Local author wins National Book Foundation honor
Recently, the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Award, announced its 2018 “5 Under 35” Honorees — the five best writers in the United States, under the age of 35. (Learn more at www. nationalbook.org)
And Yellow Springs’ own Moriel Rothman-Zecher was one of those five selected, for his novel “Sadness is a White Bird.”
The novel explores the story of a 19-year-old man preparing to serve in the Israeli army while also attempting to reconcile his relationship with two Palestinian siblings with his loyalties to family and country.
Rothman-Zecher explains that his novel grew out of his own experiences in, as an Israeli-American, finding parts of his identity from disparate parts of the world.
His grandfather’s family moved to Yellow Springs in 1953 for his grandfather’s job at Antioch College. His father grew up in Yellow Springs.
Rothman-Zecher was born in Jerusalem, but at age eight, returned with his family to Yellow Springs, and lived there until age 16. At 17, he attended high school in a town in Israel, a town which, he says, served as the model for the setting of his novel. He was excited, at first, to serve in the Israeli army, but over time, his attitude changed, and eventually, he served some time in military jail for refusing to serve.
The experience inspired the plot of “Sadness is a White Bird.”
Once back in the United States, he attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied political science — and took two creative writing classes.
“I was always reading fiction,” Rothman-Zecher says. “And yet, I never anticipated writing it when I went off to college.”
After college, RothmanZecher lived in Jerusalem until 2017, before returning to Yellow Springs in October of that year. He and his wife celebrated the birth of their first child in April of 2018 — “Four generations of YellowSpringers!” he notes.
“Meandering all over the planet has been both tiring and exhilarating,” he adds. “It’s good to be settled.”
While living in Jerusalem from 2011-2017, he says he became involved in political activism, and began “drifting to the left of politics in Israel,” protesting the occupation of Palestine. He adds that he wrote articles and opinion pieces for both Israeli and U.S. publications.
In 2015, one such piece was published in The New York Times. (To read it, visit www.nytimes. com/2015/01/12/opinion/ why-i-wont-serve-israel. html)
“The piece drew some anger,” Rothman-Zecher says. “I understand that being more comfortable to refuse than others might be was because, in part, of my connection with the U.S. But I don’t see myself as more ethical than my friends and fellow Israeli countrymen and women who did serve. I just took a different path, and I know to some I sound genuine, and to others I don’t.”
He adds that his wife encouraged him to write about his experiences.
“I thought I’d write nonfiction about my experiences, and I got my proposal together, but then realized that I’d grown bored of telling my same stories again and again,” Rothman-Zecher says. “I became more interest in what didn’t happen — but almost did and could have, had the situation played out a bit differently. From there, I developed my characters and plot.”
“In retrospect, living in Yellow Springs from age eight to sixteen was more formative than I could have realized at the time. At the time, I was just a kid, worrying about typical kid things — like, ‘are these jeans cool or not,’” Rothman-Zecher adds. “But I absorbed the culture of the town, which is definitely influenced by Antioch College, the town having been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and anti-war activism. I took in a legacy and feeling of progressiveness, pursuing justice, protesting unfairness, and not just tolerating diversity but uplifting diversity. What I picked up and inherited from Yellow Springs has stayed with me through my adult years and is a large part of why we moved back here, for our daughter.”
Learn more about Rothman-Zecher’s work at www. thelefternwall.com
Sharon Short writes historical mysteries under the pen name Jess Montgomery (www. jessmontgomeryauthor. com). Send her column ideas, book club news, or literary events at sharonshort1983@ gmail.com.