| The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air
Author Interview
On The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air : Allan Appel in conversation with Paul Bass
Paul Bass: Your new novel, The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air, while it's set in the heart of the Jewish community in the L.A. of the early 1960s, it's really about two kids who are outsiders within that community. Neither the boy nor the girl is very comfortable in their own lives. Is that done on purpose?
Allan Appel: Well, I guess if they were comfortable I wouldn't have a novel. But I always write, it seems, about rabbis who fall in love with Japanese women; about Jews coming under the thrall of Buddhism. Jews on the margins.
PB: Yes, well Jews on the margins who then collide with other traditions. That's what happens in your previous books like High Holiday Sutra and the The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard. But in Hebrew Tutor, it's about collisions within the Jewish community.
AA: I guess so. I mean the male protagonist, Norman, you're right, is very uncomfortable with his role as a kind of scholar, a light of the L.A. Jewish Diaspora. That especially contrasts, grindingly so, with his parents' luftmenshy-life.
PB: And Bayla is a rich girl who is as uncomfortable with her parents' flagrant materialism?
AA: Right. It's not unusual for kids to be in rebellion against their parents and what their parents expect of them, but in this book I guess the conflict, if you see it as a social study, is about a kind of class struggle, or class issues within the Jewish community. I don't think too many people are writing about that these days.
PB: Might it be too intrusive to ask if some of this material emerged from your own life experience?
AA: Yes, it would be too intrusive. No, not at all. Of course all fiction emerges from life, no matter the genre. Yes, I was a star of the L.A. Jewish Diaspora, well maybe a starlet, like the protagonist Norman, and I even did a little tutoring for about $15 a session which was a fortune to me. Oh, and I did have a car that always leaked oil on my way to the tutoring, or anywhere else. But I never tutored in Bel Air, and I've never been on a motorcycle in my life.
PB: Even though the premise of the book, that is the frame, is that Norman, much older now, is telling his youthful love story as an application to be the official rabbi of the King Solomon Bikers Club?
AA: Correct
PB: You were studying to be a rabbi once?
AA: Not quite. I attended the Jewish Theological Seminary, but its teachers' college. I didn't get all that far down the rabbi road, although I loved my strong Jewish education, and I've written about Jews and Jewish situations all my life.
PB: There's also, if I may probe a little, a deep emotional vein running through your novel, and it's a kind of love or nostalgia that when it's summoned up is also spiked by regret and shame.
AA: I think that's true.
PB: What's the regret about?
AA: Well, it's not that I didn't become a rabbi, even though this is my second novel whose fictional frame is a rabbinical job application. In High Holiday Sutra, my hero Jonah is applying for a job with the Hebrew Meditation Circle of Los Angeles. In this one, the hero wants to be the spiritual leader of the King Solomon Bikers Club.
PB: So you, fictionally speaking, only want to be the rabbi of Buddhists or bikers?
AA: Sounds good to me. No, as to regret, I think that touches on another theme in the book, although I don't like the word “theme”: it's got to do with the hero's relationship with his parents. Maybe that's where there's a touch of the shame part. He feels he has to take care of them, worry about them, explain the world to them—not that they've asked. He simultaneously wants to get the hell out as soon as possible. His girlfriend Bayla's Yamaha motorcycle is the quickest and sexiest option, so away our hero rides, leaving behind a dust cloud of guilt. Or rather taking that cloud with him, yea all the days of his life.
PB: Whew! So where has the old road of life brought you and what are you working on now?
AA: I'm happily, and surprisingly, working full time as a reporter for the newest newspaper creation, an online-only paper called The New Haven Independent. I live in New Haven with my art historian wife Suzanne (married for three decades), and kids out of the house, one an editor and the other a soccer coach and cook. I'm working now on a book about two brothers, one a Jew and the other who has become a Mormon, and the issue between the boys is the ultimate residence of their recently deceased dad's soul. Will it end up baptized in the Mormon spirit world and stay in Jewish heaven, wherever that is, dining on the most celestial corned beef? That is the question.
PB: Love, death, colliding traditions? Same old stuff?
AA: Yes, but this time, there's heaven and food. Whadda ya gonna do!
Paul Bass is the editor of the New Haven Independent. He has covered New Haven and Connecticut as a reporter and editor for thirty years, accumulating numerous awards for journalistic excellence. He is also the co-author of Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer (Basic Books, 2006). Also Available by this Author:
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