(2) - By Andre Aciman - Slate Magazine

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To: Posted Thursday, Nov. 5, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Writing:
Readers think I bare my soul in my work, that I don't mind the risks, or that I write about things people have always felt but have never quite had the time or courage to put into words. That's not it at all. My writing works on people the way certain dreams do: While dreaming them, you could almost swear you've dreamed them before. That's exactly the response I am looking for. I want people to read me for the first time as though they were reading me for the second. I want them to feel that they've heard all this before, though they can't remember where, because every word they read is stalked by a pre-existing shadow seemingly originating from their own experience, not mine. It makes the most far-fetched, unusual things I say seem very familiar, easy to take in, and thoroughly believable. But like a magician closing a show, now that I've explained the trick let me play another on you: I want you to suspect I am lying, the better to stun you when I speak the truth. Therein, perhaps, lies the magic.

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Writing 2:
I love to mimic people. People say I'm good at it. What they don't know is that I have no skill whatsoever at picking out or magnifying characteristic features. What I am good at is imitating another mimic's performance. That's the kind of "realist" writer I am. I don't notice things in real life and then report them on paper; I am the product of pre-existing writers who have taught me what to look for. I am not happy when I've captured someone's essence on paper but when I look back and say, Dostoyevsky or Maugham would have caught that too.
I am not the product of life and experience but the product of other texts. I copy books, not life. I am most happy when readers think that I had to experience life to the hilt to write what I write. In fact, I was merely coasting on other writers.

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On being Jewish:
No interest. I don't understand how Holocaust survivors can turn to religion. Can there be a God after Auschwitz, after they gassed your mother, your daughters? Can there be faith in anything but a satanic God? A chosen people. Chosen for what? And what if there wasn't a God? Without a God can you still have Judaism? The answer is, believe it or not, yes. Clearly, you can't start a religion without a God, but once a religion is in place, what keeps the religion and the people together are its rituals. People need rituals, not faith, not God. It is the rituals that come to our rescue in times of sorrow or joy. Faith is just the nickname we give the rituals. The songs for this or that occasion, the motion to avert this or that danger, the ritual gathering of people to provide this or that comfort, this or that celebration. Nothing to do with faith. In its brilliance, Judaism has even managed to create Yom Hashoah, the Day of the Holocaust. It has absorbed the biggest challenge ever to rise against Judaism the way it has neutralized the suffering of the Jews in all times: by ritualizing it.
A. has lost her lover. The only person she wants to talk to about her suffering is her lover. He is still her best ear, the best shoulder, the one who understands best, always ready to help her out. But he's the one who inflicts the pain, I say, almost pleased I've caught a contradiction. Yes, I know, she says.
Can religions survive by refusing to question their God when he begs them to question him as he did after the Holocaust? Or do they survive precisely because the need for rituals is far stronger than the fear of finding oneself in a godless universe, where God is dead, where God has yet to be invented all over again?
A. is right. Perhaps I don't understand love. It occurs to me that I've never understood faith either. Perhaps the two are one and the same.

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To: Posted Thursday, Nov. 5, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

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André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and has lived in Italy and France. He teaches at Bard College in New York and is currently working on a love novel titled Over the Footbridge.

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