James Roseman has two important things in common with Aaron, the protagonist of his debut novel Placeholders: they’re both Jewish, and they both fell in love with an Irish girl.
That’s about as far as the similarities go, but Roseman, 30, couldn’t help but imbue the story with a question he’s prone to toying with himself: what constitutes a Jewish identity, especially when you lose your faith?
Placeholders follows Aaron, a young man struggling to get through the mundanity of his corporate job in Boston while grieving his brother who died fighting for the IDF, and Róisín, an Irish expatriate who’s being paid under the table by a dodgy cafe owner because she’s overstayed her visa by a few years. After meeting on a night out, each find in the other a bit of consolation amid a sea of personal losses. But with disparate religious backgrounds and each their own unabating sense of loneliness, the pair are forced to confront reality when Róisín discovers that she’s pregnant.
Placeholders, published by Verve Books, will be released on 26 September, 2024.[Missing Credit]
It marks a powerful debut for the American-born author, who said he believes there aren’t enough Jewish characters in fiction and felt compelled to give Jewish readers a story through which they might be able to see themselves.
“The most powerful thing literature can do for me personally is reading a book and going, ‘Oh, wow. I am not the only person who has felt that,’” Roseman said.
Placeholders, which hits bookshelves on September 26, is sure to provide readers with many such moments.
Aaron’s grief over his brother’s death is complicated by his own feeling of separation from the faith he grew up in and the extent to which his Jewishness is connected to Israel, the country his brother died for. Through this internal conflict, Roseman explores a question that is forefront in the minds of many diaspora Jews in the current climate.
“If you have more complicated thoughts about Israel as a political situation, there’s an assumption that maybe it says something about your Jewish identity... And I wanted to capture that in a very direct way,” said Roseman.
“This is certainly not a book that's written in reaction to the contemporary situation, but the important thing about it for me was always to express this inherent tension to specifically American Judaism, which is Israel and faith. Where do you fit in if you feel Jewish, but you also feel complicated things about the state of Israel? What does that mean for your identity? And what does it mean if your close family feels differently?”
Raised in conservative Judaism in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Roseman never questioned his Jewish identity because he was perpetually steeped in it. But when he departed as a young adult, both from his home and from the regular practice of religion, he began to think more about what constituted a Jewish identity, having realised he’d taken for granted his Jewishness when he was among a likeminded community.
“I feel comfortable saying now, I am not less Jewish because I don't go to services, but it certainly doesn’t always feel that way,” Roseman said.
This question of Jewish identity was thrown into sharp relief when Roseman moved to Ireland by himself in January 2019, securing a work visa through a software engineering job, and was as distant as ever from his Jewish roots – religious or otherwise. But writing seemed an avenue to channel his thoughts about faith and identity; it was only once he settled in Dublin and began attending literary events that he considered writing professionally. His wife, who he met less than a year after moving to Ireland, encouraged him to do a creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme during Covid, and Roseman said that “was probably the first time I really thought of myself as a writer.”
Placeholders began as a short story during the MFA and, with the encouragement of a writing mentor, he started working on the first draft of the novel a few months after graduating in 2022.
Though the Jewish community in Ireland is small and the presiding attitude pro-Palestine, Roseman said he was never worried about how the book would be received.
“I really had to fight myself from trying to water it down out of fear of contentiousness,” Roseman said. “But I think if someone were to read my book and think that I were making a hard political statement, I would feel misinterpreted.”
Indeed, the soul of Placeholders is not so much in Aaron’s intellectualising of the Israel-Palestine conflict but in what that internal process says about his grief. It is a story of loss, above all else, and the humanity that can be found in the ways we cope with it.
