Questioning Return. Beth Kissileff

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СКАЧАТЬ Wendy carefully swooped up a piece of crepe draped with chocolate and swathed with the bitter espresso ice cream, now puddling as it melted. “Maybe I need to improve my Hebrew, try seduction in different languages. My chances to land a guy will go up statistically if there are more guys to cast my potential net for.”

      “Phillipe would be proud—why don’t you write him a fan letter and tell him what you learned from his article.”

      Wendy smirked.

      “No, seriously, I had a professor in journalism school who made it the capstone of our class to write fan letters to writers we admired. People appreciate them, and mostly write back.”

      Wendy wiped her mouth with her napkin and intoned, “I’ll pass on that assignment, thanks, Professor Markovsky. Currently, I’m limited to English. That’s why my dissertation is exclusively on Americans.”

      “What’s it about? You haven’t told me.”

      “American baalei teshuvah in Jerusalem. How they tell their stories.”

      “They’re nuts. What else can you say?”

      “For starters, why? Why of all the possible nutty paths there are do they choose to do this, not radical veganism? Or Buddhist asceticism?”

      “Big deal. There are a variety of ways to be a nut! As we say in journalism school, where’s the story here?”

      Wendy put her fork down and said, “American kids, from American families, most of them in the US for a few generations. Now, they are taking on this different identity, Jewish in a way no one in their family has been in over a century. Why? What does it say about the role of religion in America? Dormant for a few generations and then, voila, coming to the fore. Does the behavior of baalei teshuvah compare to other American religious groups or is it sui generis?”

      Orly chewed thoughtfully, and said calmly, “Wendy, I’m not your professor. You don’t have to use jargon or situate your work within the field as a whole. Just tell me why you’re doing it, as a friend.”

      Wendy put down her utensils and laid her palms flat on the table, splaying her fingers. “My best friend growing up, Nina, had an older sister, Deb, now Devorah, who became religious when we were in high school. It was weirdly fascinating, how this person who’d been a lifeguard and competitive swimmer started wearing these long skirts and shirts, and looking indistinguishable from other women dressed that way. I wanted to know, had she really changed? Was she different, or was it all in the externals, just an overlay?”

      “Alright, what was it?”

      “I don’t know. I couldn’t just ask her. Now I’m asking a whole population of people like her. It started with my interest in whether someone truly changes or whether certain core parts of the personality are the same. I also wanted to do a Jewish dissertation in American religion. I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on Buddhists in America, and how the process of immigration changes religious practices. That semester, my grandfather died, and I felt this urge to . . . connect? I guess that’s it: grow closer to my own family, my own past. Make sense?”

      “Totally. I was just curious.”

      “No problem. What got you into journalism?”

      “I’ve always liked to write, and I’m naturally nosy. I love to ask brash questions and get in a person’s face, and figure out how to unsettle them if I sense they won’t tell the truth otherwise. I wrote for the newspapers in high school and college, and decided J-school was a natural fit.”

      “Trying to unsettle people is one of the things I like about my project. I’m trying to get them to tell their stories to see where they are uncertain, what kinds of hesitations creep in even while they are embracing this religious path.”

      “The thing is you shouldn’t unsettle them too much, just enough to get what you need. One of the most important things is bonding with your subjects, and knowing how to write with both objectivity and compassion. It’s a hard balance to strike, but good writing demands both, in different measures at different times. If you want advice on journalistic interviewing techniques, I’ll be happy to tutor you.”

      “Only if we meet over crepes here.”

      Orly lifted her fork again, and Wendy lifted hers to match. They clanged together and then both forks made their way from the plate to their owners’ mouths to finish the rapidly dwindling dessert.

      True to her word, Orly printed out a copy of something from one of her journalism school courses on interviewing techniques and dropped the article off in Wendy’s mailbox one afternoon when she wasn’t home. Oddly, the piece mentioned, in addition to some journalistic ones, the two that Violet Dohrmann had specified she should get: Interviewing: Its Principles and Methods by Annette Garrett, and The Social Work Interview by Alfred Kadushin. Wendy was reading it over for the umpteenth time, making sure she was following its suggestions.

      Of course, she had her questions written out—that had been done long ago, and she had checked them with Dohrmann to get the order right for best flow. She knew that, if there was a slowness or a lack of response, she could vary things, try to empower the interviewee by asking something about his ideal vision of being religious, or just be silent and force the interviewee to keep talking and break those awkward silences. Her favorite part of the article was carefully highlighted now and also copied out and stuck on the inside cover of her interviewing notebook along with Post-it notes saying, “Be sneaky,” “Be annoying,” and “Work your subjects up.” All these were dream commands for the shushed and silenced youngest sister, the one who wanted to be listened to and taken seriously, but was always relegated to the kids’ table, to watching cartoons on TV, to being told the matter wasn’t something she could understand: “Not for you now, dear. One day when you’re older.” Finally, this was Wendy’s chance to make people respond to her, to be in charge of the conversation, to direct it and get them to say things she was interested in. Orly’s piece was about techniques for journalists, and it talked about having a sense of the shape of the article you want to write and how the quotes from this person would fit, knowing what you wanted the subject to say. For Wendy, of course, the interesting part was not knowing what her subjects would say, getting them to say the things even they didn’t expect to say, the wholly fresh astounding honesty with which she hoped to get them to peel off their masks of piety and say what they genuinely felt, not what their teachers would expect from them.

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