An Interview with Tamar Yellin
Tamar Yellin is the author of numerous short stories which have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Stand, The London Magazine, Jewish Quarterly, The Third Alternative, Leviathan Quarterly and Nemonymous, as well as the World Fantasy Award-winning Leviathan Three (The Ministry of Whimsy Press) and the anthology Best Short Stories (Heinemann). Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, will appear in March 2005 from The Toby Press. She lives in Yorkshire.
Zoran Živković: Why do you write, Tamar?
Tamar Yellin: Isn’t that supposed to be the question all writers hate? I can’t recall a time when I didn’t want to write. Even before I knew how to form letters, I used to fill notebooks with line upon line of scribble (illustrated, of course) in my eagerness to record those first stories I can no longer even remember… I write in order to pursue some vision which is always hovering in my head, whether it is a theme, an emotion, a place or a character I feel compelled to convey. I love words. I love making sentences: to transform my experience of life piece by piece into something beautiful. If I don’t write I begin to feel restless and unwell. It’s the only kind of work which really satisfies me.
Zoran Živković: Yes, I think I know what you mean. Would you tell me more about those early days? They seem very important since your prose is so autobiographical and your pivotal character is a very perceptive, very sensitive and very bright young lady who is usually the narrator. Do you recognize yourself in her?
Tamar Yellin: Everything happened before I was eighteen. Love, death and betrayal. To me childhood has been the source of all my creativity. Not only my somewhat death-drenched adolescence, the loss of my parents (they both died of brain tumours when I was in my teens) but the earliest affections and attachments, to people and to places, and the even earlier inchoate impressions, of the garden of my infancy, the house where I grew up. When I was eighteen years old I locked the door on my parents’ house and drove away to university, and I never went back. My life was spliced there. Much of what I have written since has been a re-imagining, in one way or another, of what Yehuda Amichai calls “my childhood, of blessed memory.”
It’s always risky to make assumptions about the autobiographical content of a novelist’s work. When I take the material of my own life and turn it into fiction I take whatever liberties with it I please. To me it is like a piece of clay the potter molds: I will change it and shape it, add, alter and subtract. It bears the same relation to reality that a dream does, where you seem to recognise things and yet they are strange. A reader can’t fix on any one element in a story of mine and assume it is factual truth. As for the young lady you refer to, perhaps you recognise her more easily than I do. As a writer, I am a non-person. When I write about her she is the same to me as any other character I create: she may or may not have elements of me; she may have characteristics which are not mine at all. The characters in books are not real people; they are fictions. The very act of writing fictionalises everything.
