Debut novel mines Jewish mysticism

Stephanie Feldman's debut novel, The Angel of Losses, is haunting.

Even more gripping than the real and imagined folktales that Feldman weaves into the book, however, is her exploration of sisterly rifts and bonds and family secrets shrouded by time.

She'll have a launch party for the book at 7 Tuesday night at Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr.

"I was always interested in ghost stories, and when I started this book, that's how I thought of it - as a story about family, a ghost story about a family, and a ghost story about history," Feldman said in an interview. "I sort of follow whatever lead or whatever detail sparks my imagination. That's what took me into folklore, and there are a lot of spooky stories in Jewish folklore."

The novel's protagonist, Marjorie, is a grad student in New York City earning a doctorate in British Gothic literature. The subject of her dissertation is the Wandering Jew, a legendary figure forced to roam the Earth until the coming of the Messiah. For all that the archetypal drifter has in common with Faust and the Ancient Mariner, he also bears a resemblance to the White Magician, a character in the stories her grandfather Eli told her and her younger sister Holly when they were children.

Holly, now known as Chava, is an Orthodox Jewish convert whose husband, Nathan, belongs to an esoteric (fictional) sect. Neither she nor Marjorie was raised Jewish.

But even when grandfather Eli was still alive, little was known about his life in Russia; his accent and his past were erased when he emigrated, his last name anglicized. When he dies, he leaves behind - along with a bundle of unanswered questions - four notebooks filled with stories about the White Rebbe, a miracle worker, and the cryptic Angel of Losses. The fabled pair watch over the lost letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a symbol that completes the hidden name of God. To uncover who Eli was, Marjorie must look to the notebooks, to Jewish folklore and mysticism, and to history.

To prepare to write Angel, Feldman said she read and collected legends she liked. Some of the existing folktales she drew on are those about Rabbi Joseph della Reina, a 15th-century Kabbalist (Jewish mystic) who wanted to bring the Redemption.

"The thing that I thought about in everything was the idea of exile, and exile is a very important concept in mysticism," she said. "But not just in Jewish mysticism, but the idea that we live in a fallen world, and exile is another way of conceptualizing that."

Feldman, 31, grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and graduated in 2005 from Barnard College with a degree in English. She lived in New York after graduating, and now resides in Fort Washington with her family.

During high school, she cultivated her writing skills through several local programs. At the University of Pennsylvania, she took a poetry course and a creative nonfiction course. She also participated in the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, an intensive summer academy offering workshops in a variety of disciplines. It was defunded by budget cuts in 2009. (Kevin Bacon is a 1974 alum.)

"The teachers that I had in Philadelphia and the opportunities I had in Philadelphia went a long way toward me going on this path, toward . . . taking my writing seriously and going with it," she said.

After college, Feldman considered going to grad school to become a professor of 18th-century literature; in a sense, she said, by immersing Marjorie in the academic environment, she is imagining what that would have been like.

Like Marjorie, Feldman studied Gothic novels, which inspired her to "write something that was a little bit spooky and melodramatic" that simultaneously "was interrogating issues like gender and family and obligation."

Marjorie grapples with Holly's decision to leave behind the life she knew for one of strict dietary laws, modest clothes, and motherhood. The fact that Holly and Nathan live in the sisters' childhood home in New Jersey only complicates matters.

The contrast in the siblings' lives, Feldman said, is an exercise in exploring how people construct religious and cultural identities. She herself grew up practicing and continues to practice Reform Judaism.

Feldman said the geographical divide between New Jersey and New York City "underscores the emotional divide between Marjorie and Holly but also between her as an adult and her as a child."

In addition to coming to terms with her relationship with her sister, Marjorie must decipher the meaning of Eli's stories so she can learn the consequences of his actions and what they might mean for her family, and Holly in particular. Not to mention making sense of the unsettling dreams in which he visits her and says, for instance, that there is a reason he concealed his past. The dreams are another detail Feldman borrowed from her own life (though she said her dreams were less sinister than her character's).

"I wanted to give Marjorie and Eli that connection that sort of went beyond his death," said Feldman, who dedicated the novel to her grandfathers. She was close with them, she said, but unlike Eli, they were born in the United States and "were not necessarily storytellers." But she said the idea of imagining what life was like for ancestors in Eastern Europe is "not uncommon in modern Jewish writing."

Still, Feldman said she did not tailor the work to a particular audience.

"There's the tension between people who are more assimilated or less assimilated . . . but I don't think that's limited to the Jewish community," she said. "I think that's part of the cosmopolitan society that we live in - people who live according to very different ideologies, but we still live together."

Stephanie Feldman: "The Angel of Losses"

7 p.m. Tuesday at Main Point Books, 1041 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr.

7 p.m. Aug. 6 at Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble, 1805 Walnut St.

For more events, visit www.stephaniefeldman.com.

215-854-2301 @Zoe_M_Miller