An Interview with Tamar Yellin
Zoran Živković: Most certainly. Now, your first work of fiction to be published in book form is your novel The Genizah at the House of Shepher (excerpt). But before becoming a novelist you have been (and still are) a very successful story writer. Many of your stories have appeared in a variety of prestigious magazines, identifying you as an excellent stylist and very accomplished author. What is your ideal prose form?
Tamar Yellin: I feel most comfortable with the short story. I like to write economically. Not minimalistically, mind—but I like every word, every sentence, to have weight. When I write stories I can be as brief as I like. And yet a short story can embrace an entire life, an entire universe.
Everything that is written, instinctively finds its own form; if it works, there is an inevitability about it. One should not write as a story what can be told as a poem. A novel which could be a story has failed to justify its existence. I sometimes think I can achieve more depth in a short story than I can in a novel, simply because the words have more weight and value. There is nothing wasted… Yet I can’t resist the epic pull of the novel. There are themes, scenes, narratives only the novel can convey.
Zoran Živković: What I find maybe the most fascinating in the ancient and noble art of prose writing is the moment when a new work is, metaphorically speaking, conceived. How does this happen in your case?
Tamar Yellin: That’s one of the hardest questions of all to answer. It’s very difficult to pin down or analyse the moment of literary conception, and, in a sense, one resists doing so. It might break the spell… I will say that there is usually one scene, even one moment in a novel which I am working towards, a moment of consummation almost, towards which everything else in the book is building. It is usually in my mind from the beginning. Getting to that moment, writing that scene, is the greatest pleasure of all and the sweetest reward. It won’t necessarily come at the end of the book. It may be at the mid-point or in the second half.
Theme is also very important to me in my conception of a book. I am very devoted to ideas. A story is not worth telling unless it has some deeper meaning. Yet how can one say which comes first, the theme or the story? They grow together; they are symbiotic. The story, the theme and the characters can grow inside one for years. And for me they are always intimately bound up with a sense of place.
As for short stories—they spring out of nowhere, don’t they? I will sometimes start a story on the strength of one sentence. I would never dare do that with a novel. There is too much at stake.
Zoran Živković: I assume all writers introduce, consciously or not, intertextual references in their works. That’s hardly surprising, since we have behind us a 5,000 year tradition of prose writing that can’t be neglected or avoided. Are you aware, while you write, of the various influences of other authors on your fiction? Could you identify some of them?
Tamar Yellin: I was a very strange young writer: I hardly read at all. Until the age of about fifteen, though I wrote prolifically, it was only with the greatest of effort that I could be induced to read a book. I can’t begin to estimate the lasting damage this may have done me as a writer… However, there was one significant exception to the rule: I would read anything by or about the Brontë sisters. So I can honestly say that almost my whole literary education, at that crucial early stage, was conducted by the Brontës and their biographers. Fortunately, they were good teachers. I acquired an extremely wide vocabulary just from reading their books, and a sense of the rhythms and structure of the English language which perhaps can only be acquired from the great Victorian novelists. I absorbed the passion of their writing. I also picked up all sorts of historical and literary knowledge, because when you learn about the Brontës you learn about their entire world, too.
