OyChicago articles

Alex Epstein writes really-really short stories. Most don’t even take up half a page of his newly published quarter-page format book,  Blue Has No South . This collection of his latest work was masterfully translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay.

As Epstein admits, short fiction is “not a common Israeli form,” but he has been working with the concept of “flash fiction” since his early prose attempts of the early 1990s.

The shortness of the stories belies their depth. With titles like “Another Conversation with Death,” “The Last Dreams in the Garden of Eden,” “The Crippled Angel,” and “A Short and Sad Imaginary Guidebook for the Traveler to Prague,” Epstein’s stories are minimalist yet nuanced. When the end result is so short, every word matters, and Epstein plays with his words, coaxing multiple images out of a single phrase.

“For me, it’s always about the writing process,” Epstein said during a recent bilingual Hebrew and English reading of his work. “When I’m writing, anything can inspire me – a sentence or a word or an image will materialize and take hold of my imagination. Everything can find its way into the stories.”

The May 17 reading was part of the “Global Voices” series at the International House at the University of Chicago.

Epstein, who was born in Leningrad in 1971 and immigrated to Israel at the age of 8, is an Israeli author. Yet his subjects are not stereotypically Israeli: no conflict or camels or desert in these stories. His is world literature, and he’s been praised as the heir to Baudelaire, Borges and Kafka.

McKay, the translator, said she struggled to transfer some of the word plays and ultimately had to reach for an Italian word in one of the stories to accurately preserve the pun. Hebrew’s limited variety of words places boundaries on the way an author can play with the language. The more widely endowed English vocabulary can add meanings even to really short fiction.

“Becka understands the importance of every word in a very short story,” Epstein said.

English also opened many doors for Epstein, he said. He has gained an entirely new audience by virtue of having his work translated. Moreover, translations to other languages stem from publishing in English. Epstein said that his work has been translated into Greek, Korean and Hungarian directly from the English incarnations rather than the Hebrew originals.

McKay, who is also a published author, views the collaborative spirit of translation as its biggest benefit.

“When I put something out there [via translation], it’s not just my own,” she said. “It’s part of something bigger than my own writing.”

In addition to Blue Has No South, Epstein is the author of two other collections of short stories and three novels. He is the recipient of the 2003 Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature and a 2007 participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He currently serves as 2010 Schusterman Foundation Visiting Israeli Writer at the University of Denver.

McKay’s translation of Suzane Adams’ Laundry was published in 2008. She is also the author of a book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land and currently teaches translation and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University.

Chicagoans might remember Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow from his 14 years in the Windy City. As a successor to Ann Landers, Zaslow doled out advice on all sorts of life questions through his column in the Sun-Times. Thousands of people are still making his mother’s chicken soup, he says. Since then, Zaslow has written or co-written three best-selling books, including  The Last Lecture , Highest Duty the story of Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s plane landing on the Hudson and The Girls from Ames, a record of female friendship. His Journal column, “Moving On,” focuses on life transitions.

Oy!Chicago: How do you choose which stories to focus on?
Jeffrey Zaslow: I like to write things that are accessible. I’ve gotten many letters and e-mails saying that they think about themselves when they read it, which is what you want your writing to do. All of my books are about the same thing: love.

What advice would you give budding journalists in a world where newspapers are potentially dying?
I wish I had easy answers. All I can say is that if you want to write, you should. On one hand, it’s hard to get out of school and get a newspaper job like I did. On the other hand, when I was young (I’m 51), you had to get someone to print your stuff. And now Internet sites will run your stuff and it looks great. There are chances to write and be read. You don’t have to wait for somebody with a printing press to print what you’ve written.

How does modern media influence your work?
The Last Lecture [co-written with Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch] was a confluence of all different types of media. First there was this four-minute video online. People e-mailed it to each other by the thousand. Then the whole lecture was put online, and then there was the book. Years ago, if I had written about it, I would have quoted a few lines from it and it would have come and gone in one day.

The Girls from Ames is a story of female friendship. What was it like for you as a male reporter to get to know these women and some deeply personal things about their lives?
I have three daughters, so I was prepared from that perspective. I know women need strong female friends throughout their lives. It keeps them healthier and happier—all the research shows that. I approached the book as very much an outsider. I didn’t assume anything about these women. The Ames girls rolled their eyes at me when I asked a silly question, but in the end, I was like an outsider reporting on this sociological phenomenon of women’s friendship.

Catch Jeffrey Zaslow this Monday June 7 at the Standard Club for  JUF’s Non-Profit and Educators Division dinner .

Also this week, David Gergen, Senior Political Analyst for CNN, will speak June 3 at JUF’s Government Agencies and Lawyers Division dinner at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.