Episode 09: Elyssa Friedland
On Being a First Generation American and Why Representation in Books Matters
Elyssa Friedland’s Five Books:
1. Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk
2. Night by Elie Wiesel
3. The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
4. The Measure by Nikki Erlick
5. Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland
The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.
Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
After the Jacobson siblings win a life-changing fortune in the lottery, they assume their messy lives will transform into sleek, storybook perfection–but they couldn’t be more wrong.
The Jacobson children reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore beach house on the market. Packing up childhood memories isn’t easy, especially when each sibling is facing drama in their own life.
When Noah sees an ad for a Powerball drawing, he and his sisters, Laura and Sophie, go in on tickets while their brother Matthew passes. All hell breaks loose when one of the tickets is a winner and three of the four Jacobsons become overnight millionaires. It’s not long before the Jacobsons start to realize that they’ll never feel rich unless they can pull their family back together. (Penguin Random House)
Jackpot Summer was a USA Today bestseller, a Skimm Reads Pick and one of She Reads Most Anticipated Contemporary Fiction 2024.
Elyssa Friedland is the acclaimed author of Last Summer at the Golden Hotel, The Floating Feldmans, The Intermission and Love and Miss Communication. Elyssa is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School and currently teaches novel writing at Yale. She lives with her husband and three children in New York City.
Elyssa reflects on how exotic American-born parents felt to her as a kid, and how 10/7 led to some last minute changes to Jackpot Summer.
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The Five Books: Elyssa Friedland on Being a First Generation American and Why Representation in Books Matters
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Every week, I ask Jewish authors about five books in five categories.We'll hear about two Jewish books that have impacted the author's Jewish identity. We'll hear about one book, not necessarily Jewish, that they think everyone should read, a book that changed their worldview. We'll get a peek into what book the author is reading now. And we'll get to hear about the new book they've just published and how it came about.
Today, we'll be talking with Elyssa Friedland about her most recent novel, Jackpot Summer. After the Jacobson siblings win a life-changing fortune in the lottery, they assume their messy lives will transform into sleek storybook perfection, but they couldn't be more wrong.
The Jacobson children reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore beach house on the market. When the youngest son, Noah, sees an ad for a Powerball drawing, he and his sisters, Laura and Sophie, go in on tickets, while their brother, Matthew, passes. All hell breaks loose when one of the tickets is a winner, and three of the four Jacobsons become overnight millionaires. It's not long before the Jacobsons start to realize that they'll never feel rich unless they can pull their family back together.
Jackpot Summer was a USA Today bestseller, a Skim Reads pick, and one of She Reads’ most anticipated contemporary fiction of 2024. Elyssa Friedland is the acclaimed author of Last Summer at the Golden Hotel, The Floating Feldmans, The Intermission, and Love and Miss Communication. Elyssa is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School, and currently teaches novel writing at Yale. She lives with her husband and three children in New York City.
Elyssa reflects on how 10/7 led to some last-minute changes to Jackpot Summer that helped her find new meaning in her writing.
Elyssa Friedland:
I never saw myself serving a role beyond entertainment. I never imagined that my books would play a more important role, but I really believe that they do now. We need Jewish stories now more than ever.We also discuss the way books can help you see beyond your immediate circumstances.
Especially when you're young, you don't really see outside your town, outside your community. Like, you only know the world immediately around you, and this book really opened my eyes.
And Elyssa tells us what intrigued her as she was rereading Elie Wiesel's Night.
I have been long fascinated by survivors of World War II and how some choose to really cling to their faith, and some are ready to throw up their hands. And I really understand both.
That's all coming up next.
Hi, Elyssa. Thank you so much for joining us here today on The Five Books. I'm excited to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
I loved the lottery as like heightening the stakes of everything that they have going on in their lives. And I also really loved all the sibling dynamics and the adult sibling dynamics and their relationship with their dad. There was so much there.
So I'm excited to talk about all of that with you. I also read the essay that you published in On Being Jewish Now, edited by Zibby Owens. And you talked about making changes to the book in the wake of 10/7 before you had submitted. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
So I wrote my essay about writing Jewish characters and how in the wake of 10/7, I really changed my tune. Jackpot Summer is my sixth novel and all of my books have had a lot of Jewish content. And I certainly enjoy celebrating my religion and my tradition. But after a while, I felt like it was getting a bit redundant. And I wanted to sort of break out. But in publishing, it's really risky to do that.
I absolutely understand not writing about a different culture, tradition, life experience if you haven't done the work to research it. And that can be very insulting and really irresponsible. But I think that if you put in the work, you should be able to tell stories that are apart from your own experience. And I really wanted to do that. I was kind of — to be very colloquial about it, I was kind of sick of only writing Jewish stories.
And I had Jackpot Summer, their last name was Potter, which I felt, you know, it's a more ambiguous last name. And the Judaism sort of took a backseat. They were a Jewish family, but it was really quite secondary or even tertiary to the plot.
And after 10/7, I just changed my mind. And I said, you know, we need Jewish stories now more than ever, especially positive Jewish stories that present a Jewish family as people. And the Jacobsons are a family that have a lot in common with many other families, Jewish or not.
And I wrote it in the essay, I mean, we need to remind readers and people in general of Jewish people's humanity. And so I really elevated the Jewish content in the book, which was fun to do and easy. And I guess rather than feeling resentful of it, in the wake of 10/7, I was buoyed. And I never kind of thought — like, being a novelist, it was a really nice place for me to exercise my creativity, connect with readers. I'm a huge reader. It was an industry that I felt privileged to be a part of professionally. But I never saw myself serving a role beyond entertainment.
My books are fairly light. They have deep themes, but there's also a lot of comedy in them. They're, you know, beach reads. I never imagined that my books would play a more important role, but I really believe that they do now.
And in some ways, that's really, for me personally, it's a welcome surprise because it's more purposeful. Reminding readers and whoever my book reaches that Jews are people too. They deserve respect. They deserve a right to live, to feel safe. And I just never expected my career taking that kind of turn in terms of purpose.
Yeah, for sure. And I also just really appreciated the characters, their joy in their Judaism. You know, they all have different relationships to it, but they feel at ease as Jews to me, and they feel joyful about their Judaism to me, which I really appreciated in there.
I'm really glad because that was the aim.
Book One: A Jewish Book from Childhood – Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk.
I grew up with a very affiliated background. I went to Jewish day school from nursery school through my senior year. I grew up in New Jersey, just like the Jacobsons, in a very Jewish town.
So my life was very Jewish, and without even realizing how unique that was, and it wasn't until I got to college that I realized there was such a larger world out there because I had been in such a bubble. But I think anytime your eyes are opened and you realize what a bubble you've been living in, it's a good thing. Because especially as I went into a career as a novelist, you need to understand the world around you. I certainly gained a larger perspective.
So tell me about when you read Marjorie Morningstar.
I read it in high school. I don't even remember why I picked it up. I — maybe I found it around my house, I'm not even sure. I liked the title. I knew it was about a young Jewish woman and you know, certainly was like searching to understand myself and find myself in characters.
It was — even though I went to a Jewish day school, I don't feel like we read a lot of Jewish books. To the extent we did, it was like, Number the Stars, The Diary of Anne Frank. They were very specific.
Here was a more modern story where the Judaism was — definitely played a very central role, but ultimately it's a “finding yourself, finding what you want in life” book. And I think also because Marjorie lived in Manhattan, where I live right now and I grew up in the suburbs, I always thought Manhattan was the gold standard, and I just thought it was very glamorous that she moved to New York.
I think that I appreciated about the book what I appreciate about my own books, which was that the Judaism is just there.
Yeah.
It's a huge part of the story, but it's not, you know, with an emphasis on a particular historical episode.
Can you, just for listeners who maybe haven't read it yet, can you give us a quick overview of the story?
Oh my God. Well, this is kind of testing my memory because I love the book, but I haven't read it in so long. I wonder how I would feel about it if I read it now.
Marjorie, from what I remember is, she moves with her family to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side, where her parents are very excited to put her in a more elevated wealthier society where they hope that she will meet someone with high status. She's fairly observant, and she wants to become an actress, and she meets a man. He's older and it's like a complicated love story, and he's basically more avant-garde and looking for a more of a bohemian lifestyle, and he tells Marjorie, like, “I'm not for you. You should be like a Jewish mom on the Upper West Side with a family,” which she protests because she's in love, and I don't want to give away the ending, but she figures out what's right for her.
Yeah. I mean, the book came out in 1955. It's set in the 1930s. And I think from what I was reading, it's like the first novel to treat American Jews as — intimately as Jews without seeming exotic.
I would agree with that. And I mean, I also feel like in my own family, because my parents actually were born in Europe, and they came to the United States after World War II ended. The only Jewish experience I really knew was the immigrant experience.
And to me, I mean, you just said like Jews as not exotic, but actually the Morningstar, or Morgenstern in the book, her family's actual last name was really exotic to me, because like I didn't even really ever think about Jews that had been in America for a longer amount of time. And I ended up meeting my husband, his grandparents grew up here, and that was, you know, air quote “exotic” to me, which like everything, especially when you're young, you don't really see outside your town, outside your community. Like you only know the world immediately around you.
And this book really opened my eyes. I mean, certainly some of my classmates had grandparents that had grown up here and had been in the States for far longer. But it's not like, you know, you talk about your grandparents and their immigration story, you know, with your high school peers.
And so it was discovering it in Marjorie Morningstar that really opened my eyes to like, Jews are, you know, they don't all have the exact same experience. And subsequently, like in a much more modern, personal way, I have been learning that with my books when I go on book tour, because I've done so many visits to JCCs around the country. And I'm like, I know Jews from Omaha, I know Jews from Texas, and they have a really different experience.
Like, I know the Northeast, New Jersey, New York, Long Island Jewish experience. It's who I went to camp with, it's who I know, who I went to school with. But, you know, I went to Texas several times for book events and I'm meeting Jews who are really obsessed with football and wear cowboy boots.
And I was blown away by that. You know, well beyond reading Marjorie Morningstar, I'm continuing to be interested in the American Jewish experience and how diverse it is. Which I think is really important also in the wake of 10/7 where, like, Jews are all just being lumped together as, you know, we're all the same and often with very negative traits and like there's a lot of diversity that's not recognized.
Yeah. And I think especially now we're much more attuned to Jews from other backgrounds, Sephardi backgrounds, you know, Middle Eastern backgrounds, et cetera.
Absolutely.
Yeah. But back to Marjorie. You know, one of the things that this book is really about is a woman who's choosing between sort of a big life and a more familiar life. And I just wonder how that resonates for you.
It's interesting. I think probably when I read the book, I really believed that to be a choice that was necessary to make, but I have a very familiar life and a very big life now. And I just attribute that to the fact that it's like 90 years after when Marjorie Morningstar was set. And I have a, you know, my kids went to Jewish day school. We celebrate Shabbat.
I feel like I can have both in a way that Marjorie couldn't. I feel like it's very possible to have both now.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood – Night by Elie Wiesel.
That was really special for me because my son was reading Night in School, my oldest, and I was like, oh, I read Night. Then he tried to talk to me about it, and I realized I didn't remember it, and I was lucky enough, I mean, our synagogue in New York is where Elie Wiesel prayed. So first, it was meaningful to me just to read a book simultaneously with my son.
How old was he when he was reading it?
Thirteen, and he is now sixteen. I think that what interested me the most about reading the book is that I have been long fascinated by survivors of World War II and how some choose to really cling to their faith and some are ready to throw up their hands. And I really understand both.
And I wonder sometimes, like, what is the difference between the people? What is the difference in their experience? And I think just reading Night was a really interesting reminder of, like, it's not necessarily the case that those that cling to their faith had a so-called easier time during the war.
And so they came through with a lot of their, maybe still reunited with their family or they didn't have quite as, you know, gruesome an experience. But that is definitely not the case when you read Elie Wiesel's horrifying, traumatic, terrible in basically every which way experience. So, you know, and yet he remained an Orthodox Jew and quite devout.
And I don't have any answers. I don't know. It's a question I still have.
I talked about it with my son. I don't know what you think. Like, I just don't know what makes some people go through something horrible and stay faithful or even increase their faith, and some people turn their back. I don't know. I still don't know.
I would be really intimidated to write a book about that. I mean, obviously, Night is not fiction, but if I were to try to approach the topic from a, you know, a fictional perspective, I don't know that I could do it justice because I don't really have any insights into it. I'm just perpetually fascinated.
Yeah, for sure. I'm curious, can you tell us a little bit about your family's background?
So all of my grandparents are, well, they're all, they're all passed now, but they lived, all of them lived really long lives. They were Holocaust survivors. They were actually taken by the Russians and sent to Siberia and were in labor camps and survived, lost siblings.
I don't really know the siblings' stories if they were not, if they were taken by the Nazis or if they were taken to Siberia as well and just didn't survive the horrible conditions. I don't know. Maybe because they were younger then, I don't think there was this feeling of like — you know, when I would visit them when I was like eight or nine, I mean, they're in their sixties. I don't think there was this feeling of like, oh my God, we need to make sure Elyssa sits with them and hears their story. You just don't think like that when you're, or my parents didn't think like that when their own parents were in their sixties and vibrant and didn't seem like the end was any time soon, and then, you know, the visits dwindle, they get older, I'm off to college. And my parents know a lot more and I have asked a lot of questions, but I wish I had heard it, you know, directly from my grandparents.
But we never, they were very loving, but I was never close with my grandparents because of the language barrier. I mean, they just were not that comfortable speaking in English. And my parents are very American. They were born in Europe but came to this country at a fairly young age, something like one of them was maybe five, one was eight, and had a very, I would not call it an American upbringing. But certainly by the time I was born, but even when they were newlyweds, it was a very American Jewish existence.
It's so interesting that they had such similar backgrounds.
I know. Well, their parents knew each other in the old country, which is really crazy. When they met later on in life, their parents were like, we know each other.
Wow. So it makes sense. I mean, you really did have this very specific, both of your parents having come from this very specific similar background.
Yes.
Wow. So in reading Night, you chose it as a book that impacted your Jewish identity. What was it that you feel like resonated for you in changing how you thought about it?
I don't know that it necessarily changed me, but it brought back to the forefront of my mind this question that I'd always grappled with, which was not quite on the scale of thinking about the Holocaust, but even just growing up, watching families go through terrible things. And so if nothing else, it just brought to my mind a question about Judaism and religion in general that has always fascinated me.
And I think the essence of Judaism, as far as I understand it, is questioning. So if nothing more, just the very act of questioning sort of reconnected me to what I think is at the root of Judaism.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview – The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.
So much like I was tempted to write outside my own culture, I love reading outside my own culture and I love this book by Thrity Umrigar called The Space Between Us, which is set in India and explores the caste system and the relationship between two women, one in a very high society caste and the other is an untouchable, the lowest caste in India. The lower caste woman is a domestic worker in the home of the wealthy woman and their lives get really intertwined in unexpected ways. I think this book really reminds people that the lowest caste are people with the same range of emotions as the upper class. And the complicated relationship between these two women was really fascinating to me. And I'm a nerdy writer, I frankly liked the way it was written.
Yeah. And it's interesting because I think sometimes when we come from a very specific background, you know, you called it a bubble, but when you do grow up, then you can relate in a different way to a story that's set in a very different culture.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Were there takeaways from this book that you felt like really resonated for you?
I think that the strength of women, I would say it's definitely a very female-character-based book and I like to read stories that emphasize the strength of women and their really incredible ability to connect. That's something that I took with me from that book and I look for in other books.
Book Four: The Book You're Reading Now – The Measure by Nikki Erlick.
So I'm reading a great book called The Instrumentalist. You'll recognize the theme of liking to read about cultures and time periods other than the one in which I'm living. This book is set in the 1600s. It is set in Venice and it's a historical fiction story about a young orphan, a girl who displayed tremendous talent for the violin and she ends up being trained by Vivaldi. And I don't know what happens because I'm only about 30% in, but I'm loving it.
Again, this combines a great story. Love historical fiction because I feel like, you know, I'm checking a lot of boxes. I'm learning at the same time that I'm being entertained, but also I really appreciate the language. It's really, it's funny. I would call the language melodious, which actually makes sense because it is a book about music.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Novel – Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland.
I really loved reading Jackpot Summer. I—so much of what I enjoy about your books in general, they're so funny, they get at these bigger themes, they get at these deeper ideas, but the characters are just so relatable. There's something about the sibling text threads back and forth. I feel like anybody who has siblings understands the quick shifts between siblings. You know, they go from backstabbing to defending each other, helping each other. I love all of that. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the sibling dynamics and what you were getting at there.
I think it's funny how when families, I see it a lot when I am around siblings, that all their maturity goes away and they go, the adult siblings, they retreat right back into the roles that they played when they were children. Like oh, and they hold on to these grudges like, you were always mom's favorite or mom and dad never pushed you to work as hard as me. I think siblings always regress when they're back together.
So that’s sort of, it's actually comical if you get to write about adults acting like children, that's just funny and I like to write humorous things. The text chain, so there’s, in between each chapter, there is a sibling group chat. I'm in a lot of group chats, not with a sibling, but with friends. And I think they have a really fun rhythm to them, and you can go between a serious topic to something funny, and there's a natural rhythm. It was also a way, because the book alternated between four characters, it's not like every scene has all four siblings in it, it just wouldn't have worked for the story. And so the text chain was a way for me to show that the way all the siblings relate to each other in a very quick, accessible way, since it wasn't possible to write an entire book where all four siblings are always in the room together interacting.
I did love the scenes when they were all together interacting. Those are really fun.
Those are fun. Those are hard to write.
I bet.
A lot of people don't manage.
Do you have siblings?
I do. A brother, big age difference. So, didn't really have that experience growing up very much, almost — I think I really consider like I had an only child experience. And so maybe it's like that jealousy of the siblings, that interaction, that fun interaction of lots of memories together and you know, that shared history, which I didn't really have with the big age difference. I think I also wanted to immerse myself in a family that I would have enjoyed being a part of, with like a more lively sibling interaction.
I also loved that you got to know their mother, Sylvia, even though she dies about a year before the action of the book takes place. She still is a real character in the book and kind of interfering in their lives. And also just the way that the father, Leo, steps into his role as a father even at an older age.
As far as Sylvia, the mother in the book, I think it was really cool that she had such a big influence in the book, even though she's already passed, because if you think about the phrase “larger than life,” she was a larger than life personality with a huge impact on her community and her family. And what better way to show someone being larger than life than showing the way that they still have influence after they're alive. And that was certainly Sylvia.
And it also created this, you know, vacuum. Sure, she influenced them. They think about her often. But she's not available to give advice and to be there on the day-to-day basis and that really creates a role for the father who had always taken sort of a backseat. When you're married to a woman who's taking up a lot of space and has like the more dominant personality, it can be easy to recede into the background and feel like someone else is sort of managing the children. And then Leo, the grandfather, is left as a widow, and his kids are adults but that doesn't mean that they don't still need parental guidance, and he's sort of forced into the role and feels very uncertain of being the primary parent and the one that they lean on, but he has no choice. And he comes to appreciate the role and he really grows into it quickly.
Yeah, he really does step into it in a really beautiful way and I loved how you portrayed his life as so vibrant and you know, he still has chapters yet to explore even in his older age, even as he's moving to Florida. I do want to get to the lottery aspect and I can imagine why you chose to put a lottery in here and the relationship to money, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that choice.
I think money is fascinating. I think people think that they want more of it than is actually better for them. And I would never want to win the lottery, especially after writing this book and doing research into lottery winners. But all my books have just sort of a big hook, like a big life-changing thing that happens. I hope that the readers of Jackpot Summer take away that money is not only not the answer to everything, it can often, you know, exacerbate problems.
I wanted to ask you about Sophie and art. And, you know, there was an interesting interplay there of whether or not she felt like she could pursue her art while having a full-time job or not. And I'm curious how you think about that as an artist, writer.
I think that it's like you don't really quite always know where your inspiration comes from. And so she resented having to work as an art teacher because she felt like, because she was so tired and exhausted from being at work all day, she didn't have a lot left to give to her own art. And I kind of almost think, like a simple expression like you want something done, give it to a busy person. Like in some ways, the busier you are, you know, the more you get done and too much time can actually be sort of crippling. You know, you overthink things. And she also took tremendous inspiration from the students in a way that she hadn't realized.
I walk a lot of places in the city, but occasionally I take the subway when I, you know, need to go sort of beyond the walking bounds. And I always come off the subway with, like, a new story, like a new idea, because I don't pass as many people on the street. You get on a crowded subway and you're just like, ah, there's so many like inputs coming at you. And I feel like it's actually very stimulating for creativity.
And it's not just, you know, Sophie also when she wins the lottery, she also leaves her shared artist studio, which is like, so annoying. And the other artists take her supplies and it's like, this one's annoying and that one's annoying. But meanwhile, when she goes to paint by herself, she's very lonely and she doesn't have inspiration. And so, I remember reading a really interesting or sorry, listening to an interesting podcast about happiness and how people really misjudge what would make them happy. So one, we talked about money already, but also connection with other people.
And so, Sophie, I don't blame her for what she thought. She thought it was annoying having a day job because she was exhausted and didn't have time for her personal art. She thought she would love a gorgeous studio where she could work in peace and quiet.
But in fact, she missed working in the shared space. I mean, I have an office in a WeWork, and I really like it. It gets me out of my apartment. It gets me seeing other people. It may not be as many as are on a crowded subway car, and I tend to see the same people over and over. But that's also really interesting in its own way, to watch these strangers' habits and getting out of the house as much as I like to hibernate as much as the next person, especially when the weather turns, getting out is really important. Many people have misconceptions. They think that they want a material thing when, in fact, it's an experience that would make them happy. They think they want a certain quality in a partner, and it turns out that that quality doesn't make them happy. I mean, we're constantly learning more about ourselves. And I like to write about that in books.
I love to read about that in your book.
Great.
So that's great. This was a really fun conversation.
Thank you for having me. Really interesting conversation. Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Elyssa Friedland discussing her novel Jackpot Summer. You can find a link to the book and all the others Elyssa discussed in our show notes.
If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family. You can also find us on Instagram @fivebookspod.
I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dena Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council and to Odelia Rubin.
