An Interview with Tamar Yellin
All through my teens I was reading and writing poetry. All the great poets, in particular Shakespeare and Keats, taught me the importance of sound and metre in language, and that imagery is what gives life to language. I write for sound and I write for image. Where those two coincide there is a sort of inevitability about the sentence.
The other great influence in my youth was the Hebrew Bible. I studied biblical Hebrew intensively from an early age. The beauty, the extreme economy of that language served as a kind of counterbalance to the rather florid and wordy style I was absorbing from the Victorians.
I am a passionate reader now. The writers who inspired me in the past do not necessarily do so any more. I still read the Victorians with pleasure, but I wouldn’t want to try and write like them. My mentors now are all foreigners: when I read Kafka, or Primo Levi, or Garcia Marquez, I feel inspired, because of the beauty of the language and the—how shall I put it?—enigmatic clarity of their work. That is a quality I also try to achieve. I love Katherine Mansfield, too, who has a foreign sensibility because she was a New Zealander. At present my absolute love is the German writer W. G. Sebald—he was a great inspiration to me when I was writing “Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes.” I had already conceived and begun writing the book, when I discovered Sebald’s The Emigrants. It filled me with joy because I saw someone writing passages of continuous prose, without dialogue, without even paragraph breaks—and it was unstoppably readable, utterly compelling. I thought: It works, it’s permissible. You can get away with it.
Zoran Živković: Your prose written so far can be divided in three groups: one novel (The Genizah at the House of Shepher) and two collections (Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes and Kafka in Brontëland)—with a number of uncollected and unpublished stories. Since it’s possible that the chronology of the more or less forthcoming publications of these three volumes isn’t going to match the chronology of the origin of your works, would you tell me more about the latter? It’s rather interesting, since you are in the constant process of maturing as a writer, if I may say so.
Tamar Yellin: Of course you may say so. I hope I will go on maturing as a writer for as long as I continue to write. Life seems to me to be like a series of veils—you pass through one, you think you see more clearly, then you experience the lifting of another veil. Writing is the same. It is a continual learning process.
In many ways the writing of The Genizah at the House of Shepher has been the story of my whole adult life. I first thought of the book in 1987, when I visited my grandparents’ house in Jerusalem for the last time before it was to be torn down. There in the attic we found a family archive so vast that the very dust on the floorboards was composed of disintegrating paper. Amongst the letters and diaries and the back numbers of the newspaper my grandfather edited before the First World War, was a little black bible of tremendous importance, which had been missing, until that point, for over seventy years. It contained vital notes, made by one of my ancestors in the late nineteenth century, of the textual differences between the Aleppo Codex and the standard Hebrew Bible. The Aleppo Codex, one of the oldest and most perfect manuscripts of the Bible in existence, had been lost in a pogrom in 1947, and it was with the help of these notes that it would ultimately be reconstructed.
As I sat there in the attic surrounded by my family’s history I was possessed by an ambitious vision, to write a novel covering several generations and moving between Lithuania, Jerusalem, England and Azerbaijan. It would somehow comprehend the whole of Jewish history back to the Garden of Eden and down to today, where it would examine complex questions of contemporary Jewish identity. And at the heart of the book would be the mystery of a Codex—an embodiment of all the themes of truth, myth, history I would be exploring…
