Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and moved to Israel at the age of eight. He is the author of four collections of short stories and three novels in Hebrew; two of his collections have appeared in English: Blue Has No South (Clockroot Books, 2010) and Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot Books, 2011), both translated by Becka Mara McKay. His work has also been translated into Russian, French, Greek, Spanish, Hungarian, Dutch, Croatian, Polish, and Italian. In 2003 he was awarded Israel’s prime minister’s prize for literature. In 2007 he participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He writes literary reviews for several newspapers and teaches creative writing in Tel Aviv. You can read seven stories from Lunar Savings Time in the Kenyon Review Online here.
HP: Here in the US, the territory of the short-short story seems dominated by Lydia Davis–or, to switch metaphors, perhaps she is its most famous American explorer, its one-woman Lewis and Clark. But in our conversations about fiction you have been more likely to mention Raymond Carver as an English-language force or influence. This leads me to two questions: the first is what you might have to say about the short-short story in its international incarnations and traditions, including but not limited to those in English. The second is about American literature in particular: now that two of your collections have been translated, how do you see your stories against the background of, or in conversation with, American literature?
AE: There are many fascinating examples of the short-short story in twentieth-century literature–from Daniil Kharms to Kafka, from Borges to Julio Cortazar. Some of them wrote short-short stories alongside longer fiction, of course, but others, like Augusto Monterroso, a fantastic Guatemalan writer, concentrated almost exclusively on the very short format. And it goes much further back, if you look at Zen koans or the miniature stories from the Jewish tradition, from the Talmud. There has always been something appealing in trying to say as much as possible by using minimal length in fiction, and it is more evident today when we think about the way we tell each other stories via Facebook, Twitter, etc. “ It seems that now days the short-short story (or even the 500-word story) gains an edge in the digital format, whether it’s on the web or on a touch screen. Even if only because it “resides” better than a longer fiction on a virtual page. I am not sure that I am in a position to a place my work in correlation with American literature, but I can’t imagine myself writing short fiction without reading not only Carver, but also many other wonderful American short-story writers, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, just to name a few.
Your travels on behalf of your books in English have brought you to such destinations as New York; Northampton, Massachusetts; Iowa City; Denver, Colorado (for several months); Los Angeles; Montreal; Chicago“ What would some of your postcards say?
Who would have thought that such short fiction could accumulate so many miles“ In Chicago I activated the alarm in the Art Institute, after deciding that the shortest way to leave the museum was via the emergency exit. I know it sounds like one of my stories, but this one is true. Denver is the home of the best bar in the USA where smoking is still allowed–I think I made more progress there than I usually do in two years. In Iowa I was part of the International Writing Program, which brings writers from all over the world, and it was an unforgettable experience. However, it was not all about literature–in Iowa City the Carver tradition extends to other places as well. (Which is to say that they have few good bars of their own.) New York is not that different than Tel Aviv. At least that’s what we, the Tel Avivians, like to say.
What is the most interesting aspect of seeing your work translated? And I also want to ask: do you yourself translate into Hebrew?
Definitely the work with my translator, Becka Mara McKay. Hebrew is much denser and shorter than English–as Becka once said, in Hebrew “this is because of you” can be said in two words, and it can even indicate whether you are addressing a male or a female. It’s amazing to see what creative solutions she finds to keep the brevity in the stories, without compromising the meaning or the music. I am surprised to see that sometimes the result is better than the original.
In my twenties I tried to translate poetry from the English. I think it was after some failed attempts to translate e.e. cummings that I realized that I should stick to just writing. But it is something I highly recommend my students (of creative writing) try, it teaches you a lot about your own work and about the very elusive transition of fiction or poetry through different perspectives.
And then I want to ask about your relationship to your mother tongue, Russian. Do you still read in Russian?
Unfortunately, rarely. When we came to Israel I was a child, and after reading all the books we brought with us (it was in 1980, and it was hard to get books in Russian in Israel), I switched to reading only in the language that I call my adoptive tongue, Hebrew. In some fanciful way this leap had a very important role in my becoming a writer. So maybe it’s not surprising that now I can’t even write a simple note in Russian.
In addition to your four collections of stories in Hebrew, you have written three full-length novels. I have heard you–and also several critics–describe your stories as compressed novels, a novel that someone could write, or which you then did not have to write. Perhaps I am misquoting you, or them. But can you talk about this extraordinary act of compression, and what has led you in different moments toward one form or the other: the novel as novel, or as paragraph?
When I start to write the page is blank. When I finish, most of it is still blank. So in this sense it’s fair to say that some of the short-short stories I write are closer to an imaginary novel, rather than to the regular short story. It has so many possibilities of what is not told, not written, of what only exists in the margins surrounding the miniature narrative which is revealed. But sometimes it’s just all about the singularity of a moment, or a feeling, or memory. So I do also write short-short stories that don’t try to compress anything, they just in the right length“ p.s: I do admit that there are no spoilers in flash fiction.
You have spoken elsewhere about how fragments, or shrapnel, of Israel’s contemporary reality appear in your work; this seems very true to me as a reader. I wonder what fragments might be appearing in your work now, or lingering with you from the political world as you write. I am thinking about what tone or mood may shape the fiction, or about the pressure these political moments bring to bear on daily life, and the impressions that may be left in literature.
I live in one of the craziest countries in the world. The enormous contradiction between our absurd situation, meaning the occupation, the blindness of our leaders, the unnecessary violence, and our supposedly “normal” everyday life will always have an effect on whatever artistic representation of reality, even if the story takes place in a caf?? or on the moon. I don’t define myself as a political writer, but it’s quite obvious that when I write about the Trojan war, for example, as I do in some of my stories, I also think about something that is much closer to present time. Sometimes the best approach is to deal with it in a direct manner, a path I tried, for example, in one of the stories in Lunar Savings Time, The End of the Conflict or the Miracle of the Analog Clocks. On the other hand, maybe this is also the reason why I try to write as many love stories as I can.