This premise—that the most fundamental aspects of your own life are left to chance—is the subject of many books and movies of varying quality. What I hoped to do, in this novel, was to present a different idea. People are not shaped by their experiences, which they cannot choose, but rather by something they do control: they are shaped by what they make of their experiences. I also wanted to write a book that believed in happiness, that showed that happiness was possible, even in a world dead set against it. Happiness, I believe, is not something that one finds, but rather something that one makes.

In this sense, I suppose, it is a “coming of age” story, but one that has very little to do with age and very much to do with taking responsibility for one’s own life and choices. That’s something that can happen at any age. It doesn’t happen in a moment, but over a lifetime.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

The Book of Job

See especially Chapters 1, 2, and 3; Chapter 38:1–30; Chapter 42:1–6, 12–13, 16–17 (Tanakh, A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985]).

I. L. Peretz, “The Dead Town” (1895)

English translation available in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1990).

In this short story by the classic Yiddish writer, a traveler meets a man on the road who claims to live in a place called “the dead town,” a place that can’t be found on any map—a town where most of the inhabitants are already dead, but none of the living residents have noticed.

Nachman of Bratslav, “The Seven Beggars” (early nineteenth century) English translation available in The Tales: Nahman of Bratslav, ed. Arnold Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).

This complicated mystical tale by a Hassidic luminary tells the story of two children, abandoned in a forest, who are rescued by seven beggars. Years later, when the children marry, the seven beggars reappear at their wedding, each bringing a story with him. One beggar’s story takes place in a pair of countries where no one is able to sleep.

Travels of Benjamin of Tudela (twelfth century)

English translation available as The World of Benjamin of Tudela: A Medieval Mediterranean Travelogue, ed. Sandra Benjamin, trans. A. Asher (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).

This medieval travelogue recounts the voyages of a Jewish merchant who made a point of visiting and documenting Jewish communities throughout the medieval world.

S. Y. Abramovitch, Travels of Benjamin the Third (1878)

English translation available in Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, ed. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden (New York: Schocken Books, 1996).

This comic novel by the classic Yiddish writer, set in a small Russian Jewish town, tells of a modern-day traveling Benjamin—an idiot who barely makes it around the block.

Sholem Aleichem, Yosele Solovey (1889)

English translation available as The Nightingale, or, The Saga of Yosele Solovey the Cantor, trans. Aliza Shervin (New York: Putnam, 1985).