Tradition and feminism clash in new novel

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Riverdale author Amy Gottlieb, 58, grew up on Long Island before moving to Palisade Avenue 19 years ago with her husband to raise their children.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you’re a writer: you live in Brooklyn,’ and I can’t imagine living in Brooklyn! Because in Riverdale, [for instance] my gardener is a poet and it [poetry] just surrounds us and in this kind of more humble, unspoken way. There’s a lot of talent and a lot of support,” Ms. Gottlieb said.

Her debut novel, “The Beautiful Possible,” was published in February by Harper Perennial. It centers on a love triangle between a rabbi, his wife and a Jewish refugee from Germany after World War II.

Ms. Gottlieb, who has worked for an international association of rabbis for many years, called on her personal experience as a source of inspiration.

“That gave me a wonderful lens on the complex lives of rabbis and their families,“ she said. 

Her novel’s characters were also inspired by women from her mother’s generation. 

“They were caught between living a traditional life and feminist longings,” Ms. Gottlieb explained. 

Finally, learning about the stories of Jews escaping Germany and finding their way to India inspired the journey of one of the characters in the book. Walter finds refuge at an ashram in India during the war before heading to New York City.

There, Walter meets the other two main protagonists of the novel at a Jewish theological seminary — rabbinical student Sol and his fiancée, Rosalie. What ensues is a 70-year-long love triangle that Ms. Gottlieb says explores the shaky domain of faith and the human heart.

“I am entrenched in Jewish life. I started to get more involved in intellectual pursuit of religious ideas when I was in graduate school. I studied Latin American literature at the University of Chicago, which has a pretty amazing divinity school, so I started to wander over to explore what was going on there and was exposed to another approach of talking about religious ideas, faith and transcendence that I didn’t have as a child growing up and going to Hebrew school. That opened up a whole other level of my intellectual spirituality,” Ms. Gottlieb said.  

“In my novel there’s a strong connection between my characters’ wrestling faith [...] and the faith that it takes to tell a story and to imagine the hearts of people who lived before us. So it was important to me that I weave those two notions of faith in the book,” she added.

Ms. Gottlieb worked on “The Beautiful Possible” for over 10 years. The first few years were dedicated to finding the direction of the story while juggling a full-time job and a family. At that point Ms. Gottlieb would write whenever she found the time. The process continued until one day, “the novel had taken over my imagination in such a strong way that even when I wasn’t sitting down and writing I was thinking about it,” she explained.

For the author, writing begins at the crack of dawn. 

“I can wake up really early because it’s important to me to get an edge on the day when it’s still quiet and then I’ll write at home,” she explained.

She also enjoys writing in cafes, especially the Indian Road Cafe in Inwood.

Ms. Gottlieb never took part in a writing program or any writing course,  explaining, “I’ve really done everything on my own my whole life.” But over the years, the Bronx Council on the Arts has shown her support. Among other awards, she won a literary fellowship from the organization in 2009, which helped her work on her novel.

“This novel is a book of questions... It’s a continual exploration. I’m always trying to know more about the possibilities of fiction. What can one do with language and how far can a story go?” Ms. Gottlieb said about her work.
She is working on a new novel while promoting her recent release, but said it is too early to divulge anything about her next work.

Amy Gottlieb, Novel, The Beautiful Possible, Alice Guilhamon

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