Episode 25: Jessica Berger Gross
On Cultural Judaism and Creative Resistance
Jessica Berger Gross’s Five Books:
Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon
Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern
The Postcard by Anne Berest
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Hazel Says No by Jessica Berger Gross
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Rabbi Sharon Brous (Senior Rabbi at IKAR, and author of The Amen Effect), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her eleven-year-old brother, Wolf, spend the summer at the town pool, where they acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community. That is, until a dramatic fallout on the very first day of her senior year tips the fickle balance of idyllic Riverburg and impacts everyone in her family.
Jessica Berger Gross is the author of the memoir Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Longreads and many other publications. She graduated from Vassar College and has a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Originally from New York, she lives in Maine with her husband and teenage son. Hazel Says No is her first novel.
In our conversation, we’ll explore finding creativity after trauma, the joy of being “culturally” jewish, and how a high school production of Brighton Beach Memoirs changed the course of her life. We also talk about the power of saying no – not just as a personal boundary, but as an act of resistance, deeply rooted in Jewish tradition.
Other Books Mentioned:
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Are you there God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
Transcript:
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Jessica Berger Gross about her novel Hazel Says No, about a Jewish family who moves to small town Maine and how a meeting between the principal and their teenage daughter on the first day of school sets off a cascade of repercussions.
Jessica Berger Gross:
And maybe we can think of it as like a post-Me Too. The story where it's not her saying no, that's just the very beginning and tip of the iceberg. And also like all the things about agency and feminism and activism and community and class and how you grapple with that too.
Jessica Berger Gross is the author of the memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Cut, Longreads, and many other publications. Originally from New York, she lives in Maine with her husband and teenage son. Hazel Says No is her first novel. In this episode, we discuss finding creativity and grappling with trauma and the power of teachers to change the course of your life.
Jessica Berger Gross:
It's just been like, really special and important feeling to me to like go back and think about the books because so many of the people that like brought these books to my world were Jewish actually. And so it's Sylvia Avner, my Hebrew school librarian who every week told me what books to read and handed me books. And then with Brighton Beach Memoirs, it was my high school drama teacher, Larry Waxman, Jewish guy who lived in the village and taught so many people from like Howard Stern to me and many people in between.
Jessica also captures what it means to connect with Jewishness through culture rather than religion.
I think the real magic of the Jewish world is in the, how much we love books and like that we're funny and that it's very, very warm and very connected. And, you know, it's kind of like intellectual, but also silly and bawdy.
All that and more, coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Jessica. I found Hazel Says No to be tender and funny and sharp and also just so alive. It's about the ripple effects of saying no and both the personal cost and the quiet power there. And your voice is so fresh, the characters felt so fully realized, they really have just stayed with me. So thank you for writing it.
Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it closely.
So maybe you could just start with a brief synopsis of the story of Hazel Says No.
Jessica Berger Gross:
Sure. Hazel Says No is about a Brooklyn family who moves to small town Maine and finds themselves gefilte fish out of water. We have clothing designer mom Claire, American Studies professor Gus, precocious 11 year old sixth grader, about to start sixth grade, tween Wolf, and his older sister Hazel who's just turned 18 and she's starting her senior year of high school in this new community. On the first day of school, something terrible happens that changes — well, I should go back and say the family's moving from Brooklyn because the dad, Gus, has a job opportunity at the college for tenure, a tenured professorship, and they're thinking it's going to be like an easier, cheaper, stress-free life. That's why they're moving. They don't necessarily want to leave New York, but they feel like to send their kids to college and to have their kids even have, like, separate bedrooms, this is what they have to do and their credit card bills, blah, blah. But then on the first day of school, when this terrible, awful thing happens in the principal's office, the Greenberg Blooms will never be the same again and neither will the town. And the ripple effects of Hazel saying no permeate through the town and beyond.
There's so much texture there, such a fresh take on a Me Too story. And each of those Greenberg Bloom family members, I want you to write more books following each of them in all their different directions. This is your first work of fiction, and you've written several powerful nonfiction books. You edited an anthology on miscarriage. You wrote a memoir on yoga. And you wrote your personal story of being estranged from your family. So what drew you to fiction at this point in your writing life?
Jessica Berger Gross:
Two different big things. One is that I grew up, like from the time I was little, novels were the most important kind of reading experience to me. So novels, that's what I grew up loving the most, as much as I do love memoir and nonfiction, of course. But I didn't dream that I could do it, you know? So that was one thing. And then the other part is that I had written so much about my personal experiences that there was like nothing left to say, especially after my memoir. That was like...I left it all on the field and it was so personal. And also it was about something so difficult. And the truth is like after putting that on paper and figuring out finally after so many years how to do it, I was a lot happier, honestly. And so there's this writer in Portland, Maine, Phuc Tran that came to my son's school to talk about his memoir. And someone's like, are you gonna write another memoir? And he said, what am I gonna write about, like paying my mortgage? No, I have to write a novel. And then the irony of the whole thing is that it turned out for me that writing a novel, it's actually so much more personal than the memoir or any of the personal essays or personal nonfiction because like Estranged, it's so intimate, but, and it's so personal and it's so truthful, I think, but it's about this one part of my life and something that happened to me, I’d say, and Hazel is really like my insides on the page and like my insides coming out transformed into these four different characters in the family and even some of the other characters too.
Amazing. I can't wait to hear more about that. What was it about this particular story that felt compelling to you?
Jessica Berger Gross:
Do you know the TV show Northern Exposure? So Joel Fleischman, he's like this Upper West Side New Yorker and he gets sent to medical school by the state of Alaska. And so after being finished with medical school, he owes them a few years working in Alaska. He thinks he's moving to Anchorage, but actually he finds out when he arrives in Alaska, they are sending him to like small town Alaska. And that came out, I guess in my late teens.
And it really imprinted in me that to me that is like the archetypal fish out of water tale. And I've lived in a lot of different kinds of places, partly because I love traveling and I'm always, like, up for a new adventure, but partly because my husband is a college professor and it's sort of like being a baseball player. Like you get traded between, you know, teams, like you move between campuses. But I never felt like such a fish out of water until I moved from Brooklyn to the middle of Maine. Not to Portland, like cobblestoney hipster Maine, but small town in the middle of Maine. So that was kind of in my head for a while. Like, it'd be really great to write about a family that lives from Brooklyn to Maine because there's so much that's happened that's like, I just, I want to, you know, put on paper. So that kind of lingered for a couple of years. And then the other part was just my, if there's something that connects my work, it might be, well, especially this book and the last book, it might be like this feeling of just, wanting to fight against authoritarianism, like on all levels and especially on the personal level. And so these stories, even before, you know, hashtag Me Too was in the news, like this kind of story is the kind of thing that, like, gets in my craw and like, I just can't let go of the things that happen to girls every day, you know, like Hazel says.
It was those two ideas coming together, but flipping. And maybe we can think of it as like a post-Me Too story where it's not her saying no, that's just the very beginning and tip of the iceberg, as you know, having read. And also like all the things about agency and feminism and activism and community and class and why her saying no was more powerful and more kind of sexy in certain worlds than someone else saying no and what that's all about and how you grapple with that too.
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon.
I usually start by asking guests about their Jewish upbringing, but I want to acknowledge how honestly you wrote in your memoir Estranged about growing up in a home that was in many ways, as you put it, a nice Jewish family and also marked by violence and emotional pain. I want to know how those two realities, your Jewish identity and that experience of abuse coexist for you growing up.
Jessica Berger Gross:
Oh my gosh, that's exactly it. It's so hard and complicated because, it's so enmeshed, you know, so now even, especially for me in, like, a synagogue setting, like I'll go and just cry. I don't go that much. There are so many other, like, ways that I access my Jewishness, even like with my real, like there's a character in the book who's the town rabbi. Well, my real town rabbi, like I see her much more often to like swim with her, go cross-country skiing than, you sometimes she does get me to come to synagogue for stuff. But it's so emotional for me to like go back to that feeling of being, you know, in the synagogue and like playing with my father's tallit strings and, but like, and it'd be, feeling like warm in that community, but then knowing that we had this terrible secret and that like no one was protecting me. And also the idea that I spent so much time in Hebrew school to full afternoons a week, like a full Sunday session, like every week for years and years and years. And that I was like learning all this stuff. And some of it seemed, you know, like arbitrary rules of whatever Shomer Shabbos and kashrut and stuff like that. Not that we were necessarily doing those things at home, but I was still being taught this was the thing to do, all the halachah, but yet, like the most basic thing was not happening at home, which was just my personal physical boundaries being respected. And the same with other members of my family.
So, but it was never so much that, like, I'd never got to a point with my Jewishness where I felt I'm throwing this away. Like it's Judaism's fault or it's the Jewish community's fault. Like I didn't feel that either. And there were so many people and it's just been like really special and important feeling to me to like go back and think about the books because so many of the people that like brought these books to my life, to my world were Jewish actually. And so it's Sylvia Avner, my Hebrew school librarian who every week told me what books to read and handed me books.
And then with Brighton Beach Memoirs, it was my high school drama teacher, Larry Waxman, who, Jewish guy who lived in the village and taught so many people from like Howard Stern to me and many people in between. Yeah, it's just, it's all so very, very intertwined. But I do have to say that to me, like as a Jew and just generally as a human, the most important thing is like being a good person and just like treating others around you well or trying to. And standing up for yourself and not letting other people violate you. And so that's like, that would be like my first commandment, you know.
That's beautiful. And I find it fascinating that you were able to hold that thread in place, that that thread of Judaism felt like a continuous pull in your life.
Jessica Berger Gross:
And I would say actually even beyond, I mean, in college, I joined a Jewish women's discussion group and I lived in Israel at the Rod Institute after college and then I worked at Ben Gurion University. I mean I studied way beyond, but eventually as an adult coming to be able to realize like I'm allowed to make decisions about what being Jewish means to me. And also that I'm just as Jewish as someone who's like super observant and me and my rabbi friend are equally Jewish. We're just Jewish in our own ways.
Absolutely. So tell me about this drama teacher and when you read Brighton Beach Memoirs.
Jessica Berger Gross:
Okay, so Larry Waxman, my drama teacher at Southside High School in Rockville Center. I was always really into reading and then as soon as I had the opportunity to like try out for drama and sing and be in chorus, I did all of that in junior high and I got to high school and the high school drama department was very serious business. No joke, like we've had Tony nominees and actually this, that someone who was Dorothy in the musical in ninth grade who I was up against a callback. She had just been an Annie on Broadway. So there was always this whole, you know, our town in Long Island, but then like the city and our drama teacher had gone to Tisch and lived in the city and he would bring people from the New York world to do our sets and do our tech and all of that. So it was a very, very big deal and very life-changing for me when I tried out for the play. In the beginning of ninth grade, they would do a fall drama and it was Brighton Beach Memoirs.
Actually, the last two it was down to me and my friend Cathy, who is still one of my dearest friends. We've been friends for 40 years. We were called back. I got it. And it was life changing. Not only was it in my memory a fantastic show, but also finding this, you know, just very much like a found family. We were a family in the play on stage and we built this, you know, it's a wooden frame house. It's the set for that play. And you're basically on stage the whole time.
And you're really creating like the warmth of a family so that when you're doing the meal scenes and all the, it's there. And Larry Waxman, the teacher, was absolutely brilliant at like creating this, like a [ ] of, you know, what it felt like and what we were like as a group. So I think that kind of changed the course of my life. Not that I went and became an actor, but like later when I tried to write Hazel, I think even just reading it again, like the structure and the idea of almost like mixing comedy and drama, dramedy, and having each character have their own struggles, but then the dominoes fall and everything kind of, yeah.
You mentioned that your, a librarian at your Hebrew school was giving you books every week. What made you choose this book as a book that impacted your Jewish identity?
Jessica Berger Gross:
Yeah, I thought of so many and I actually have a couple of, these are like very serious runners up. So I have some of My German Soldier’s one in my hand and Are You There God? It's me, Margaret, Judy Bloom. I also read a lot of Norma Klein. There's so much, I mean, Diary of a Girl and like there's so many books that she gave me, but I think that I picked the Neil Simon because that was the first time I think I was Jewish, like very publicly, you know, even beyond my bat mitzvah the year before. I mean, this was being Jewish, acting out a Jewish character on stage in a town that wasn't just Jewish, not at all, but very much like being embodied as a Jewish girl, as Lori, on stage in my underwear, you know, I'm like changing my clothes and then finding community through that with both Jews and non-Jews who were in the show with me and kind of finding a way out of my family through that a bit too. So it just, yeah. And then also I have kind of a crazy side note and this is very like, to me this is very Hazel Says No for people who've read and then go back and listen. So I played Lori, the younger sister. Down the block from me, I kid you not, Stacy Glick, who played Lori in the movie, lived on my street. She's now a literary agent, actually. And what's so funny is, you know the way you are as a kid, like, to me it was as big a deal that I was in the Southside High School version as that Stacey was in the movie, because I mean, you know. And I just, I think that's really interesting too. And that's very Hazel Says No in that there's the media in New York, Brooklyn world, and then there's the like town world, and they both matter as much.
I love that peek in the publishing world in Hazel Says No, we'll get to that. When you said that this was the book that you were going to talk about, I was thinking of Neil Simon and that he does capture what isn't said in Jewish families and the resentments, the fears, the shame, and there's this kind of like safe Jewish dysfunction in his plays of families who bicker and fight and stay together. And so I was wondering how you related to that dynamic.
Jessica Berger Gross:
I mean, one thing that's interesting about the play is everyone's dealing with very serious things, especially the older generation. I, you know, of course, when there's like physical verbal abuse in a house, it's because of things that have come before. Here, the specter of the Holocaust is like coming at them. And I think, you know, for me with Estranged or probably almost any memoir where there's like Jewish dysfunction, it's because of, you know, more recent it's from that, from the Holocaust and everything, the trauma that came before generationally. But yeah, I think I found it like a really lovely reprieve that they could fight, but it didn't get physical and everyone still loved each other. I think it taught me a lot. That sort of there's fighting and then there's fighting because I very much knew the feeling of the table, like say the Thanksgiving table or something where I never didn't leave crying. I mean, it was, you know.
But it still started out, I mean, it was, you know, on the silverware and the plates for my mother's wedding and all of that, like, but there's also still, even in Brighton Beach Memoirs, there's the outside and there's the inside. So I'm always interested in what really goes on inside a house. Some may say like, maybe it's like a Hallmark movie that it works out at the end, but to me, it's so, it's such a wonderful second chance to create a safe and happy family, both me and my actual family now, with my husband and son or in a fictional world.
Yeah. I was going to ask you what a Jewish home means to you today, having created one that's so different than the one you grew up in.
Jessica Berger Gross:
I mean, yeah, that's so interesting because definitely my home feels very, very Jewish, but it's not like in the ways that I was brought up. It doesn't look the way they taught me either in my house or at Temple B'nei Shalom, you know, like that it was supposed to look. Though there are elements there, you know, there's a mezuzah on the door and there are Shabbat candles and like we have seders and it's not that none of that happens, but I think the real magic of the Jewish world is in the how much we love books and like that we're funny and that it's very, very warm and very connected. And, you know, it's kind of like intellectual, but also silly and bawdy, which will take us to our next book.
But I love the high-low. And I really appreciate about my husband and son that they are they're totally like that, too. I mean, it's like give me Real Housewives and Andy Cohen, you know, or give me Hacks or like The Postcard we'll talk about later. I mean, I just want it to be good, you know? I think to me, like being Jewish is, you know, cultural. I don't like when that term is used as if it's like less than. To me, you know, being culturally Jewish, or I guess you could say secularly Jewish, like when we saw Alex Edelman's Just Like Us, you know, before it went to Broadway, that was like us being, you know, very Jewish. And then we like, went to Russ and Daughters or you know, whatever, like that, all of that, but, and then you know being Jewish in Maine has been very interesting to you and I actually happen to live in a very thriving Jewish community in small town Maine where there's been a synagogue since like 1904 and we have an amazing rabbi and her wife. I don't feel a need to, like, celebrate all the many holidays every you know, it's like I feel it's more like a smorgasbord for me religiously, I'd say like oh, yeah, well like Passover, actually, at the synagogue is really great. Like, that was really fun last year. Let's go to that. But, wait, now there's going to be this really amazing talk at the college, at Colby. Let's go to that. A lot of being Jewish, though, I feel just like happens in my house.
Book Two: a Jewish book from adulthood — Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern.
Jessica Berger Gross:
So Howard Stern Comes Again is a book where he starts out by telling you to never read his earlier books. And it's a book where he's written an introduction to the book and then an introduction to each interview that's in the book. He basically has selected and curated some of his favorite long form interviews that he's done over the past 20 years. And I picked him because of the book and those interviews, but really more like who, everything he does on the radio and also like all the people he has come in, many of whom are Jewish comedians and Jewish cultural people. Howard Stern is someone who has changed dramatically through therapy actually. And I would say that that mirrors my change too.
But I was drawn to him on the radio like back when I was young, like sneaking him or hearing my father play him. So I always had like an interest, but then after he did his four days a week of therapy and came out the other side, that's when I re-found him. And I've honestly learned a lot from these interviews about the creative climb and, like, what it takes to, you know, get something done, like in my case, debut as a novelist at age 53. But also both for Howard Stern, his crew on the show, but also for the people he interviews, there's a lot of trauma and there's a lot of childhood angst and kind of like getting through that to the other side to be creative. And I really relate to all of that. There's also a gallows humor. Also, Howard Stern went to high school in Rockville Center where I grew up. And so I just, I feel, you know, I feel deeply at home reading the interviews, reading this book, listening to the show with that kind of comedy generally, even the parts that are like way too much for me, you know, but I still kind of love it. And then I don't know, there's something about him like doing, you have to go and find the clip of like Howard Stern and Adam Sandler doing bar'chu et Adonai ham v’orah.
Stern and Sandler:
Baruch atah Adonai n’oteh n’atorah
I mean, it's just amazing, and so to me that brings together. Maybe Howard Stern is the way I found to like knit together, you know, pathos, comedy, tragedy, being Jewish, being happy, having some therapy, all of that.
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about when you said that you relate to his public evolution and so many of his more recent interviews are about redemption and reckoning. I was wondering if you see Hazel Says No as a similar kind of story of reckoning.
Jessica Berger Gross:
Yeah, I think it's a reckoning for just about every character in the book, right? The only person in the book who doesn't, you know, I don't give that to is the principal. But other than that, I mean, like, who doesn't? And the truth is, like, I could have. And at one point when I started out really early, I did, like, POV, like, get inside the principal's head. And then I was just like, I don't want to be there. So I'm not going to do that. But...And it's a family story. So I wanted to concentrate on the four family members. But I mean, isn't that what life's about? Like, hopefully we all have a redemption story. You know, it's not just Howard Stern. Like we start out, we were clueless and, you know, and some of us are luckier than others in terms of like the home environment and what our parents are teaching us or whoever is raising us. But, but still we each have to figure out like who we want to be and how we want to be in the world.
And so that's what my characters are figuring out. And that's what I had to figure out to get to the point where I could write fiction. And I know some people, of course, like Zadie Smith, you know, was writing fiction in her twenties brilliantly. But for me, it took the weathering of being a human for longer and kind of like going through that transformation to know my taste and to find my voice and put that on the page.
Book Three: a book that changed your worldview — The Postcard by Anne Berest.
Jessica Berger Gross:
I saw that a lot of people are picking this book. I think the reason why people are picking it is because it just speaks to what's happening now in so many ways. It's a book about the humanness of suffering. So after the last election, after the inauguration, it was the first book I could read. I couldn't read for a while and it was the first book I was able to read and really be immersed in. Anne Berest has talked about this as being a true novel, something like that.
Okay, so the main character in the book gets a postcard with the names of some of her ancestors. I think it's her two of her great-grandparents, yeah, and great-aunt and uncle who had died in the Holocaust. But she didn't know what it meant. And she put it aside and she put her Jewish identity aside. And then years later, there's an antisemitic incident at her daughter's school. She starts to do a deep dive and investigate. But really, it's about a family living during the Holocaust in France and what happens to them, but it's also very much a book about resistance. It actually reminded me of the books that my Hebrew school librarian Sylvia Avner would give to me in that you take something that's so big and so horrible, whether it's like the suffering that's going on now or suffering then, and you humanize it. And it just, it means that instead of ignoring suffering, we can begin to empathize and also begin to figure out, like, where our resistance will lie within that oppression and suffering and wrongdoing.
So that I think is why the book speaks so powerfully right now to people who read it and to me. I did also want to give a shout out to some of the other books I was speaking of because I found this so hard. I mean, the thing about books is that of course they change you if they're good, they change you. So shout out to Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. And She Said by Jodie Cantor and Megan Toohey, Random Family by Adrienne Nicole LeBlanc. I read that when it came out and it's just so, that's another book about immersion and empathy. And then a book set in Maine, Fellowship Point by Ellis Elliott Dark. So it's really hard to choose, but I would say right now, like the book I want my teenager to read this summer is The Postcard by Anne Berest because I think it points to, honestly, it goes back to saying no, actually, that we just can't stand silently by when terrible things happen on either side to us, when people we're connected to are doing bad things, when they're being done to us, on any stretch of our connection of humanity. One, because it can happen to us, you know, anytime, anywhere. But two, because like that's what it is to be a human is to care and our interconnectedness and you know, you can't dehumanize suffering because it's real people who are suffering.
Book Four: the book you're reading now — The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
Jessica Berger Gross:
It's so good. I can't believe I didn't read it right when it came out a couple of years ago. You know, it kind of reminds me of the town in my book and the town I live in and that you have different kinds of people living together. Sometimes they get along and sometimes they don't and there are a lot of problems, but there's also a lot of heart. Then I just am really, really appreciating his language. His language is very beautiful. He's a musician and there's something very musical about his language and his storytelling. And again, the mixture of tragedy and comedy. I guess that really just speaks to me always because that's what life is. And I think that's very Jewish.
Book Five: the author's latest book — Hazel Says No by Jessica Berger Gross.
Hazel Says No, even the title is such a powerful and immediate boundary. And you spoke a little bit about boundaries before. Is that the kind of clarity that you wished you'd had? Or do you think stories like this help model what's possible?
Jessica Berger Gross:
Oh, yes. The thing about Hazel is she has so much confidence in saying no because of the family she's from. And I really wanted to give that to my son and I hope that I have and I hope I've given it to myself. You know, at a certain point we have to say no. And it doesn't matter how much power someone has. You have to have, like, a moral compass that's beyond the rules.
Wolf says he is a quote, “Jewish highlighter in a pack of Gentile pencils.” I love that line. And after Hazel speaks out, the town turns on her and a swastika appears on the family's door and it's the small town rabbi who shows up. You talked about the rabbi in your own town. Was that modeled on her? And also, what were you trying to say about Jewish life in a small town?
Jessica Berger Gross:
I write about in Estranged or briefly mention that the house I lived in in Long Island as a baby, like where we lived a couple towns before Rockville Center, a swastika was spray painted on our mailbox. And that was one of the reasons we moved to the next, like moved to another town and stuff like this has happened in my town in Maine too. And stuff like this has happened at the, you know, in Brooklyn at the German school where my close friend's daughter was going, like, mean, obviously it's happening everywhere all the time. So it's not even just a small town thing, certainly not just a small town main thing, but I just, it's so, it's sad because when I was writing that, the antisemitism in the book, and I had early readers a few years ago, a couple of times people would be like, I don't know if this is realistic. And now of course it's like, couldn't be more realistic.
But I knew that because I had grown up hearing this story and I had grown up, lived that street that I lived on. At the end of the street was the Rockville Center links, which was a restrictive, racist and antisemitic country club where Jews and Black, they had like one Jewish family, one Black family, and that was it. So I just, it's just in my bones. So this is just part of the American fabric, unfortunately. And, but then also, so with the rabbi, so I read about this rabbi and her wife when we were deciding whether or not to move here. And on the other side of it, she's now one of my closest friends, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs. And she and her wife, Mel Weiser, are hosting my Hazel Says No launch next week in the synagogue. Everyone in the town is invited, co-sponsored by the library and the independent bookstore and Waterville Creates and all that.
And there's something about a rabbi who was not like the rabbi necessarily always up on a pedestal on the Bima like the one I grew up with, who you're sort of almost scared and intimidated to like talk to at, you know, your like bat mitzvah session. But someone who's your friend, you know, that's special. And I wanted to write about that. And also like she drops a lot of wisdom and she's important to me and my family and the perspective of a fictionalized small town rabbi comes through, I hope, in a true way in that scene after Halloween.
Claire's backstory is very similar to yours. She's estranged from her parents and she's created this loving family for herself. What was freeing or challenging about fictionalizing parts of your own story?
Jessica Berger Gross:
I mean, it's so great that you can make stuff up and like, it's so freeing, it's so fun, it's so deep feeling. And it took me back to Brighton Beach Memoirs, you know, doing theater junior high and high school, like that one of the things that Mr. Waxman taught us. And I also went to the summer program called the Ensemble Theater Community School. And we learned like the method and all these different acting techniques. And so, with fiction, not only do I not have an MFA, I hadn't taken a creative writing class in high school, for real. So for me, I went back to my drama training and like high school drama training, but it was really good training in high school to be able to just freely imagine and not be tethered to exactly, like, what had happened. It's just the best thing ever. Like I loved it so much. I had so much fun doing this book. The hard part was more you just don't know if it's going to work out with fiction. Like with nonfiction, you usually write a book proposal and sell that. So you're sitting down to write with a book deal, with a contract. Fiction, no one's asking for it. Everyone's writing a novel. You have no idea if it's going to work out. And it's just the biggest, like wildest leap.
We started to talk about the publishing aspect inside the novel where Hazel finds her way into the publishing world first with an essay that goes viral and then she's pursued by literary agents. She goes on a podcast. She takes meetings in LA. It's a really fun peak, but you also see that Hazel has this ambivalence about telling her story and writing a memoir. So I wondered if that mirrored any ambivalence on your end.
And I guess also what I was thinking about was the difference between telling a story for healing and telling it for public consumption. And that's something that she also grapples with and wondered if, how that tension shows up for you in whatever it is that you're writing.
Jessica Berger Gross:
Yeah, I mean, because I always approach it like, well, you know, I don't even keep a journal. Like for me, writing, you know, it's much more art than therapy. I have therapy for therapy, but I do know that writing can be very, very therapeutic for people. And the irony of it is like, I could say when I was writing my memoir or certainly writing this novel, I'm not doing this to feel better. And yet doing it does ultimately make me feel better. You know, it does that even when I'm, it's the opposite of what I am trying to do, but also the life mirroring art, the chapter in LA. I had researched this one book-to-film agent, I think in the book, call him maybe Josh. His real name is Jason, the person I was researching and now he's my book-to-film agent. Also the thing about Hazel, she's given these opportunities or she makes opportunities for herself too, but she's so young that it's not really necessarily the right time. And so that's something that she is grappling with and her parents too.
Yeah, I mean even within that story she has to either say yes or no to whether this publishing trajectory is right for her and telling her story in that way.
Right, we're making choices all the time by saying yes or no. Even if you're not explicitly aware of that, it's happening. So yeah, like turn the volume up on that and really like know what you're, you know, choosing to go along with or not.
I love that thread of connection of resistance through your book to the postcard and some of the others that we talked about. I wouldn't have necessarily thought about it, but you put it there and it's really powerful. Thank you for sharing this book with us. I thought it was just such a compelling read. I couldn't put it down. I hope people really enjoy it and take away all the things that they should take away from it and also your voice is just like so sparkling. It's just so alive. I really, I love the writing. It's great. Thank you.
Thank so much. This was such an amazing conversation and I also really appreciate the opportunity to think about the books that did help shape not just my Jewish identity but my identity and to think back on Sylvia Avner and Larry Waxman and all the teachers and librarians and bookstore owners who passed me books.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me. This was so, so much fun.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the Five Books. Our guest today was Jessica Berger Gross talking about her book Hazel Says No. You can find a link to the book and all the others Jessica discussed in our show notes. If you'd like an email reminder to keep you up to date with new episodes plus links to all the books we discussed directly in your inbox, you can sign up in the show notes or on our website, fivebookspod.org. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also find us online at fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team at fivebookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram at five books pod or on Facebook, the five books podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman.
Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
