The Ladies Auxiliary
by Tova Mirvis

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345441265
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Tova Mirvis grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and lives in New York City. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University under the tutelage of Rebecca Goldstein and Mary Gordon

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At the annual Ladies Auxiliary supperrette, (which was, according to all accounts, lovely) the members of the Ladies Auxiliary caught up with Tova Mirvis, and amidst the smoke salmon quiches and peach pies, they sat down with her to talk about her novel

Ladies Auxiliary:   We have to begin by saying that we, of course, know you, and have known you since you were a little girl. In fact, we know your parents and grandparents and we even knew your great-grandparents. You, like us, are from Memphis--five generations, we believe. Which brings us to our first question: What was it like to write about your own community?

Tova Mirvis:   It felt very natural to write about the Memphis Orthodox Jewish community where I grew up. In fact, from the time I first wanted to write, I knew that I wanted to write about this world. The people, the foods, the sense of place, all of these things moved me to write. Even though the novel is fiction, I drew on my experiences of growing up in such a close-kit community. In many ways, I grew up feeling very rooted and I wanted to evoke this in the novel, to explore the desire to be part of a community and keep hold of a certain way of life. At the same time, I sometimes felt like this sense of being connected was a little too much. Not only did everyone know each other, but they also knew everything about each other. So the novel is also about the cost of being part of such a close-knit world, about the difficulty of trying to fit in, about finding a place to be an individual.

LA:   If we were the ones writing the novel, we might have done things a little differently. We certainly would have placed more emphasis on the positive aspects of the community. We would have mentioned, for example, the fact that Mrs. Levy does a great deal of volunteer work. And we would have left out those terrible details about the problems at the school. But, alas, it was not us doing the writing. We were the ones being written about. Though we don't mind the time in the spotlight, we have to ask, why did you decide to have us narrate the story as a group?

TM:   When I first began thinking about this novel, my impulse was to tell it from Batsheva's point of view. That novel would have been about what it feels like to be new to a close-knit and insular community, what it feels like to try to fit in and be unable to. I realized though that I really wanted to write the flip side of this: what it feels like to be the close-knit and insular community and feel that someone new is trying to change this. Once I realized that, I knew that the narrating voice would have to come from someone on the inside. But I also knew that this novel wasn't going to be about just one member of the community and how she is affected by Batsheva's arrival. I wanted to write about the way the community is affected as a group. So I decided to have you, the ladies, tell the story in a communal voice, as something of a chorus. This way, I could show the inner-workings of this world in your voices, the women who have spent your lives there. And this way, I could evoke the strong sense of communal norms and expectations. Even if every individual differs in some way from the group, there is still an overwhelming notion of what "we" do.

Using the communal voice was the most exciting part of writing the book and also the biggest challenge. I have to admit, when I started writing, I couldn't identify with you. But as I wrote, I began to feel closer and to understand that you do what you do because you care so much about preserving the world you've worked so hard to build. I got to know you on an individual level and saw that even though you form this somewhat formidable group, you each have your own relationship to the community and your own desires and problems. This made me feel for you, so that when I finished writing the book, I really missed you.

LA:   Do you have a favorite of all of us? You can tell us, we won't be too insulted.

TM:   I feel very close to all of the you. I feel like I lived with you for the three years it took me to write the book. But if forced to pick a favorite, I would have to say that Helen Shayowitz has a special place in my heart. She epitomized so many of the struggles in the novel. She has spent most of her life trying to fit in. She is unwilling to do anything that will jeopardize her position as Mrs. Levy's right-hand woman. But that is shaken for her over the course of the novel and she begins to see that she has traded her individuality for this sense of belonging.

To my surprise, Mrs. Levy would be the runner up, even though--and I apologize to you for this, Mrs. Levy--she has provoked the greatest amount of outrage. A few people have come up to me and told me that they "could just strangle that Mrs. Levy." But she does what she does out of a desire to hold onto a world that she sees slipping away. And her own Achilles heel is the fact that her own kids have chosen not to live in Memphis. Though she doesn't talk about this, it's a motivating force behind a lot of what she does.

LA:   Although we don't like to dwell on the unpleasant, we suppose we have to ask. What has been the reaction to the novel from other readers in Memphis?

TM:   Before the novel came out, there were a bunch of theories as to what it was about. One person said it was about a true-to-life scandal that happened in Memphis when I was a kid, and someone else claimed to have read the book and said that not only was it about that scandal, but that I had used everyone's real names. I went back and people came up to me and said that they heard they were in the novel and that they were upset about it. Or that they had heard they weren't in the novel and they were upset about that too.

Then the book came out. A lot of people in my community were excited and supportive and understood that it was fiction. My parents, who live in Memphis, have been wonderfully supportive, and they have had to bear the brunt of the negative reaction. I think that the people who were upset felt it hit too close to home and that it wasn't "nice." People accused me of airing the dirty laundry in public. Some people were so upset about the book that they weren't going to read it. Other people told me that they had figured out who all the characters were, although everyone of course had come up with different names. Apparently, there were five candidates for Mrs. Levy.

I think that there is always a strangeness when writing about your own community. People inevitable try to read themselves or their friends and neighbors into a work of fiction. But what I love about fiction is that it's not interested in replicating something exactly as it is in real life. It is about creating characters and places and events, about telling stories. And with regard to the complaint of airing the dirty laundry, I would say that it's important for every community to be able to take an honest look at itself and be able to talk openly about its positives and negatives.

LA:   There are, as we're sure you know, men in the Orthodox community in Memphis and they are for the most part missing from this novel. Some of our husbands were quite irritated to be so deliberately excluded. Why did you choose to focus only on the women?

TM:   So much of the novel is set on the home front, and in the kosher grocery store and in Loehman's and at donor luncheons. And as you know, in this community, this is the women's domain. You are the ones who see Batsheva while grocery shopping for Shabbos and carpooling your kids back and forth. In some respects, this domestic sphere is seen as less important, while the men's world is the one that matters.

But it is in the women's sphere that the children are being raised and the community is being shaped. The men are off at work while this is taking place. Even though you may not have as many official leadership positions in the community, you are the ones who control a lot of what happens here.

LA:   We would certainly have to agree that we are the ones in charge around here, and it's nice someone finally took notice. But let's get away from the subject of us, and talk about someone else for a bit. Batsheva, perhaps. Did you base her on someone you knew?

TM:   She was initially inspired by a friend of mine in college who had converted to Judaism. My friend was someone who did her own thing and I was always struck by this quality of hers. One time, we were having coffee and I was describing the community where I grew up, where I felt like there was such a strong sense of what is done and what isn't done. She jokingly asked me, "What if I moved to Memphis?" I laughed and thought, "My God, what if you did!" That was where Batsheva began, but through the writing process, she evolved into her own person. She came to life for me when I separated her from my friend and let her become a character in her own right. I felt that I had to actively go looking for Batsheva. I took walks around New York looking for her. I went shopping for clothes she would wear. Now, it's funny to remember that Batsheva was born in that conversation with my friend, because except for a few details, they're not very much alike.

LA:   Batsheva is certainly very--how shall we put this politely--enthusiastic, and we have learned to appreciate this quality of hers a bit more. But we still feel that she crossed the line. If only she had tried to fit in a little more, none of this would have happened. But everyone already knows what we think of her. What do you think of her?

TM:   I agree with you that she walks the line and sometimes crosses it. I wanted to blur the line between propriety and impropriety. I didn't want her to commit any grave, clear-cut offenses that would definitely put her outside the self-constructed walls of the community, but I also didn't want her to be too perfect. I think Batsheva has a striking lack of self-consciousness; it takes her a while to pick up on what is being said about her. And she isn't always aware of the effect she has on people, particularly Yosef and the high school girls. But for all the ways she is different from the rest of the community, I think Batsheva is so threatening because she is, more or less, part of this world. She does convert to Orthodox Judaism. She does show up in synagogue, she does observe the Sabbath. She can't be completely marginalized and declared "non-kosher" and yet she is still certainly not "one of us." And in many ways, I think that maybe some of you are envious of her. She has a feeling for religion that not everyone has. For people raised in this world, the rituals and holidays can become mundane, but for Batsheva everything is new and meaningful.

LA:   What about the high school girls? It still breaks our hearts to think of Shira Feldman off with that non-Jewish boy. The way you've portrayed them, they seem so disgruntled and restless. We know you were a good girl in high school, so they're not based on you. What made you write about the girls and why did they have to be so angry?

TM:   I went to the Orthodox high school in Memphis, The Yeshiva of the South. There were eighteen girls in the school and three boys in a separate school. Even though I didn't openly rebel in high school, I did feel restless. It was hard to be in such a small school, with the same people, for so many years. In the novel, the girls feel this sense of being cooped up. They live in a very structured world where they are taught to focus on all the restrictions instead of the meanings behind their way of life. Despite their religious upbringing, they're still normal teenagers. They're curious and hungry for the outside world, and Batsheva gives them a window into it. I know you try very hard to shelter your daughters. And I understand why you do this--you want your children to be religious in the same way you are. But I don't think there's any way to ensure that kids turn out the way you want them to.

LA:  And of course, we have to mention the Rabbi's family. We can't stop thinking about what happened with Yosef. Now, we have to admit that it wasn't what we thought, although we might say in our defense that there was reason to be suspicious. But still, don't you think Batsheva played some role in Yosef's leaving the community?

TM:  I do think that she played a role in his decision to leave, but I don't think it's her fault. Even before he met Batsheva, Yosef was wrestling with questions about who he was and what he wanted. Batsheva was the only one he could talk to about this, and maybe this spurred him to act on what he was feeling, but it was there all along. I think this could be said for a lot of what happens in the community over the course of the year in which the novel takes place. The problems were there anyway, just underneath this facade that all is fine and well. Batsheva may have been a catalyst for the specific rebellions in the novel, but the seeds were planted well before she arrived.

LA:  So much of the novel is about Jewish life and rituals, all the preparations for the Sabbath and the holidays--we got nervous just thinking about all we have to do to get ready for them. Is this a novel that could only take place in the Orthodox Jewish community?

TM:  Only the details of the novel are particular to the Jewish community. I wanted to convey this world through descriptions of ritual and holidays. But I think the themes of the novel go beyond this particular community. One of the best compliments I've received about the novel was from someone in Mississippi who told me that she knows very little about Judaism but she could have sworn this book was about her mother's Methodist church. Someone else told me that the ladies in the book are just like her aunts, and she is Asian American. I think that all communities deal with issues of what makes one an insider or an outsider. Any religious community has to negotiate a means of preserving a tradition. And I think that the desire for community is universal. Today especialy, when there isn't as much sense of being part of a particular community, people are looking for ways to recreate a feeling of belonging.

LA:  Being Jewish in the South is not the same thing as in New York (as we're sure you know, having decided to live up there for reasons we cannot quite understand). Down here, we feel both part of the city and a little separate from it. We've lived here for so many generations and yet, we feel a sense that we too are outsiders in some way. Did you feel this way growing up here?

TM:  I did, and I think that in many ways this is typical of the experience of being Southern and Jewish. So many Southern Jewish communities are very well-established and go back so many years, and yet still it seems like they don't quite fit there. When I went to school in New York, people hearing that I was from memphis and had grown up in the Jewish community there always expressed surprise that there were Jews in Memphis. As you know, the Jewish community in Memphis is relatively small. There are about nine thousand Jews in the city, and maybe a thousand who are Orthodox. I grew up feeling very aware of being different. At times, this was uncomfortable, always feeling like an outsider. But still, I feel deeply connected to Memphis. They say that to be from Memphis, you can't have just lived there for twenty or thirty years; you have to have a grandparent or preferably a great-grandparent who also lived there. I still have this sense of what it means to be from somewhere. Even though I live in New York City now and have lived here for nine years, I will always be a Memphian.

LA:  Since you've felt so comfortable sharing all the details of our lives, let's talk about your life. We know you're married. (In fact, we were at your wedding at the Peabody Hotel, and we could have sworn you borrowed some details from your own wedding and put them in the novel.) And we hear we owe you a belated Mazel Tov - on the birth of your baby boy.

TM:  I feel like I had two babies this year--my son Eitan and this novel. In many ways, their "births" paralleled each other. I spent several months of my pregnancy on strict bed rest and I revised the novel during that time. I was so cut off from the outside world that I felt like my characters were keeping me company through those long, nerve-wracking months. I was supposed to deliver the final manuscript to my publisher on a Friday but I decided to keep it over the weekend, to look it over once more. That Saturday my baby was born, two months early. One of the first things I thought about having the baby was that I had the manuscript sitting in my apartment and I needed to turn it in. I ended up delivering the two of them in the same week.

LA:  We certainly know what it's like to juggle many commitments at once. With our obligations to our children and to the shul and school, sometimes we feel like we're running around with our heads coming loose. Just the other day, we were saying how, all too often, it feels like there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything we want to do. With a baby, where in heavens name do you find time to write?

TM:  Before the baby, I was more flexible. I had a rule that I had to write for five hours in a row every day, but I could start whenever I wanted to. Now though, I don't have that luxury. I know that if I don't make good use of my writing time, I won't necessarily be able to write later on. As soon as the baby-sitter arrivers, I take my laptop to the Starbucks on my corner and write.

LA:  What's next for you? We hope your next novel isn't about us as well--we need a little rest from all the excitement.

TM:  It's definitely not a sequel, but beyond that, I'm reluctant to say. One of the things I've learned from writing The Ladies Auxiliary is that the novel you set out to write is not always the one you end up with. What I do know for sure is that it's also about the Jewish world and the challenge of living in both a religious world and a secular one. It is set in New York and in Israel, and I've found that little by little, Memphis is creeping into it as well. So ladies, get ready.




© Copyright 2009 by Tova Mirvis. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.

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