“The dark humor of Jewish literature and folklore is a really important element of the book.” -A Jewish Q&A with author Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country
I had been eager to read Sacha Lamb’s book about a Jewish angel and demon who learn together in a shtetl and travel to America since I spotted a hint of it on twitter, so when the book landed in my mailbox, I was thrilled! No joke, I ran so quickly out to that mailbox and tore open that package. And even with all the high expectations I’d set for a book, it still managed to exceed them.
I caught up with Sacha Lamb to ask all the Jewish questions about When the Angels Left the Old Country. And when I read the answers, I got that lovely tingly feeling you get when you’re listening to a talk on a topic you love and the speaker is so clearly deeply knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. Readers, enjoy:
Q: First, Mazal Tov Sacha on a wonderful and very Jewish book! Your editor compares your work to Sholom Aleichem and Philip Roth, and I fully understood where that comparison came from as I read. How does it feel to be contributing to the canon of Jewish literature?
A: These comparisons are so, so gratifying it’s almost difficult to comprehend! It’s one thing to draw on classics for inspiration but it’s entirely another to have people recognize the inspiration, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Ironically, when I wrote the first draft of ANGELS, I wasn’t trying to embark on any kind of serious project–it was actually a decompression project after finishing a difficult draft of an entirely different novel! I’d been working on a YA contemporary that was centered on a story of grief and loneliness, and I’d also just finished a history degree, so I wanted to play around with things that felt low-pressure and fun. It might seem odd but that’s how I landed on the Ellis Island immigrant narrative (it’s both very familiar from literature, and also adjacent to the topic of my history research). Historical fantasy is kind of my comfort zone, so I went into it just trying to pack in as many cool facts I’d picked up in my reading and as many fun jokes as possible.
Obviously it’s gone through changes since that first draft, and some of the revision was in more consciously drawing from Jewish classics and some lesser known or more forgotten works–Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, immigrant memoirs I’ve read, Singer’s sister Esther Kreitman. The dark humor of Jewish literature and folklore is a really important element of the book and something I loved playing with. One of the “I can’t control this, but I wish…” kind of dreams I had during the publication process was “I’d love to see this in a synagogue library, or at the local Judaica shop,” and I’ve been really blown away by the responses so far.
Q: Uriel the Angel and Little Ash the Demon are as different as they come, and yet they found each other. How did the idea of an angel and a demon who are chevrusas (learning partners) come to you?
A: It was a couple of elements of inspiration that just came together and gelled really nicely. Chevrusa study is built on this idea of productive tension, and we have models all the way back to Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish of chevrusas as effective life partners. Whether you want to read them in a romantic/erotic way or not, there’s this great dynamic in their story of people who’d seem ill matched on the surface, but they complete each other in this amazing way and the legacy of that is millennia of arguments. I just love that, and it’s a partnership dynamic that also makes for good plot energy, because there’s the inherent tension, push-pull of working things out together through disagreement.
The idea of centering a narrative on a chevrusa dynamic came together with a couple of demon stories. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a short story called “The Last Demon”, about a demon who’s left behind in the crumbling attic of a village shul after the Holocaust, half-starved and subsisting on the Hebrew letters out of abandoned books, and reminiscing about the golden days when he could torment the local rabbi. And there was also an adaptation in 2019 of GOOD OMENS, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, which has an angel and a demon working together to thwart a Christian apocalypse. Another ill-matched, or perfectly matched, odd couple!
Those three things came together and I immediately had the picture of this angel and demon pair who’ve grown to really love each other through years and years of arguing over their books, and then things start to change in their village, not in the catastrophic way the narrator from “The Last Demon” has gone through, but in a way that unsettles them and throws them out of their complacency and into the modern world. Then their relationship is tested by the forces of modernity and they each question their own roles in the world, but the partnership is ultimately unshakeable. That’s really the heart of the story.
Q: In this story, Jews in the Old Country make their way to the Golden Country, the United States, where the streets are paved with gold. (Or cheese, to quote An American Tail.) What sort of research was required to accurately portray this experience?
A: I mentioned that I had just finished my history degree when I started writing. The research for the novel was kind of a “freebie” alongside my research in school, because my MA thesis was on Jewish immigration, albeit a slightly later period. I ended up focusing on Cecilia Razovsky, this really cool woman who was head of the NCJW’s immigrant aid division in the 1920s (when the immigrant quotas were installed for southern and eastern European immigrants and Jewish immigration got bottlenecked). But of course to write about the 1920s you have to read about everything from 1880 onward, so I have read everything I could get my hands on about Jewish immigration between 1880 and 1920 and a little bit to either side of those dates. I focused on gender, disability, and queerness, because these were intersections of identity that made it even harder for Jews to get into the States, and also because those are intersections of identity that I personally experience.
I don’t want to bore everyone with an entire lecture, but I will recommend some books that are great for learning about the time period and subject! DAUGHTERS OF THE SHTETL by Susan Glenn is a great introduction to the lives of Jewish immigrant women. TRIANGLE by David von Drehle is a very readable account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and the dynamics that led to 146 mostly young, immigrant workers dying in that disaster. BAD RABBI by Eddy Portnoy is a collection of clippings from the interwar Yiddish press, a little outside the period of the novel but really, really fascinating look into the sort of more sordid daily life of Jews in Eastern Europe.
I also read memoirs and autobiographical novels by Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, Rose Cohen (yes, I stole her name!), and others, including a YIVO oral history collection that was published as MY FUTURE IS IN AMERICA, edited by Daniel Soyer. Memoirs and personal recollections are great because they might not necessarily capture how things “really” felt, but they capture how people remember them, and I really wanted the novel to have that familiar feeling, like it might be something you’ve heard before.
By the way, I’m currently reading an advance copy of MOTT STREET by Ava Chin, which is an account of her Chinese-American family’s history in New York City. While I didn’t have any Chinese characters in my book, it’s worth noting that as Jewish immigrants from Europe were struggling with antisemitism to enter the States and become naturalized, East Asians weren’t allowed to naturalize at all, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was in full force. So Chin’s book, which takes place on the Lower East Side just like the American portions of ANGELS, is great for seeing how immigration laws treated one of the Jewish community’s close neighbors. And there’s a really cool story in there about how some of her great uncles, who were prominent in the Chinese community, put on a Beijing opera style theatrical performance to benefit victims of the Kishinev Pogrom!
Q: Rose sets off on her own to America, but on the dock before she boards the ship, she befriends Uriel and Little Ash because they look young and Jewish. That experience, finding and instantly befriending a fellow Jew in a non-Jewish space, was very familiar. Did you pull from your own life experiences in writing this book?
A: Absolutely, yes. Rose is both feeling the connection to other Jews and, though she definitely doesn’t realize it, she’s got a bit of gaydar going off there. When you’ve been marginalized for whatever reason, even if you haven’t consciously thought about it, those moments of understanding are so important. That’s actually a theme that I keep coming back to in my work. My first published piece, Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live (Book Smugglers, 2017–it’s available for free online!), focuses on a trans boy who’s a victim of bullying, and he almost thinks no one will ever understand him, until he finds people who do. Especially when I’m writing for teenagers, I like to emphasize the strength and warmth you can get from reaching out to people when you sense something familiar in them.
Q: Both Uriel and Rose struggle with not understanding themselves. As Uriel risks becoming more human to do a mitzvah, Rose questions her own affection for her best friend Dinah and the resulting choices she’s made. The hero’s journey comes with navigating the inner journey, as well. Was this intentional? And, if yes, how did you plan the structure of your book to reflect this journey?
A: I did deliberately structure the book so that the supernatural and natural events would be intertwined, and likewise so the internal narratives of identity would be intertwined with the physical journey the characters are on. A migration tale of course has a sort of in-built structure of movement and checkpoints, and the checkpoints are moments where identity becomes a highly charged question: identity is being imposed on you, or you are forced to represent your identity to others.
The angel character, Uriel, is built from the idea that angels change their names according to what task they’re engaged in, and only have one task at a time. Building a character from that concept almost forces you to think about identity formation, because in order to move through the narrative AS a character, it ends up having to make choices about what parts of itself it would rather hold onto and what it’s willing to let go of. Rose has been hurt in a way that makes her determined to be self-reliant, and her journey is more about figuring out that she can be big-hearted and altruistic but also listen to her own emotional needs. Little Ash understands himself better than the other two, so he ends up confronting other characters who define him too narrowly and prejudicially. Some of those confrontations literally happen at the Ellis Island checkpoint or in printed identity documents, and some of them are in the characters’ heads. I really enjoyed braiding all those threads together.
Q: This is my favorite question to ask Jewish authors. What books did you identify with as a kid and when was the first time you saw yourself in a book?
A: I read a ton of historical fiction and a ton of fantasy. The DEAR AMERICA books were definitely a big influence, and because those are structured as diaries, the protagonists are kind of necessarily bookish, which I definitely identified with. There’s one in that series that’s about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and it was so harrowing it’s imprinted on my brain forever. I collected books about the Triangle Fire, actually, and part of it was those books always centered really strongly on female friendships that you could read as romantic or quasi-romantic. I also really identified with Daine from Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books, because she got along with animals better than people!
In some ways though I don’t think I saw my whole self until I was in my twenties. A couple of books I had really strong “this is me” responses to are really recent–THE CITY BEAUTIFUL by Aden Polydoros, THE ART OF STARVING by Sam J. Miller. The landscape of kidlit has changed so much over the last decade or so, it’s now possible to say “I’d like to read a Jewish historical fantasy with queer characters in it” and get a satisfying response. I mean, you can say that and someone can give you more than one book! That’s great and I’m really excited about it, and I hope it keeps on going and we get more and more variety.
