Welcome back! We’re so happy to bring your story “There’s Magic in Bread” to our readers. Can you tell us what inspired this story and how it came about?
I’m so glad to be in Fantasy Magazine, with fiction this time! I’d had the idea of a bread golem, and of intertwining a modern story and a pre-Holocaust story for many years, but every time I’d try to write it, I couldn’t figure out the theme the story was about. But after a few months of pandemic, I was feeling helpless—I wasn’t a healthcare professional, I wasn’t going to be able to develop or test a vaccine, etc.—I realized that’s what the story was about: what you do when you feel helpless and all seems lost. Because the thing that helped me was doing something, frankly anything. I bought a used sewing machine and learned to sew masks. It didn’t help the main problem, which is that there was a pandemic. It didn’t help my second problem, which is that I was high-risk for major complications in a pandemic that people didn’t seem to care enough about. But it did help me feel better. And it eventually led to new options that hadn’t been open to me before, like activism via op-eds in the San Francisco Chronicle. So, into the story that went, and suddenly the narrative gears clicked together.
Your choice to contrast the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with the Second World War and the Holocaust, to me, felt simultaneously ultra-bold and extremely sensible. What led you to tie those particular times together in this story?
My whole family had to deal with the Holocaust in different ways. Most were able to flee from Eastern Europe. But my grandmother was only eight when she went into hiding with a Christian family in Poland, and the rest of her family was murdered by the Nazis. For as long as I can remember, my family has had the attitude of, “if she can survive that, you can survive this smaller thing that’s happening to you now.” So when I was feeling a lot of despair about the pandemic situation, especially as a person whose disability will very likely be made permanently worse (with very poor quality of life) if I get COVID and especially feeling scared when hospitals were talking about rationing care for disabled folks, I would always remember my grandmother’s story. I was in good shape in comparison—nobody was actively hunting me down to try to give me COVID, and I had the privilege of being able to stay home. I could figure out how to do this. So eventually, in my head, the two events became very intertwined. This story is loosely about my grandmother, who gave me great perspective (by phone, from Israel, just like in the story) early in the pandemic, and who had a family pharmacy (not a bakery) in Poland back in the day.
While this isn’t the first golem story I’ve read since 2020, it is the first that made me tear up. Do you think that there’s a particularly strong resonance among readers and writers for golem stories these days, considering everything?
I think that, for me, there’s been a huge uptick in antisemitism lately, which has made me lean into my culture and religion a bit more. I hadn’t seen a ton of Jewish speculative media prior to 2020, when I started writing this story, and I wanted to put something out there. A golem is both very Jewish, and also a thing you can directly create and act upon. I think a lot of us have been feeling helpless and gravitating towards the things that are empowering, and perhaps the combo of these two things has made a sudden golem renaissance in SFF? But also, golems are cool, so it might just be that!
This story doesn’t shy away from modern realities; contrast that to the wake of the 1918 flu, where creators were eager to never mention it. How do you think writers today should tackle the pandemic in their stories, and how has it influenced the course of your writing in particular?
SFF is a wonderful tool for escapism, but I wish more stories that could reasonably include the pandemic would do so. I worry that such a high percentage of our media (both SFF and otherwise) is pandemic-free, that it makes it harder for society to remember that we’re actually still in a pandemic. We haven’t fixed this (for example US COVID deaths in 2022 were higher than in 2021) and we still need to take mitigation steps. But folks in many countries are too eager to say that it’s over and we can throw all those mitigation steps out the window. I’d love for more media to remind folks of the reality we still live in.
For my writing in particular, I couldn’t write very much in 2020. Too much pandemic anxiety. But as I found better coping mechanisms, the writing came back and came with a greater focus on mental health and disability than before. I’ve also learned how nice it is to be able to write lying down on a couch in pajamas instead of sitting upright and wearing actual jeans at a café.
Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
Just a week ago I finished a middle-grade novel that has five kids with super-senses (super-taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch) meet in detention and realize something hinky’s going on, so they must unravel the conspiracy that made them that way. And, as I wrote in my previous Fantasy Magazine essay, I’m a sucker for a good heist story, so of course the characters need to break into a secret lab to solve the mystery! Here’s hoping it finds a good home.