Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

Interview with Richard Zimler

by Ben Naparstek

Richard Zimler will admit to being an unlikely chronicler of Jewish folk practices and mystical traditions. As he states, deadpan, "I'm a terrible Jew. I'm not the least bit interested in the rules and regulations." Yet the Portugal-based American novelist has just completed the loosely connected trilogy he calls the "Sephardic cycle," the final installment of which, Guardian of the Dawn, was published earlier this year. "What interests me about religion is the stories, the mythologies, which contain messages about the big issues—about how we should live, about what love is, about what sacrifice means," he says.

Zimler's secular strain is rooted in his family background. His father was a committed Stalinist, an overbearing figure who was intolerant of dissent. His mother was chronically depressed. "I had a typical New York Jewish dysfunctional family," he says. Zimler's indignation at social injustices and fascination with matters religious and occult was present from an early age; he studied comparative religion at Duke before writing a thesis on street prostitution at Stanford.

Zimler is an unashamedly old-fashioned craftsman, writing baggy, plot-driven sagas with a strong political consciousness. In Hunting Midnight (2004) he shrugged off contemporary literary sensibilities to write from the perspective of an African slave. So it's not surprising that he sniffs at postmodern game-playing. "I'm not a postmodern novelist trying to be clever or illustrate some theory," he says. "I'm stupid enough to think that books still can change the world."

As a gay, Jewish expatriate in Europe, Zimler is a meeting point for different minority identities, which is perhaps why he writes historical fiction, to "give voice to those people who have lost the battles—those who did not succeed in controlling their own destiny."

In The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1998) Zimler set a literary whodunit against the backdrop of the Lisbon Massacre of 1506. Convinced of a kosher conspiracy behind the plague besetting the city, the gentiles of Lisbon rounded up 2,000 Jews and burned them in the city square. Zimler's exploration of this little-known episode of Portuguese history sparked some unexpected responses. "Because the pogrom is not taught in schools, people had no way of knowing whether that was fiction or reality," he says. "A lot of people came up to me and asked, 'Were we really that terrible? Did that really happen?'"

Guardian of the Dawn unfolds over the closing years of the sixteenth century in the Portuguese spice colony of Goa. The book's young narrator, Tiago, hails from a family of "New Christians," Jews forcibly converted to Christianity and exiled from Lisbon decades earlier. The story flickers between Tiago's recollections of his childhood and marriage and his current incarcerated state, as he becomes hell-bent on discovering the identity of the person who denounced his family to the Inquisition.

Zimler decided against traveling to Goa to research the novel. "I was warned that Goa has become a tourist haven," he says. "I wanted to keep an image of Goa at the end of the sixteenth century in my head. I was worried that the sights, sounds, and smells of the city I conjure up would become contaminated by modern development."

Guardian of the Dawn is a reworking of Othello, with lines from Shakespeare subtly woven in. "I tried to imagine what had gone wrong between Iago and Othello," he says. "After all, Shakespeare gives us flimsy reasons for Iago's hatred of 'The Moor.' I take Iago and Othello back to their childhoods, when they were friends. I talk about the trauma that separated them, which made Iago hate Othello." The novel's final scenes, where Tiago avenges the deaths of his loved ones, were "liberating" to write. "I could write about someone who had cast aside his moral code," he says. "That was very exciting and challenging."

Zimler only recently became aware of the Inquisition in Goa. "Like almost everyone else in Portugal, I'd always heard of 'Golden Goa,' when that colony was the prosperous center of the spice trade. I never questioned that glorious image of a thriving and exotic city until I read about the Inquisition being established there," says Zimler.

Zimler began his career as a proverbial prophet, celebrated overseas while neglected in his own land. His New York agent sent the The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon to twenty-four publishers, from which Zimler collected twenty-four rejection slips. One publisher wrote that he had already purchased his Jewish book of the year.

So Zimler dispatched the manuscript to a publisher in his adopted homeland. Two months later, Zimler was summoned to the publisher's Lisbon burrow, where he was asked what he wanted on the cover of his book. It was only after The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon reached best-sellerdom in translations throughout Europe that U.S. publishers beckoned, and a bidding war ensued. Zimler says, "I wouldn't have a career if I didn't have that crazy idea of publishing it first in Portugal, and if my Portuguese publisher hadn't taken the risk of publishing an unknown American author."

Zimler moved to Porto, Portugal, fifteen years ago with his Portuguese-Mozambiquan partner, after his thirty-five-year-old brother died from an AIDS-related illness. He left San Francisco in an effort to "stop thinking about AIDS and death and start over." His brother's death spurred Zimler's most private and emotionally charged work, Unholy Ghosts (1996), which depicts a gay couple in Portugal as they suffer the blows of the health crisis.

What frustrated Zimler most was not that the book went unnoticed by the mainstream press but that the gay media also ignored it. "The gay press in America is hopeless with regard to gay literature," he says. "They make more money covering gay resorts and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. If gay writers don't write a novel with straight characters they won't get covered in the mainstream press. If they risk writing a gay novel they still don't get covered in the gay press. So it's a no-win situation."

Zimler's latest book, The Search for Sana, was recently published in the United Kingdom. It's a semi-fictional biography of a Palestinian dancer, Sana, who Zimler met at an Australian writers' festival in 2000. Sana approached Zimler for his autograph and spoke, wet-eyed, about the emotions The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon stirred in her. "I found her immensely charismatic," Zimler says. "She moved so elegantly and playfully and there was something mysterious about her too—a strange sort of reticence for someone so outgoing." The next morning, Sana jumped to her death before Zimler's eyes. Devastated, he wondered "if my book had anything to do with her desperate actions." He says, "That's what started me on my investigation of her past."

Even now, critical and popular success hasn't entirely melted the resistance of the American literati. Zimler's agent decided to wait until after The Search for Sana is published in Europe before courting American publishers, anxious about peddling a polemical take on Israel/Palestine. That nervousness is understandable. As Zimler says, "American Jews can be even more conservative and fundamentalist with regard to Israel than Israelis. In Israel you're allowed a range of opinion."

At first, Zimler was angered by his agent's reaction. "I felt like I was being censored," he says. "But then my agent explained that she wanted to test the waters outside of America. After all, if the book gets good reviews in England, it will make it much more easy to sell. In the end, I agreed that it made sense." If the American publishing world's late recognition of his past efforts is any barometer, Zimler has nothing to worry about.

Ben Naparstek is a law student and freelance literary journalist in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, and Jerusalem Post.

Source Citation

Naparstek, Ben. 2005. Interview with Richard Zimler. Tikkun 20(6):66.