Joshua Cohen fuses empathy and analysis at this year's Jewish Book Festival

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      Joshua Cohen has published two very different books within the past 19 months: 2017’s Moving Kings, a novel set in the grittier boroughs of New York City, and last year’s Attention, a collection of nonfiction articles and essays that find him ranging from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Azerbaijan. Ask him to define the difference between creative writing and work “written to order”, though, and at first he answers with what sounds like a joke. One, Cohen contends, is written in longhand; the other, on a screen. But there’s a serious distinction to be made between these two forms of scribing: one is open-ended and contemplative, while the other suggests that it’s page-ready the minute it’s electronically typeset.

      You’ll win no prizes for guessing that Cohen writes his novels by hand, although he says that both media are inextricably linked in his mind.

      “They get written simultaneously, so they respond to my life and whatever political questions that I have,” he explains, reached at home in New York City. “But the nonfiction.…not only does it have practical demands on it in terms of deadlines, length, et cetera, but it also needs to stay relatively on point. Whereas the fiction is really a place where I can allow myself to not just not satisfy certain expectations, but to sort of invent expectations for myself—and then fail myself.”

      Has a more writerly observation ever been made? Both droll and demanding, Cohen is an apt choice to open the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival this weekend, when he’ll join UBC prof and novelist Maureen Medved in conversation as part of the opening-night gala. And there’s a reasonable chance that he’ll discuss the topic that links Moving Kings’ slice-of-life realism and Attention’s more analytical musings: his sense of how much we’ve surrendered, “as citizens, as thinking, knowing, reading, writing people” in today’s environment of corporate despotism.

      “Much of my own coming-of-age wasn’t just a period of exploration of the books that came before me, but was really a kind of study of the institutions that were being systematically dismantled in front of me, whether they were the institutions that I worked for for a brief amount of time, which were the big newspapers and magazines, or the publishing industry,” the 38-year-old author notes. “Even when you want to go and put up your own website and self-publish, there’s the idea that you have to sign a service agreement, and you might not, at the end of the day, even own what you made and put up yourself. And I think of it as this constant surrendering of these powers, of these rights. That’s a demoralizing process, and so a lot of the journalism or a lot of the essays in Attention try to document the process of this demoralization. And the fiction is trying to get at how it feels.”

      That’s one way of explaining the raw emotional power of Moving Kings, Cohen’s fifth novel. Its multiple protagonists are David King, the divorced and alienated proprietor of the titular moving company; his nephew Yoav and Yoav’s friend Uri, fresh from serving their mandatory stint in the Israeli army; and Avery Luter (a.k.a. Imamu Nabi), an African-American Vietnam vet suffering from untreated PTSD. They’re all also suffering from varying degrees of dispossession and loss, and one of Cohen’s aims is to find out if there can be any “consolation” in their shared experience.

      “The explicit question really was ‘How much are these people sort of the victims, and how much are they the perpetrators?’ ” he asks. “And so part of the consolation of the book that I was mentioning is the indictment of everyone. I mean, once we kind of know that everyone is implicated in this mass demoralization of society, whether through malevolence or hypocrisy or ignorance—that there’s no way that one can not be implicated in this—I think that there is, then… Well, if we have to find community in the negative, then at least there is community. And I think that in beginning to acknowledge that aspect of it, you can begin to pull yourself out.”

      This will take work, he acknowledges—much like his own task of writing, which he describes as an effort to “not be who I was”, largely accomplished through a mix of empathy and analysis. And, he suggests, events like the Jewish Book Festival are an appropriate forum for Jewish culture, at least, to engage that challenge.

      “My sense of the Jewish element, let’s say, of my work is less in its subject matter, although occasionally I’m pursuing Jewish themes,” he says. “It’s more about the question that should be asked at every Jewish book festival, which is ‘What are we—quote-unquote we—doing to earn the epithet “the People of the Book?” This could be just a big historical curiosity, it could be just a remnant of history, or it could be a living condition. And in my mind, what it means for that to be a living condition is that these ideas of attentivity, of thoughtfulness or thoughtful action, are things that are not just celebrated some random week in February, but are ingrained in our lives.”

      The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival presents Joshua Cohen at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Saturday (February 9).

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