A Novel Toast to The Good People of New York: Talking with Thisbe Nissen

by Judith Bolton-Fasman

Thisbe Nissen's energetic first novel delivers on its title: it is a sustained toast to the eponymous good people of New York and to the city itself. This reciprocal relationship between New York and its citizens overlays the intricate and familiar couplings that Nissen explores throughout The Good People of New York.

Nissen's exploration of relationships begins on page one when Fran Kornblauer, a raucous Jewish New Yorker, brings together Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig--a native Nebraskan and Bronx die-hard respectively. This unlikely, yet familiar pair court in their odd way, fall in love and marry, making their relationship a classic story of "girl marries goy."

In a recent interview with JBooks.com, Nissen, who is twenty-nine and also the author of a collection of short fiction, highlighted the personal details of the book. "The most autobiographical part is my parents' courtship," she said. "Unlike the protagonists, my parents are still married. Somewhere along the way though, Roz and Edwin stopped being my parents." And somewhere along the way, the book switches its focus to their daughter Miranda. "Miranda is who I thought I was in high school," Nissen notes.

In this urban comedy of manners, Roz and Edward are inspired to name their daughter Miranda after watching a performance of The Tempest. Nissen's affinity for Miranda Anderson is understandable. Like her protagonist, she too came by her name after her parents watched a performance of Shakespeare. Thisbe is an ancient Greek character who appears in a short play within A Midsummer 's Night Dream. The tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe, originally told by Ovid, was the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. The fact that Shakespeare folded the story of these two young lovers into one of his comedies, indicates how tenuous the divide between comedy and tragedy really was to him. That is certainly true in Miranda's life.

Nissen blends pop culture and Shakespearean themes, gradually exposing the tensions between Roz and Edwin. That tension is present in the first chapters, which Nissen says, "address explicit Jewish themes through an interfaith couple."

Nissen was not brought up in a particular religious tradition. As in the novel, her Jewish grandmother once found a Christmas tree hidden in her parents' closet. "My mother is Jewish and I came to understand more about what that meant to me as I grew up. My mother's parents were from Russia, met in Nova Scotia and found their way down to Yonkers where my mother and her older sister were born. My grandparents were Orthodox. My father is a lapsed Methodist. I spent a lot of time with my [Jewish] grandmother when I was young. We celebrated the [Jewish] holidays with her. Most notable in my mind were the seders we had together. We also had a [Christmas] tree and a menorah, but they were more seasonal than anything else."

Nissen's dual identities notably merge in a hilarious, indelible passage in which Roz prepares to pass off Edwin as a Jew in grandiose if unorthodox style at her nephew's upcoming Bar Mitzvah:

"And so over the next six months it seemed that everyone was in training. Roz for child birth. Mona to host the Bar Mitzvah party of the century. Adele for grandmotherhood, and Joshua and Edwin for the recitation of their Torah portions and their entrances into the covenant of Jewish manhood. Mona transcribed the text of Edwin's speeches completely into phonetics, and the memorization was, Edwin told Roz, much like learning the Latin hymns and chorales he'd sung in the church choir as a boy in Nebraska."

The scene is another shining autobiographical moment (Nissen's father learned to chant Torah phonetically for her cousin's Bar Mitzvah)--burnished and fictionalized--demonstrating the absurdity and black humor of one of American Jewry's central dilemmas: the ability of so many Jews to read Hebrew, particularly the language of liturgy, without ever understanding what it is they are actually saying. Nissen plays on that sort of fundamental disconnect throughout the book. In her fictional world, communication between a man and a woman, a Jew and a non-Jew, is often devoid of deeper understanding as well as plagued with mind-numbing roteness. That was the case for Roz and Edwin. And that scenario spooks Miranda at various tender and impressionable stages in her adolescence:

"The drinking and the dressing-up, trying to be older, it all seems so silly to Miranda, so misdirected, so not the answer to all these questions. Still, she knows she would willingly do all those things, look foolish and naïve--shave, drink, even have sex maybe--if she knew it would end the cluelessness and the desperately desolate sensation of being twelve."

After Roz and Edwin divorce, the quintessential urban kid becomes a latchkey kid. She's free to eat too much junk food and watch too much television while waiting for her harried mother to come home from work.

Towards the end of the interview, Thisbe Nissen marvels over the fact that she has written a novel that reflects the burgeoning interfaith literature in American Jewish letters. On her book tour she was also surprised to discover that the New York City milieu of the book leads readers to associate it with more traditional Jewish literature. Born and raised in Manhattan, Nissen received an MA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and recently bought her first home in Iowa City. "Now that I don't live in New York, I realize what a Jewish world I lived in. You don't realize when you're in it what a culturally Jewish place New York is."

While that's not a new revelation, in The Good People of New York it emerges as one that is as quirky and memorable as Miranda Anderson and her befuddled parents.
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