Where does its marketing power end, and its more philosophical inquiries begin?
I don’t even know when its marketing power begins, or if it has any. That didn’t occur to me when I gave the book that title. In fact, I was really worried that my publisher would try to make me change it. To me, The End of the Jews — both the title and the novel itself — is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world. The end of the communities that one can easily and safely feel a part of, whether they are as small as families or as big as the global Jewish diaspora, the global black diaspora. It’s about both the problems and the possibilities that come with a more complex, more tortured understanding of yourself, your tradition and culture, other people’s traditions and cultures, where the lines between all of these things begin to blur. How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support — religion, family, ethnic solidarity — are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes ne
