represented South Africa at the recent Gothenburg Book Fair held on 28 September-1 October 2023, during which she was interviewed about her book as well as about the milieu of multi-cultural post-apartheid South Africa in which she works in a seminar entitled ‘Unity in diversity’. We are pleased to be able to publish, with minor edits, this interview, which was conducted by Swedish journalist and author Görrel Espelund.
PART 1 – THE BOOK
GE: You’ve written all your life, but the Gospel According to Wanda B Lazarus, is your first novel. You base it upon the premise…what if the Wandering Jew … was a woman…Why?
LJ: I came across the myth that has fallen out of fashion but remains in our collective unconscious. I wanted to explore the myth of the wandering Jew from a feminine and feminist point of view, turning the age-old male trope on its head. It turns into a paradox without even trying, and exposes the persistent foibles of the human condition through the ages. The What if …? intrigued me. What if the Wandering Jew was a woman? And not just any woman. A foul-mouthed, sexually charged musical picara. And what if … she was accidentally cursed with immortality by Rav Yossi[1] himself, on the way to Golgotha? And this led to the what if … when she was supposed to die, she entered a liminal netherworld call the pleroma, where the muses of antiquity task her to return and return again to eleven different historical epochs through which the Jewish people passed? What if Wanda used her nascent and emerging agency to cast her female gaze upon the patriarchy … without saying that word once? Well, only once; my editor insisted.
GE: Maybe you can also quickly re-fresh our memories… tell us about the myth of the wandering Jew?
LJ: The Wandering Jew was an antisemitic myth concocted in the Middle Ages by a bunch of monks at St. Alban’s. Roger of Wendover, aka Bendover in Wanda’s irreverent vernacular. Legend had it that on the way to Golgotha, Christ asked for a drink of water from a bystander, Ahasuerus, or Cartaphilus, which he refused. Jesus apparently cursed the man there and then to be an outcast, a wanderer, until his return. This rumour has been rear-engineered into all sorts of antisemitic hysterias through the ages. When I was seven, I was accused of ‘killing our Lord.’ ‘I’ve never even met your Lord,’ I retorted in my buzzcut Aberdonian accent. So, you could say I’ve been obsessed since the age of 7 to get to the root of this evil hearsay. And I found a myth upon which to hang Wanda’s three-cornered hat.
GE: In the book, you send Wanda out on various quests… or rather … in each episode, one of the muses sends her out with the task to retrieve a specific instrument. Wanda – who, as you’ve explained, has accidently become immortal – dies at the end of each episode and returns to the muses… Where did you get that idea from?
LJ: When I began my research on the theme, I discovered a book written in the 40s by an antisemite called George Sylvester Viereck about an immortal Jewess, Salome, and her first 2000 years of love. I was a little devastated that it had ‘already been done,’ but then was assured that we each have the right to do our own take on anything. And I didn’t want Wanda to wander about looking for a boyfriend … as does Salome, although there are hints of that. I’m married to a Nietzche scholar who many years ago told me of the idea of ‘eternal return’. The potted version of a very complex concept is … ‘The idea of the eternal return is the prospect of having to live one’s life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy…’ – and becomes all the more potent when one thinks about having to relive that life, to its terrible end. That always intrigued me in a deep philosophical way. The idea of the Wandering Jew as well, is that he (or she) is eternal – Der Ewige Jood. I had a very flippant take on the whole death thing. Wanda dies in many different ways. I wanted to have Wanda ‘return’ to an imaginary space, a magically real interstitial world that I call ‘Pleroma,’ where the bitchy, disempowered muses reside. I took the word from Carl Jung, who used it in his mystical work. According to Uncle Carl, the pleroma is the totality of all opposites … but I wanted another word for purgatory, for hell or heaven, for the Bardo, for Sheol, the biblical place of darkness after death … about which we hardly ever speak. The return to the pleroma allows the muses to speak, and permit the story cycle superstructure to operate as a kind of female task quest. Wanna be the tenth muse, girlchick? Go fetch. So it’s a transgressive heroine’s journey in essence. Rewriting the unrightable wrong. And she is a picara, in spite of the fact that I had to crack open the strict rules of the picaresque to make her grow, transform, gain sovereignty over herself.
GE: Wanda’s love of music and her striving to make women’s voices heard are central themes in the book. She has at times been described as an “avatar” of yourself… is the novel in part a memoir?
LJ: I couldn’t have written this book without living the life I’ve lived. It is a ‘mature’ work if you look at my age and my life experience. The work started off as memoir, and then I wrote the immortal words, based on my #metoo experience with the youth leader of our Jewish youth movement: ‘He had me … in the shadow of the Temple …’ And then I thought ‘What if … what if it wasn’t Temple Shalom on Louis Botha Avenue, but The Temple, 33 CE, around the time of the crucifixion? I’ve never been to a crucifixion. I’ve never been drowned in the River Neva. But … I’ve been sexually abused in a synagogue by a man twice my teenage self. I’ve slept wrapped around a spare tyre in a Canadian snowstorm. I’ve hunkered down in the Sinai without a blanket. I’ve lived an exciting and event-filled life…. Much of my life as a musician is captured here in such a way that you can’t make some of this stuff up. So my life informs the narrative, but the force of imagination and the blood sweat and tears is what forges it into fiction. And with that, I kleib a little nachas.
GE: The story runs from 33 CE/BC (basically the time of Jesus crucifixion) up until our age – 2020. In short you cover 2000 years of history, and as you said, eleven different historical epochs through which the Jewish people passed. It’s quite a task you set yourself. What were the greatest challenges along the way?
LJ: Once I’d discovered Wanda as my protagonist – or she discovered me – I placed her into epochs that she could adventure initially though my imagination and then through whole bunch of research, tweaking that many of the character traits of Wanda were indeed picaresque and by channeling that genre, which comes out of the Spanish Golden Age, Don Quixote, Lazarus de Tormes (after whom Wanda is named), I could satirize modern society in the manner of a female picaro … a picara.
GE: I think it’s time to hear a bit from the picara… Will you read us an extract from the book – the opening.
LJ [reads…]:
If we hadn’t been following Hadassah’s pomegranate all over the known world, we’d never have wound up in Bethany. Lazzie would still be alive. And I’d be mortal. But that’s not how the hamantaschen crumbled. A painted lady flaps her wings and all that jazz. The disciples remember it differently, but they were always going to write their own version anyway. I was there. I saw it all. Not in my present incarnation, but who am I to split sheitel hairs?
The beitzim started to roll when Rav Yossi and his chevras were invited over for that last supper. It was a double whammy, actually – Pesach and Shabbos rolled into one. Martha and I were helping Hadassah boil ’n bake an exodus of matzoh balls. I was never much one for domestic activity and did all I could to wheedle out of the chores in the wide, clay-baked kitchen. Normally, the servants would clean up after us. But on Pesach, Hadassah was having no shirking. Scour the scullery. Polish the porcelain. On your hands and knees, girlchicks! Seek and destroy any vestige of chametz – no wheat, no rice, no leftover shewbread, it all had to go. On Pesach, we’re forbidden to put anything in our mouths that rises. Then there’s the matter of changing the dishes – one set milchedik, another vleishedik. Hadassah was very proud of her Pesach crockery, handed down through the maternal line since the great trek back from Babylonia, each item adorned with a symbol of the festival: an egg, a sprig of parsley, chopped up charoset representing bricks and mortar of the slaves, salt water for tears. All in all, a huge schlep. Twelve extra mouths to feed was no mean feast.
Our second step daddy, Qumran Qumran, had done well in the buildup to the festival. He knew how to supply the needs of the flocking pilgrims and set up fruit stands all along the road to Damascus. Palm dates did very well that season. Figs were at a premium. He tripled the cost of olives. But he liked a flutter on the camels, did Qumran Qumran, and often returned home in his flagons with no more than a handful of copper leptons and a mild dose of the clap. Still, Hadassah was a social climber and having the chevras over would up her Quarter cred by quite a few notches. Nu, we improvised ways to stretch her stingy allowance to feed the holy horde. Rolled the matzoh beitzim smaller. Watered down the wine. She tried to pass it off as a miracle. From her lips to G-d’s ears.
PART 2 – BIO AND MACRO PERSPECTIVE JEWISH ID
GE: The Gospel According to Wanda B Lazarus has been called “a unique and significant contribution to South African letters and contemporary Jewish literature…” But when we spoke earlier you said, “I don’t know if I’m a Jewish writer – I don’t know if I’m a South African writer…” Can you elaborate on that?
LJ: I was raised in Aberdeen, Scotland, where there weren’t enough men to compose a minyan – which can only be men. So we had no religious connection outside of our trips to South Africa, where my grandfather was a big macha in the Reform movement. We immigrated to South Africa when I was thirteen. I dove head-first into the Reform youth movement. But I was always an outsider. Never a kugel. A feminist in my genes. I didn’t want to identify as a Jewish writer. But having birthed Wanda into words, I guess there’s no more denying it. I’m this Jew.
GE: I’d like to hear more about your history – what was it like to end up in the depths of apartheid?
LJ: I was angry from the moment I landed. I had never grasped Apartheid, but I’d lived among diverse cultures, and was horrified at the maltreatment. The fact that I wasn’t allowed to visit the maid’s room, that the woman who cooked for my Granny had to be summoned by a bell. When I found out that I was triply cursed: a woman, a Yiddel, a whitey, I rebelled against all of it. So I became a feminist without really trying. The ethnic identity has taken decades to come to terms with. There were and still are times that I’m very ashamed of ‘my people.’ But fortunately, we Yiddels have an inbred sense of humor. It’s been our survival tactic throughout the ages. And I seem to be quite resilient.
GE: Your mother remarried and left South Africa when you were a teen, but you stayed on and lived with your grandparents. You said you rebelled against the Jewish identity – but how strong was it in the community where you grew up?
LJ: As I said, my grandfather practically built Temple Shalom with his own bare hands. So, we were Reform, which was fairly radical in those days, extremely Zionistic – I was 14 when the Yom Kippur war broke out, and we were swearing allegiance to Israel on the eve of the Soweto riots. I think the Jewish community had a way of abstracting what was happening before their eyes. Even though nobody actually went to live in Israel, it was always a thing growing up. The synagogue had an equal rights vibe in terms of women. It was only when I married an Orthodox man at a very young age that I even knew that women had to ‘go to the back of the shul.’ And Wanda has made sure we’ll never go to there again.
GE: So how do you feel about your Jewish identity today?
LJ: What I realised since I wrote the novel is that my Jewish identity is part of me. It isn’t arbitrary, isn’t random. realised that I was this Jew, that I didn’t have to go to the back of the shul again. That I didn’t have to be barefoot in the kitchen with seven children under six. That I could kiss the Torah on a Shabbos morn. That I could look for different meanings within the canon. Kabbalah has attracted me the most. I enjoy their symbols, their idealizations. You could say it was in the DNA but we don’t like to do that. each one of us is inherently different. The collective unconscious we share with all human kind. With a hamantaschen twist.
GE: Could you have written The Gospel According to Wanda B Lazarus in any other country?
LJ: That’s such an interesting question. The book is a satire of South Africa society, of the abuse of power, of the patriarchy. It’s in every country, in every culture. Living here exposed me to that, after the magical promise of the rainbow nation. So you could say I was a stranger in a strange land who ended up becoming a South African. And even though there’s no direct reference to South Africa and nothing is set here, South Africans – and Westerners and possibly Easterners too, will recognise the universal aspects of a society gone awry. I did write a South African chapter, actually, but I put words in Madiba’s mouth; he actually visited one of our Temples in 1999 and Wanda misheard much of what he told the congregation. I was also advised that people would fixate on a beloved icon. I didn’t want to change him to any other character. Wanda still really met with Madiba. He sang her a prison song that symbolised the fight of his people. And of my people, I guess, as well. It’s also true that the further back in history you go, the more you can ‘imagine’ historical personages. Madiba is too fresh. The Holocaust, even. But they’re both there, in history, the divine and the damned.
GE: I want to raise with you one of the themes you and I discussed earlier. If we’re talking diversity and inclusivity there are values that Jewish writers have in common with Black writers. The notion of ‘Ubuntu’ aligns with the deep Hebraic concept of ‘Tikkun Olam’, the healing of the world. Can you explain this a little bit further…
LJ: Ubuntu is a peculiarly African concept which means ‘humanity to others,’ ‘Love thy neighbor as yourself,’ if you will. The explanatory phrase is ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,’ which translates as ‘a person is a person because of other people.’ This is how people take care of each other, particularly in trying circumstances. (Our Ubuntu has faded somewhat in the last three decades). Tikkun Olam is a mystical Talmudic Kabbalistic concept that means ‘repairing the world’. Legend has it that the holy sephirot, or vessels of G-d’s divine light are shattered and scattered, and it is the vocation of the Jewish people to return the sparks of divine light to their source by means of ritual and performance. To heal the world. To make the world a better place. I’ve discovered that all my writings contain a spark of this collective unconscious. Where else to place blame but upon my ethnic, tribal DNA? There’s never been a more apposite time to espouse these values in storytelling. And of course, these two triangles meet … at the heart. Creating a heart centered world. That also just so happens to be the Magen David, the Hebrew Star of David.
GE: Tell us a bit about Wanda as a “healer of the world” … where does she fit into this theme of the quest for tolerance and the acceptance of difference?
LJ: It’s extremely subtle and never overtly referred to. It’s more a characteristic of her personality. She never does harm intentionally; often accidentally, but she comes to consciousness as her travels continue … that’s where the book moves from the picaresque to the novelesque. She wreaks revenge on the wicked, sure, but she is kind, underneath all her bravado. You gotta love a protagonist who can cut out the tongue of the mendacious Archbishop of Armenia and risk her life to rub a little ‘nard to staunch the flow of the Czarevitch of Russia. Tolerance and acceptance.
GE: Before coming to Gothenburg, I know that you reached out to several Jewish authors to ask them if being Jewish affected their writing.
LJ: This is what I’ve found by Dr Karen Lazar, who wrote her Masters and PhD on Nadine Gordimer and interviewed her several times. Gordimer’s response to the same question, and I quote: “Well I think it’s truly based on nothing. I have never denied that I’m Jewish and I’ve no desire to deny it. For me, being Jewish is like being black; you simply are. To want to deny it is disgusting. It’s a denial of humanity. There’s no shame in being black and there’s no shame in being Jewish. But I’m not religious, I haven’t had a religious upbringing and whether I’m an unbeliever in terms of Jehovah or Jesus Christ is to me is the same thing. There are strange little ethnic loyalties, I suppose, that come up. I can’t help being pleased and have been pleased over the years, to think that in South Africa in the liberation movements and in progressive circles, there have been – given the smallness of the Jewish population – a really disproportionate number of Jews. I’m rather proud of this. though of course, you may then get the accusation, as you do in America, that Jews dominate progressive thinking and the press and so on. So it can be used as a stick to beat you with as well …”
GE: When we spoke earlier you talked about bringing diversity into a comfort zone for all… can you explain?
LJ: I have learned that every author is different. Two Jews in a room and they’re bound to disagree. Nobody likes the admission of being ‘A Jewish author.’ Most are culturally South African before they are Jewish. Each has a different attitude towards their ‘Jewishness’. Some of the authors I asked were downright cringy at the idea of being ‘outed’ as Jewish authors. Others were flattered. We do have an annual Jewish Literary Festival, though, which does show a cultural drive to retain and promote Jewish authors. The irony is, I have put to them the concept we’ve spoken about … Ubuntu and Tikkun Olam … and have found it to be present in many works of many SA authors. It all harks back to the Tree of Life – upon which the sephirot, the vessels, hang – confluent with the chakra system of the east. You could liken Ubuntu to the lower chakras, the earthbound everyday being in the world and Tikkun Olam as an upper chakra condition. And of course, these two triangles meet … at the heart. Creating a heart centered world. That also just so happens to be the Magen David, the Hebrew Star of David.
GE: We are now going dive deeper into the theme of unity in diversity and are going to speak about languages – but first I’d like to ask you to do a second reading.
LJ [reads…]:
I was frog-marched into the hold, war booty to the Empress of Zen. I could smell the fear. Down there it was as dark as a vestal virgin’s pomegranate. The stench of bodies was everywhere. As my eyes became accustomed to the shadows, I saw shackles bolting the passengers to the bulkheads. Packed like Sardinians toe to head, head to toe, we inhaled each other’s secretions and excretions for nineteen interminable nights and days. We were a really mixed bunch; Turks, Persians, Egyptians, Palaestinians, Sodomites, Gomorons. One thing we all had in common: every one of us was now in exile. It was a matter of survival. Eat or be devoured. I used some ’nard to bribe the kapo, a Sodomite who’d schmoozed his way up the hierarchy of captivity, to loosen my chains nightly so that I could explore the vessel. Truth be told, I needed the extra latkes. I endured each casual encounter by superimposing Carta’s clanking chain mail upon the moans of the men I rubbed and tugged on that first leg. A foreskin here, a vas deferens there, the quaint little squeaks of the scrotal sac under my command took me right back to my nights at the garrison. Then I’d be aroused from my flashback by the bodily fluids of the barbarian in my grip and discard him with all the scorn I could muster. Not before denuding him of all the vaballathi he could muster. I couldn’t believe I’d come all this way only to experience these lonely, lowly schmekels. At least the Sodomites didn’t start with me. They had no desire for the pomegranate side…
GE: Where is Wanda in this passage?
LJ: She’s in the second chapter, Twelve Weeks a Slave, in the Queendom of Zenobia of Palmyra. This was an area of the Roman Empire that was ruled by a woman in the year 272 or thereabouts. I wanted Wanda to explore the idea of slavery in her own inimitable way. And of course, to be attracted to the Empress of Zen.
GE: Well it’s quite obvious from your reading, and from what you told us at the beginning, that Wanda is not just any woman – she’s foul-mouthed and there’s quite a lot of sex in the book. Why is that?
LJ: So much about the picaresque was written by men. Lazarillo de Tormes. Celestina. Many men using a female protagonist to shine a transgressive or ironic light on the position of women. I do believe that sexuality on her own terms is what defines Wanda’s travels through the world. Turning the female gaze in an ironic way, upon the patriarchy and society.
GE: You weave in a lot of Yiddish words in the story – why was this important to you?
LJ: Once I discovered Wanda’s voice, she insisted on speaking like that. It’s anachronistic, obviously, nobody spoke Yiddish in 33 CE, but it tickled up the character and gave her the attitude that worked for her narrative. It’s interesting that some of my Jewish target audience was put off by the Yiddish. There is a certain sense of shame that springs from the language that could even be a form of self-loathing. Almost in the same way that Yiddish was banished from the secular Israeli culture. Yiddish has disappeared from SA society. So, it was an extra layer of transgression, a little bit like Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange – Nadsat jargon. I’ve actually created a ‘Shiksanary’ for the 2nd edition. Important to the story.
[1] As Wanda refers to a certain Bethlehem-born itinerant preacher who acquired something of a reputation around that time.
