Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Michael Zapata / Paper Brigade SDJW




If there's a Jewish story everywhere, as the motto of this newspaper puts it, then you're going to love this story today.

Yes, meet Michael Zapata, a novelist from Chicago who is Jewish on his mother's side of the family and Ecuadorian on his father's side. He's 40 and a bright star in American literature for the 2020s.

I came across the author online a few months ago, during some recent literary detective work, when I discovered that Zapata has written a novel titled "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau" scheduled for publication nationwide this month.

Wanting to know more about his family background and the novel itself, I got in touch
with Zapata by email and asked him a few questions. He replied in internet time, that is to say,
right away, within the same day, from his home in Chicago to my home in Taiwan.

"To answer your questions, yes, my new novel does deal directly with the Jewish experience pre
and post Russian Revolution, in Chicago during the Great Depression, and through the lens of
an Israeli-American raised in Chicago decades later," Zapata told me. "My mother's family is
Ashkenazi, originally from Lithuania, and my father's family is from Ecuador."

''My parents met in 1975 in Quito, Ecuador, when my Jewish-American mother was living there as a
foreign exchange student studying Spanish. They met outside my mother’s university and, even
though neither knew too much of the other’s language, they hit it off and were engaged three
months later during Carnival in Santa Fe, the small Andean farming village where my father
grew up. Their engagement and subsequent marriage in a courthouse in Quito was seen -- for both of
their families – an act of rebellion."

Like many Jews in America and Europe these days, Zapata told me he is drawn more to Jewish
culture that to the Jewish religion and is himself secular, and his novel explores these interlocking
identities, too.

"As the whole known story goes, my paternal and maternal great-grandparents fled one of those unspeakable pogroms at the turn of the 20th century in the Russian Pale of Settlement and emigrated to the United States. With them, of course, came both rich religious and secular traditions, which, in part, replicated themselves as, yes, interlocking identities, but also occasional fissures in my own family in Chicago," Zapata said.

''In my novel, I was interested in questioning those fissures, also viscerally and politically evident in the history of the Pale, the February and October Russian Revolutions, Israel, and Jewish immigration to the United States. Still, what binds us to thousands of years (and to each other) is a culture that advocates -- and is anchored by -- books and questioning, profound Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick-like lines of questioning of existence or endlessly mundane questioning such as the one thousand and one ways to best make a brisket. After all, questioning leads to possibility, to parallel worlds and survival.''

"My great-grandmother, who I knew for some time as a child, was fond of calling people, including myself, luftmensch, a Yiddish term of insult loosely meaning “someone with his head in the clouds,” or more tenderly, for the novelist in me at least, as “someone who exists in a cloud of possibility.”

In Zapata's recently-published novel "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau," the mystery surrounding a
lost science fiction manuscript from 1930 is revealed in the near-apocalyptic devastation of post-
Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

An excerpt of the novel appears this month in Paper Brigade, the Jewish Book Council's annual
literary journal, in print only, in Volume Four, according to the council's website.

When asked about his Ecuadorian roots from his dad and his Jewish roots from his mom. Zapata told the San Diego Jewish World: "My parents met in Ecuador, and, shortly after their marriage, they left
for Chicago. My sisters and I spent our childhoods navigating the construction of a new type of
identity and reality, half Jewish, half first-generation Latino, a bifurcated reality, and a new type
of language: Spanglish. We existed in a liminal space between continents and languages, a noisy,
messy, lonely, and often beautiful space."

Zapata is a graduate of the University of Iowa and currently lives in Chicago with his family. 

His novel is being talked about now in literary circles as one of the most important books of 2020, according to publishing sources in New York.

"By the way," Zapata told me," my novel does deal with the history of science fiction and the writing of science fiction, but the novel is not science fiction itself. I like to think of it as literary fiction. Generally, although I’m not a science fiction writer, I love the experiment and challenge of pulling together disparate genres (historical fiction, science fiction and autofiction) and traditions."

The novel? It goes like this: It's the year 1929 in New Orleans, and a Dominican immigrant named Adana
Moreau writes a science fiction novel titled ''Lost City." Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious package containing a manuscript titled ''A Model Earth'' written by none other than Adana Moreau.

Who was Adana Moreau? How did Saul Drower’s grandfather, a Jewish immigrant born on a
steamship to parents fleeing the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, come across this
unpublished, lost manuscript? Where is Adana Moreau’s mysterious son, Maxwell, a theoretical physicist, and why did Saul’s grandfather send him the manuscript as his final act in life. You'll have to read the book to find out.

Zapata’s debut novel shines a light on the experiences of displacement
and exile in a page-turner of a story that is an example of brilliantly-layered storytelling. Could there be a Hollywood movie in the book's future? Time will tell.

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