I am an anxious person and an anxious writer,” Nathan Englander says in a conversation so impassioned that he barely comes up for air as we run the gamut from sourdough to intergenerational trauma and Israel-Gaza. And writing, which he compares to an ultra-marathon-runner friend sprinting 120 miles until his toenails fall off. “I don’t know if he would say it’s fun… Writing is really stressful and torturous for me. And I wouldn’t do anything else.”
This past year has been particularly torturous for the New York-born author. Ever since Leopoldstadt director Patrick Marber approached him to do the UK stage premiere of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a play based on his 2011 Pulitzer-finalist short story, he had been rewriting the script to meet Marber’s vision. But when October 7 happened it was clear he needed to rewrite it again.
Patrick Marber and the cast Photo: Mark Senior
But it’s not as if he’s not used to reworking something obsessively. He is not, as he points out, the type to put out a book every nine months like Joyce Carol Oates, or his late friend Philip Roth. “I’m also writing every day, but until I feel like a thing is ready, I will live with it in this obsessive manner,” he says.
It is early Toronto time for an interview, but Englander assures me he’s already been up for some time attending, online, the rehearsal of the play in London. Speaking from the chaotic basement of his home in the Canadian city, surrounded by his children’s skates and hockey sticks (“very Canadian!”) – and books, he had been “gobsmacked” when he received an email from Marber asking if they could collaborate to get the play on the stage, and not least by the brevity of the “to-the-point” message when he himself writes lengthy “19th century missives”.
Simon Yadoo and Dorothea Myer-Bennett Credit: Matt Crockett
The pair worked intensively round the clock through production. “Patrick’s a madman,” says Englander. “We’d work all day until so late, and then they’d be like, ‘nap time!’ But it was the opposite of stressful for me. I love being in that room. It’s really joyous to me.”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is now a play firmly set in the present. It remains an exploration of friendship, marriage, Judaism, memory, history and the Holocaust, how we remember the Shoah and how we use it as tool. “But there is Israel-Gaza in it now,” says the writer. “It’s a small part of the play, but it is an extraordinarily fiery part of it.”
It could not have been any other way. There are two central couples in the play and in the original version they discuss left-wing and right-wing ideas around “the occupation”. But after October 7 that no longer seemed “honest”, and also made the play seem like a historical piece. So Englander added a few pages to the script that include the tense conversation these two couples might have if they got together now, or, put another way, a conversation about the conflict that many friends and families are not able to have.
Brutal scenes: Gabriel Howell (front) and the cast of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank Credit: Mark Senior
“It is not hard to imagine the position of a secular, super-left-wing progressive Jewish couple in South Florida, talking to a Hasidic Jerusalemite couple during this moment,” he says. “It was a brutal scene to write, to inhabit both sides of an argument like that and truly argue it out, no holds barred. It was some of the most intense, if not the most intense and challenging writing that I’ve ever done.”
Being asked how he is affected by the ghosts of our collective Jewish history and how they manifest in his life and writing strikes an instant chord. “Literally, bless you,” he says, launching into a long and tangential answer that likens the way intergenerational trauma leads us to certain beliefs to how Trump came to be elected, and how Brexit happened. A “Mayflower Jew”, as he calls himself, who grew up in the Orthodox community of Long Island, New York, and who studied at a yeshiva in the 1990s, Englander feels that he has been educated to refract the world through the prism of the Holocaust.
“I’m very interested in how our brains are patterned by history. I’ve always been interested, because I had a yeshiva education, that I have an old-country brain,” he says, explaining how he didn’t start mining this topic until his forties. “Since we were kids, my sister and I have always made order of new people through our idea of trust. It was just always been, ‘Who would hide us in a second Holocaust?’ If we met a non-Jewish couple, or, say, a sister and a brother, she would say, ‘He would hide us, she would turn us in.’”
He started to consider what that means for his family, an American-Jewish family in which his grandfather was a Red Sox fan, the other grandfather “a Brooklyn guy” who worked for the mayor, and in which his children, aged five and nine, call his father-in-law zayde (“there were no zaydes in my house, and no bubbe”).
“The idea that I see the world through the Holocaust, that I am obsessed by it, is explored in the play. Every day my wife calls out the time of day when I first mention the Holocaust. She’ll be like, ‘10.42! Obsessed!’”
Marber has praised the play as a comedy that is both hilarious and deeply serious. Englander’s brother in law’s father and both his paternal grandparents were Auschwitz survivors, and he is interested in how people who weren’t raised around survivors, or survivors’ children, might interpret the play and its humour. And how, or if, they understand that the Holocaust is passed on intergenerationally.
“I wanted to show how people who grew up around survivors, or around the Holocaust, talk, how they make jokes that are very dark and very complex and very shocking,” he says. He remembers, for example, the delight of a friend’s survivor father when his son made his first Holocaust joke.
“And in that world, that is not dismissing the trauma, that is acknowledging the trauma, because what happened is so horrific that you can’t even unpack the level of pain.”
Joshua Malina, Gabriel Howell and Caroline Catz Photo: Matt Crockett
But while he doesn’t find jokes necessarily disrespectful and abusive, he does object to people using the Holocaust for their own personal politics and took particular exception to those American anti-vaxxers who wore yellow stars during Covid.
“People calling the wrong people Nazis, that to me, is shocking. That, to me, is an abuse of memory. This is ours. Part of the memory of it is in passing it on, of never forgetting.”
Though he logged on for the play, Englander tends to stay off social media. He has not used Twitter in a decade and doesn’t post about politics anywhere; he couldn’t possibly distil his thoughts in one line. “I need the whole world to get my point across. Even poor you interviewing me can see it – every story is another story and another tangent.”
And he is more than wary of algorithms and how they separate people onto sides. “If you think you can separate Israeli pain from Palestinian pain right now, or Palestinian pain from Israeli pain... How can you not feel for this young woman shot at the protest in the West Bank, and also not feel for the people shot in the tunnel? How does your heart not break for a dead child?”
At a time when Jewish people are losing friends to political arguments and social media rants, the play could not be more timely.
“I don’t know that I can name someone who cares, who hasn’t had an argument. On all sides, people are not talking to someone, feel someone has gone mad. Separate, if you like, to the conflict and a war and horrible violence and human rights violations, and a lack of empathy, there’s this thing of people knowing what it means to fight on Instagram, far from where, you know, people are dying.” Empathy is a word that crops up repeatedly during our chat. “Having lived in Jerusalem where I was one of the very dwindling number of peaceniks, I still believe peace is the only answer,” he says.
We return to Covid, which for him was no time to thrive, he says. Not because he was lonely, but because others were suffering. He took care of his family, and he made the obligatory sourdough bread, but as he did so, he felt the sadness of mass death around the world. It is no different when it comes to war.
“One can be heartbroken at all the loss and suffering in the world and say, I’m also sad that school’s cancelled,” he says, reflecting on lockdown. “Those two things can co-exist. I very carefully separate out my heartbreak over the losses of October 7 and the plight of hostages, and the people of Gaza, who are living in a hellscape. I can be perfectly heartbroken over all of that.”
However, he speaks fiercely against a writer being didactic. For him, it is about telling the story.
He doesn’t have many rules, except the obligation to the story and what it needs.
But he does want people to think about how they think.
“I want people to have a play as an experience. You’re entering this kitchen with these people, and you are entering their world. It’s an act of empathy, for the characters to feel and for you to feel with them.”
It has been a heavy conversation, so I suggest ending on a forward-looking note. “That’s a family rule of mine ,” he says with a smile. “I’ll say to my mum or my sister, ‘Tell me something happy.’”
And what, I ask, are his plans for the high holidays. The answer is that he will be in London for the play, but his family does celebrate the chagim. “Part of owning history is, you have to decide, what are you teaching your children about history and culture.”
The JC is hosting an exclusive showing of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank followed by a Q&A with Josh Malina and the cast at the Marylebone Theatre on October 15.
To book use the code: JCEVENT at go.thejc.com/annefrank
