I wrote this book while living in England—I had won a scholarship from Harvard to spend a year at Cambridge University, where I did a master’s degree—and I think it shows in the novel that I was a little homesick for America while I was writing it. I specifically remember coming back to my student residence there from a shopping trip to what I considered a rather limited European-style supermarket in Cambridge and then sitting down to write the scene that takes place in Costco, an American chain superstore that carries every possible product you could ever dream of in absolutely absurd quantities. (It is a real store, incidentally, a national chain that exists from New York to Hawaii, and the description of it is true to life.) Europeans tend to look at things like this as nothing but silly materialism, but while I was living in England I missed the sheer exuberance of it—not the idea that you could have anything you wanted, but the idea that you could actually want anything you wanted, that no idea was too unconventional or too absurd. I wanted to show America as a new world of possibilities, where you can become whatever you want to become (as characters like Jason/Yehudah and Freydl/Frances do), and what that choice really means—both the exuberance and the burdens of that freedom.

I should say here that while the story of the Landsmann family is purely my invention, the historical details are accurate down to the square footage of the apartments (I’ll get into this later). I should also say that even though my family is thoroughly American, I have traveled a tremendous amount (much like Bill Landsmann in the novel), to about forty or so countries around the world. I don’t have a slide collection, though.

Do you come from a family of believers?

My family is Jewish and ascribes to the American Conservative movement in Judaism (which is right in the middle of the religious spectrum between orthodox and reform). We are, as you put it, a “believing” family in that I was raised to believe in God, to value the sanctity of life, and to take seriously the teachings of the Torah—which involves both being educated in and often wrestling with the tradition. While I can’t claim to observe every ritual, my religion is the path by which I reach my understanding of the world.

Is the story of the tefillin in New York Harbor true?