GOLDA Girls

GOLDA Interviews: Portia Elan, Author of ‘Homebound’

• Episode 12

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GOLDA founder Stephanie Butnick talks to author Portia Elan about her novel, Homebound, which is the latest selection from Nu Reads, the Jewish book subscription series (and our show’s sponsor!). This ambitious, multi-timeline novel features interwoven stories from 1983, 2078, and 2586 that navigate identity and belonging. Homebound manages to be both futuristic and deeply human—and also incredibly Jewish. 

GOLDA Girls is presented by Nu Reads, the Jewish book subscription series curated by the Jewish Book Council that brings remarkable literature straight to your door. Use code NuGolda at checkout for 15% off. Visit www.NuReads.org to get started today.

GOLDA Girls is a production of GOLDA Media. The show is executive produced by Ariel Shapiro and edited by POLDHU. 

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Intro

SPEAKER_01

Hey Golden Gang, it's Stephanie Butnik here with a special drop in your feed. Our podcast, Golden Girls, has the best presenting sponsor, New Reads, the Jewish book subscription series that I am absolutely obsessed with. The selections are curated by our friends at the Jewish Book Council and they are great. Subscribers get a new book every other month, plus exclusive access to author events and more. Newreads also makes the perfect gift for the Jewish book lover in your life. It's super easy to sign up for a gift subscription and to use our discount code Golda at newreads.org. Today I'm talking to Portia Alon, the author of the latest New Reads pick, Homebound. It's a novel of friendship and hard-won hope with interlocking storylines that span centuries from the 1980s way into the future. It's complex and full of heart and has a deeply Jewish story at its core. Here's my conversation with homebound author Portia Alan. GoldenGang,

Interview with Portia Elan

SPEAKER_01

I am so excited to be here with Portia Alan, whose new book, Homebound, is her debut novel. It just came out and it is the latest new reads pick. I have to say, Portia, I loved this book. I feel like that's a good way to start an interview by just telling you I love this book. It was so I don't even know what I was expecting, but it really just blew my mind in so many ways. Oh, I'm so grateful that you read it with such an open heart and that it swept you away. So, Portia, there's a great review of your book on the Jewish Book Council's website. It's by Daniela Wexler. And she starts the review by writing, Jewish fiction is often perhaps almost pathologically preoccupied with the past. It's refreshing to encounter a Jewish novel determined to imagine the future. So let's go into that future. This book spans like lots of timelines, lots of centuries. It goes forward in a really, really, really interesting way. How did you get the kernel of the idea of what this book was gonna be?

SPEAKER_00

The book actually started, funnily enough, in the past, in the 1980s timeline, um, with this young woman who is dealing with grief and the inheritance of a story that she sets out to finish. But I knew that very early on, this question that this character is wrestling with around loneliness and like how to feel at home in the world, how to feel a sense of belonging. That's like a big existential human question, and that the answers that I was gonna find to that question were much bigger than would fit in one single lifetime. Um, and that we were gonna have to trace it, sort of the echoes of that hundreds of years into the future, to accumulate a more comprehensive answer to how do we find where we belong.

SPEAKER_01

So introduce for us these different characters we meet, these different timelines. Lay it out for us. I would try, but I would like there's so much going on that I would just love it. Like, I need the expert, I need to go straight to the source.

SPEAKER_00

We start with Bex in 1983. She is angry and sad, dealing with sexuality and grief, writing a computer game. And then we zoom forward into the 21st century. We're at UC Berkeley with a brilliant scientist wrestling with her responsibility to community and combating climate change in the face also of capitalism. And then we zoom forward again all the way to the 26th century, where we're following a ship captain on kind of a drowned world. She is at the fringes of society and ends up taking on some passengers for a journey into the Arctic.

SPEAKER_01

So, chapter one, you start us in 1983 in Cincinnati. Chapter two rockets us, as you say, to like 2586, and you describe this location as the West Atlantic Ocean. And we meet the sort of the main character who we I feel like we follow the most throughout the book. Am I saying this right? Yes, Yesiko?

SPEAKER_00

I say it yesico, but I made up the name. Whatever people are saying in their heads is right.

SPEAKER_01

I'll call Yessiko. I like that. It's like future Jessica. I feel like that's what it is. That's how I think of her. She's in this sort of like flooded universe. The boat that she's on is called Babylon. So right away in the book, you sort of start seeing these Jewish threads. You write, Yessico was born on an island, long since drowned. And the fact of that marked her, her mother used to say, Every year she included a jar of dirt from the island on the Pesach plate between the charred tuna bone and the shriveled round of orange. And I think this line is so good because we're in like the 26th century, but right away you're rooting her not just to like this place that she was born and that has since been drowned, but like to generations and generations before her. And I feel like this idea of Passover carries through the book a little bit. We have this Elijah character who keeps popping up and is sort of mysterious. Tell us a little bit about how you're going forward into the future, into the sort of speculative future, but then you're also like really grounding this. And the way you're doing it, I would say, I would argue, is through the sort of Jewish identities that we are meeting along the way.

SPEAKER_00

I think I really saw Jessico as the ritual and the idea of passing down of story ends up being the anchor and the thing that holds Yessiko together in a world in which all of our institutional organizations have dissolved or been overthrown. And so, what do we have that holds us in place in relationship to one another? That is for us as Jews, has always been story and ritual. Um, and those things that we can come back to and almost time travel, I feel a little bit like when we sit down to Passover, we are there with hundreds of thousands of years of Passovers all at once. So I was thinking a lot about that when I was writing that future.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, one of her, one of her shipmates says, it's how we know who we are. We keep the stories, and the stories keep us.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, stories are a place where we can be together, not just with the content of the stories or the past tellers of the stories, but with the people who are sitting across from us in the here and now, when we have a shared experience of a story, or even when we have different experiences of a story, being able to enter into conversation around, no, what did you think about what happened and different understandings of it allow us to connect to one another?

SPEAKER_01

And it is interesting because this idea of connection in a few of the timelines in the book, that means not just humans, right? Automatons who are involved in the storyline. So will you tell us, will you tell us a little bit about Haya, our girl Haya? Yeah. I guess I you can say that about Haya. It's not a person. They're not a person. I don't even know. It's like it's hard for me to talk about these things in a very funny way because this this book does sort of chart new territory, it feels like.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so Haya is the creation of that 21st century scientist. Dr. Tamar Portman. And Haya is an automaton who was originally designed to do wildlife rehabilitation through going into environments or ecosystems and doing lots of data collection and using quantum computing to sort of see patterns and be able to nudge things back towards balance, towards equilibrium without having to have sort of human intervention. And of course, Chaya becomes more than that. I really thought of Haya as the ultimate outsider, the one of one that pushes the characters and also the reader to think: how do I behave towards the stranger? How do I welcome or reject or question those who I don't understand, who are fundamentally feel different than I am? And yet, from the stories that Haya tells, we come to understand that they are like us, not human, but they do experience things like we do in some ways. Um, and so how do we find a place for them at the table?

SPEAKER_01

You have a great quote where Tamar, who creates Haya, writes, We've created a robot more aware of, more integrated with the world than any other thing, human or technological, and yet it has developed a self-concept in which it doesn't belong. And I feel like that was really, really, really poignant. This idea of you've created this thing that is designed to be integrated and fundamentally will never really feel belonging. And I'm curious of a little bit about like what informs that. I mean, I think you could read a lot into that. You could be like, oh, that's Jewish, like, oh, that's queer. Like, I just am wondering like where the sort of the formulation of that idea comes from for you.

SPEAKER_00

There's an epigraph at the start of the book from Abraham Joshua Heschel about how all of us have this fundamental loneliness, this like ache for knowing that we're not alone. I kind of can't imagine any living being that doesn't at some point think, where do I fit? Who doesn't because of religion, because of sexuality, because of height, because of skin color, because of ability, all those things, whatever it is that triggers it, feels I'm too different to belong. Um, I think that's just like a really fundamental human conscious experience.

SPEAKER_01

And so in Haya, we sort of have this being who is designed, engineered to sort of be the ideal of everything, right? To have like the systems in place to be able to do all of these things. Is being the wrong way to describe an automaton? I feel like I don't want to like overly ascribe humanity, but it that's sort of what it feels like.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, Haya is conscious as far as we can tell from their narration. Like they are aware of themselves, aware of their place in a way that I think most animals are not. And so, yeah, I think being is the right word for them.

SPEAKER_01

And and aware enough to feel like outsider-ness, right? Like I feel like that fundamental human thing, as you mentioned, like to feel like I am not one of them, is so there. And I think that's what's so gripping about this book, which is it's futuristic, it sort of time travels, it timeline travels. There's a lot in here, right? There's about there's coding, there's, you know, a computer game, there's all sorts of stuff happening, but fundamentally it's a really, really, really human story. Yes, the humans look different than the humans we know now because they are living in a different moment, or the characters are actually not entirely human, but I'm curious how you manage to tell such a human story about, as you say, the longing and home and community through these very, very, very futuristic ideas.

SPEAKER_00

My writing process is very character-driven, not so much plot or like planning of event. And so when I was writing, I actually wrote each of the storylines separately and then braided them together. And so as I was writing each of them, I was completely immersed in their voice, in their world, in trying to tease out and follow that emotional thread of character. I was excited by the leaps that I got to take and like creatively stretched and intellectually stretched by trying to make sure that there was resonance in between them and logistical connections as well. So that people who are like, actually, I want to know actually what were the events that led between these two. But at its heart, all of the writing process was driven by trying to answer those questions about belonging through the characters.

SPEAKER_01

And was there ever a universe in which these characters were not Jewish? It just seems like they're saying the Shahiyanu on board in this futuristic ship. Sometimes they sail through Shabbat, sometimes they, you know, at a particularly profound moment they stop for Shabbat. I mean, how was Judaism woven into this from the beginning?

SPEAKER_00

It really, I don't think there was no universe in which the characters were not Jewish. Just because that was from the beginning a part of the vocabulary that I wanted to use in telling the story in terms of the imagery and the setting and the emotional anchors that I wanted to give. That was always a part of it. I think my personal relationship to Judaism has been a lot about finding community and about seeing a sense of meaning and also smallness at the same time. I'm part of a big meaning, but I am also a small thing. And how wonderful that feeling is complicated, but also wonderful. And so that was always a part of how I saw the characters.

SPEAKER_01

In a way, first of all, I like how you're describing braiding three storylines together, which is just like you just made a holla, you made a book holla. This idea that, like, that is what grounds them, it feels like it connects them to each other in like this sort of metaphysical way, but it also anchors them in the past and connects them through history as well.

SPEAKER_00

To me, a huge part of being Jewish feels like being part of this ongoing conversation. That's the conversation that's been happening for thousands of years in Torah study and in commentaries, and it's continues today. I am part of a group at my synagogue that of a women's group that does Torah study every year together. And just getting together and like looking at the text, holding the text in our hands and like running it through the lenses of our lives and listening to one another, that sense of being part of a conversation, it weaves together what's happening for the characters as well, that they're finding their place in a bigger conversation.

SPEAKER_01

I feel like I had this moment, I was a religion major in college, and once I realized that you could look at the Hebrew Bible as a narrative, not just as something you learned in Hebrew school, but actually as a story. And you could use the things you were learning in like comparative literature, like you could actually take it on as a story. And I'm curious how that impacts for you as a writer, doing that Torah study, if you're like doing a character study as well along the way.

SPEAKER_00

I think there is some of that. I think I also, when I have done Torah study, like in groups more formally like that, feel this sense of multiplicity, like that a text exists on so many different planes at the same time, in terms of the literal, the narrative meaning, like thinking about it as story, the sort of spiritual, metaphysical meaning, and then how those meanings shift and change across time, depending on who is looking at it. And so it feels like touching something very alive on multiple levels. And that as a writer is also what I'm trying to give to my readers, the sense that the text is alive in multiple ways.

The Jewish books that inspired "Homebound"

SPEAKER_01

I'm so curious, you know, what writers and thinkers and authors that you you've taken inspiration from, both in terms of Jewish study, Jewish literature, and then also really in speculative fiction and how sort of the two sides of those come together. If there's anyone who has done both that has been inspirational to you or important to you in your literary journey?

SPEAKER_00

There are a few. One of them is The History of Love by Nicole Krause, which also has that sort of interwoven stories across time. Um, and sort of in that same era of reading, I also read Anna Solomon's The Book of V, Interwoven Women Across Time. This is a good list, by the way.

SPEAKER_01

This is a good reading list for our listeners.

SPEAKER_00

And then Rachel Cottish's The Weight of Inc.

SPEAKER_01

It's so funny. When I was reading this book, I was like, yes, I get the like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrowness of the comparison because it's about the games. I'm like, it reminds me of the weight of ink, which is like one of my favorite books, because it's so beautifully dense in terms of like history and literature. I don't know, I love this the different storylines. Oh, wait, that's so crazy.

SPEAKER_00

What an incredible compliment. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. No, and you get immersed in these worlds and you travel. You it's funny, when you time travel in the past, you don't think about it that way. If you go from like 1600 Spain to the 1800s to the early 20th century, it's like you don't think of it as speculative the way you do in fiction that goes forward, but it's actually very much the same thing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that sense of how do we find our human relationships and counterparts across decades, across centuries.

SPEAKER_01

Wait, this is a great reading list you're giving our listeners. That's amazing. So History of Love, Nicole Krauss, Book of V, Anna Solomon, The Weight of Inc. by Rachel Cadish. I think this is great. Okay, so this basically gives you a foundation from which to like really think critically is the wrong word, but like creatively about what it means to tell a Jewish story, a story about belonging and about identity and about home, like across different universes, really.

SPEAKER_00

And what is memory and what is history that is remembered versus history that's lost? I think there are a lot of really beautiful and powerful questions that are shared amongst those books that I found helpful and inspiring as I was writing Homebound.

SPEAKER_01

And it's funny, you know, I think I know this note we started on with the idea that like a lot of Jewish fiction probes the past, but there is something hopeful and optimistic about thinking about Jewishness in the future, right? Yes, the world looks different, the islands have, you know, there's been massive flooding or all the things that have happened in this book. But there is still Shabbat that is incredibly comforting to read.

SPEAKER_00

I find it comforting as a human to think about all that we have survived and not survived in the past, but as a people have survived, that we have carry with us the tools that have allowed that survival in many ways. The stories, the study, the arguments and the conversations, the rituals and the traditions, like those are the tools of survival. And so, of course, in the future, those are the things that we will still carry with us.

Being part of the Nu Reads community

SPEAKER_01

We get to interview all the New Reads authors here on Golden Girls. And it's so fun to ask them what it means for them to be part of this Jewish subscription series of just have the mark of New Reads and of the Jewish Book Council and have that community embrace you and really, really care about Jewish storytelling and love new creative, clever Jewish books. And also to sort of, you know, be part of a community of readers who really, really care about Jewish storytelling and like love new creative, clever Jewish books.

SPEAKER_00

I feel so incredibly honored and grateful. I think it's a little bit funny. I knew that for me this felt like a very Jewish book, but I wasn't entirely sure that readers would find it to be a Jewish book.

SPEAKER_01

And so You're like, I wrote the Shahefiano in there. It's in there.

SPEAKER_00

And so to be invited into conversation and into the bookshelves of so many passionate Jewish readers feels just like such an honor. And I am so excited to continue being in conversation with Jewish readers and to be a part of a bigger conversation of Jewish writers who are imagining what do our stories mean to us today and what do they carry with us.

SPEAKER_01

And what I love is that you're broadening the idea of like what Jewish fiction can be, right? You're saying like it can be futuristic, it can be sort of dystopic, it can be all of these things, and also be deeply Jewish. So I'm grateful to you for broadening that canon for us. And congratulations on Homebound, this amazing novel that's part of the New Reads universe. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to chat. And Portia Elon, thank you for being a guest on Golda Girls. That's it

Credits

SPEAKER_01

for today's special New Reads Drop. Stay tuned for our regular episode in your feed on Friday. And don't forget to sign up for New Reads and get that special Golda discount. Head to Newreads.org. That's n-r-e-a-d-s.org and use the code Golda. Thanks for listening and stay Golda.

SPEAKER_00

That's a Golda podcast.

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Diana Fersko

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Esther Chehebar

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Gabby Deutch

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Stephanie Butnick

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