Clinging to an Ardent Hope: Eli Zuzovsky on Film, Selfhood, and Being an Israeli Writer Today

Heaven is a fuzzy thing for Jews. Jewish thinkers offer few clues as to what it is and how one gets there. One way of doing so, it seems, is making three successful shidduchim, long-lasting matches. In my devoutly secular interpretation, this precept echoes the Forsterian dictum—”Only connect!”—encompassing all sorts of bonds, from friendships to collaborations.

In 2021, I was a college senior, anxiously awaiting my thesis readers’ comments. When the document arrived, I tore through it with bated breath. “I hope the school administrator who made this match has fun in Heaven,” I thought. “This is one hell of a shidduch.”

The comments came from Neel Mukherjee and Teju Cole, two of my literary heroes and the best readers I could imagine, generous and scrupulous in equal measure. That thesis became my debut novel, Mazeltov. I recently had the pleasure of talking to Neel about the book.

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Neel Mukherjee: Eli, your beautiful novel first came to my attention as a senior thesis. Of the many wonderful and unexpected gifts the thesis gave me, as one of its graders, was the link to the short film based on your thesis, accompanied by the request that we see the film first before reading the short novel.

So, which came first, the film or the novella-thesis?

Eli Zuzovsky: I keep forgetting that we didn’t know each other prior to that thesis; I’m forever grateful to my college for our happy pairing. Reading your comments back then (and, even more so, during our later conversations), I felt like we were longtime friends. My sense was that we shared not just a sensibility—I think you mentioned films like Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, one of my all-time favorites—but also literary and political preoccupations.

I don’t remember which came first, the novel or the film. I think of them—and, perhaps, of cinema and literature more broadly—as some kind of fraternal twins, not identical, but sharing certain genes and born of a similar impulse. Making the two was mostly a necessity. I was, as the Americans say, a double major, studying filmmaking and literature, so I had to craft a project that would put the disciplines in conversation.

That year, I kept bouncing back and forth between the media. Working on the film allowed my characters—the amazing actors I was fortunate enough to work with—to talk back to me, which was profoundly useful. Then, writing the novel’s first draft as we entered post-production was an opportunity to both expand and deepen my fictional world.

Every time I’m on a film set, I’m reminded of that famous line by T. S. Eliot: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Film is all about reality and “Go, go, go”—deadlines, resources, constraints….There’s never enough time, and there’s an unrelenting need to make decisions on the spot.

An old mentor of mine compared making a film to trying to build a house on top of a moving train. To me, writing a book is more like sitting on the train and looking through the window at the changing view.

NM: Tell us a little bit about which writers have influenced your work. I ask this because of the way you enter so effortlessly the consciousnesses and points of view of such a large spectrum of characters: Adam’s tortured father; Mémé, Adam’s grandmother; Abigail, his best friend; Ben, an off-duty IDF soldier; Khalil, a Palestinian poet.

At a time when so much writing is centered on the self, you imagine other people’s minds, the soul and foundation of the novel form. Each of these voices, characters, is so fully realized, so utterly credible and convincing. Some reading must have complemented your imagination in this, correct? For example, I know from our conversations that Frank O’Hara is the authorial presence behind Khalil’s poetry in the opening chapter of Section III.

EZ: The way I see it, this polyphony is the book’s backbone and ethos. To me, the compulsion to imagine what it’s like to be another person is the raison d’être and fuel of the novel as a form.

So the obsession with the self you mention troubles me. Don’t get me wrong; I love autofiction. But the pull I feel toward fiction has more to do with others. I know what my voice sounds like in my head. I turn to literature, both as a reader and writer, to tune into other people’s thoughts.

Writing Mazeltov, I kept asking myself how we live together—especially in a place as fractured and violent as Israel—and how we shape each other. To me, the answer to such questions has to pass through literature, with its deployment of our empathy and imagination. Khalil is a poet obsessed with O’Hara, Mahmoud Darwish, and Maya Angelou. Adam’s mother, Sarah, is a literary scholar who has spent so much time studying Virginia Woolf that her consciousness has melted into Mrs. Dalloway’s.

Being a filmmaker, I found myself turning to my cinematic heroes, like Federico Fellini, Chantal Akerman, and Spike Lee (whose masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, is a beautifully expansive meditation on the nexus between identity, community, and history). I think of all these artists as my family, people who have played a key role in my own development, not only as a writer but also as a person.

NM: Adam Weizmann, the protagonist, binds the whole novel together into one cogent, coherent entity. I couldn’t help thinking how much of yourself you poured into this funny, smart, precocious character whose very soul feels roiled, who is both an insider and an outsider to all the events in the novel.

 EZ: I’m thrilled you’re saying this. That’s the part I hoped he’d play—not just a binding agent, like an egg yolk in a cake, but also a hybrid insider-outsider. I wonder whether for us, queer folks, it kind of comes with the job; perhaps we must be both.

But I also feel uneasy about Adam, probably because of my general ambivalence toward coming-of-age narratives, which often strike me as insanely narrow. As Marxist critics like Franco Moretti have shown, the bildungsroman and capitalism evolved in tandem. They share a driving logic that foregrounds the linear development of one individual almost to the point of fetishization.

In your comments on my first draft, you defined the book as “an attempt to understand a whole spectrum of apartness, unbelonging, and alienation.” So while I understand why you say I poured myself into Adam, another voice in me insists, “Wait, but this is no less true of any other character in Mazeltov!”

I suppose this is one thing Adam and I share (spoiler alert): I don’t know how to sing a solo. I’m much more into symphonies, where the different instruments and movements echo and converse with one another. To me, the self is a fluid, porous thing, and its development is always intertwined with other people.

Unfortunately, we’re witnessing a strong push in the other direction, toward hegemony and homogeneity. This anxiety has haunted Zionism, for example, since its dawn. In Israel, we’re taught to see foundational strategies like “the ingathering of the exiles” and “the melting pot” as miracles. But we disregard the erasure and destruction these efforts have involved.

The revival of the Hebrew language included a campaign against Yiddish and other diasporic cultures. Israel itself was founded on the ruins of the Palestinian people. Even within Jewish society, the establishment suppressed and stigmatized narratives, like those of Mizrahi people, to ensure the supremacy of the paradigm of the New Jew.

NM: In The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard observes: “Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can’t be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn’t have to be fair, or convincing.” Like Hazzard, you were fearless in making chance bring two characters together towards the end of your thesis.

In a way, these are the two characters who least belong to anything that might shore up their lives, albeit for very different reasons. Their meeting carries great yet unobtrusive metaphorical weight. Did you always intend this to happen?

EZ: I think so. In my thesis, the penultimate chapter, “Boys,” depicted a chance meeting between Adam and Khalil at a gay bar in New York. It was inspired partly by Ulysses and the Homeric, unlikely encounter between Stephen and Bloom.

My legendary editor, Riva Hocherman, aptly pointed out that I’d written a novel obsessed with parenthood. But I’m much more interested in forms of chosen kinship, like the partnership between Adam and Abbie and Khalil and Adam’s bond.

Reading my thesis, you questioned the plausibility of that scenario. I went on to rewrite it, although I do think Hazzard has a point. As someone to whom coincidences happen all the time (a running joke among my friends), I think we tend to play down serendipity in fiction. But rereading “Boys,” that particular coincidence did feel like a cop out; it allowed me to sidestep hard questions.

I don’t want to say too much about that chapter, so readers can experience it firsthand, if they wish. What interested me there was issues of complicity and solidarity, alongside the inseparability of political consciousness from any meaningful process of maturation. After all, bar mitzvahs mark the moment when we become morally responsible for our actions.

Many people poke fun at groups like Gays for Gaza, which Netanyahu recently dubbed “Chickens for K.F.C.” But these groups raise consequential questions about the disruptive potential queerness holds. I’m thinking, for example, of a letter published in 2014 by veterans of 8200, a famously gay-friendly, elite I.D.F. intelligence unit. In the letter, the veterans described how they’d targeted queer Palestinians so they could later be coerced into cooperation.

NM: Is it difficult to be an Israeli in the world now?

EZ: I appreciate your question, and in many ways, these past fifteen months have been the hardest of my life. But I think there’s been a hyperfixation on this question, especially in Israel and the U.S. This tunnel vision has only calcified our hearts and minds, taking us even further away from the peace, justice, and equality we all deserve. As an Israeli, I feel that it’s my duty to ask myself what it means to be a Palestinian in our world.

Jonathan Glazer, who made the Holocaust masterpiece (if ever there was one) The Zone of Interest, got so much flack for his Oscar speech. But I can’t think of a more urgent question to ask in this historical moment than the one he posed: How do we resist dehumanization?

I’m usually a massive optimist, but it’s been hard, almost impossible, to stay hopeful in the face of the atrocities we’ve witnessed. In the fall, I taught a class on fascism and film, which felt more timely than I would’ve wished. One of my main takeaways from it was that fascists thrive on hopelessness and helplessness, both of which I’ve felt acutely this past year.

We don’t have the privilege of losing faith. I’ve found myself clinging to ideas like Tony Kushner’s “painful progress” or Jean-Luc Godard’s call for “ardent hope.”

Which brings me back to literature. Three of my favorite novels that I read last year were written by Palestinian women: Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, and Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin. These books are gems of both resilience and resistance—against forgetting, against despair, against annihilation.

Then there’s No Other Land, a documentary made by a collective of Palestinians and Israelis (including my remarkable friend Rachel Szor). It’s a devastating film, but the fact of its existence gives me hope, as it charts what I see as the only viable path forward.

The companionship between Basel and Yuval, two of the directors, makes me think of a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., that feels extremely pertinent: “Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”

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Mazeltov by Eli Zuzovsky is available via Holt.