In one of the many folktales sprinkled throughout City of Laughter, the debut novel from Temim Fruchter, a girl seeks to hold the rain, all of it, in her body. Ultimately, so the story goes, “the girl had become the rain. The rain had become the girl. The girl had defied her form. The girl had eliminated her vessel.”
City of Laughter also defies formal expectation, melding plot and form in this ambitious multigenerational saga that spans centuries and continents. From Poland to Brooklyn and Takoma Park, the novel asks how you tell a story about inherited traumas and inarticulate longing through oblique modes of music-making laughter. From there, how do you reveal a secret you yourself don’t—can’t—know?
City Paper spoke with Fruchter about the beauty and challenge of working in different literary forms to investigate all that the human body can hold.
Washington City Paper: Before you became a writer, you were a musician. How did your time as a drummer for the Shondes shape you into the artist you are?
Temim Fruchter: I was always into stories and writing. I have a very early memory of—it’s very specific—eating Cheerios off the floor while narrating a story about myself in third person. This is when I’m 3 or 4 years old. But also my dad was a Jewish wedding musician and my brother turned out to be a musician, so there’s lots of music in my family. When I met the other members of the band that would become the Shondes, I was in a moment where I was really excited to lean in to my longtime love of music.
I’ve always been excited about performing and making art in a way that is explicitly political. We were an explicitly queer and trans and anti-Zionist band—that was important to me. It was a departure, in a way, but also it really built up my already deep love for music so that, when I came back to writing, I came back in a more dedicated, serious way.
Everything I do is informed by music. I find language to be very musical. My time playing music fed that, but my favorite thing about the band was connecting with people, being on tour, playing shows, getting, like, really wild energy from audiences. That’s my favorite thing about writing now too: It’s not as performative, of course, but I think of writing as a really connective project, and my time in the band affirmed that for me when I was ready to come back to my notebook, so to speak.
WCP: How did the structure of the University of Maryland’s MFA fiction program shape your process and the work you’d go on to write?
TF: I started the program when I was 39, and I finished at 41, so I had been writing on my own and with autonomous workshops, informal workshop settings, with friends, for a number of years at that point. I don’t know how much the MFA workshop really informed or created my process, but I do think the [program] was a really generous, kind, and mutually supportive space and a very inquisitive workshop.
People’s questions were so valuable. Those questions really helped shape this story, which is also a story that’s really concerned with questions. When I was originally drafting parts of this novel, I drafted them as sort of stand-alone pieces, so each time my workshop came around, I had created a different tiny world. Making this novel was the project of threading those worlds together.
WCP: City of Laughter is your debut novel, one that built on and grew from your expertise with short-form writing for outlets like Brevity and, more recently, the New York Times. What are the challenges and the benefits of writing in a short form, and how did it feel different to move into the space of the novel?
TF: I used to be afraid of the short story, and, for a time I did not read [them] because…I’ve always been an essentially haunted person. There’s something about a well-crafted short story that is just brutal. It just knocks the wind out of you. I was like, I can’t do it. They’re too powerful.
Of course, short stories were too brilliant for me to avoid. That power and that sort of brutality and the kind of ecstatic brevity ultimately drew me in as I was learning-slash-relearning to be a writer. In 2014, I took a workshop and I very quickly found that the short story was a place where there was a manageable constraint for me to experiment with building a world, but I didn’t have to stay there too long.
Comparatively, novel writing is a terrifying free fall where I somehow have to stay in real time alongside my imagination for 350 pages. I’m not known for my brevity, and even though I have written a lot of short-form pieces, nobody I know says that I’m quiet or brief when I speak. It’s exciting to have that abundant space of the novel to expand into, but I find it very challenging. I’m proud to have stayed with it, but I do find it’s a much scarier way of writing.
WCP: In your column for PANK, “Between the Bones,” the epigraph is “fragments of language and story extracted from the body.” It feels like a precursor to City of Laughter, laying out some of the thematic touchstones for the novel.
TF: I definitely wasn’t yet thinking about this book specifically, but I think so many of us just write our obsessions over and over. I don’t know that I’m the most embodied person, but maybe that’s why I look for writing—when I read and also write—that reaches toward a sort of corporeality. I really wanna feel what I’m writing at a cellular level. Writing feels mystical to me, almost prayerful. I think it’s my way of reaching toward the body, toward something connective.
City of Laughter, even though some of the concepts in it are ethereal and abstract and not embodied, I wanted it to ultimately be a book about unruly queer desire, and that lives in the body.
WCP: As you were writing City of Laughter, did you experiment with other ways of telling the story?
TF: I did. I did some experimenting, because it’s a bit of a messy book—there’s letters, there’s text, there’s folktales—but I think at first I wasn’t totally sure what container the story needed or how many different containers it needed. It became clear pretty quickly that the book I wanted to write was going to require a lot of different frequencies all at once …. The feeling I wanted to evoke with the [epistolary] form was that there were these kinds of echoes and voices just everywhere, in all kinds of forms and in all different ways.
WCP: What attracted you to the Jewish folklore story as a form and do you feel like it’s the same as the novel’s protagonist?
TF: Somewhat similar. I grew up in a modern Orthodox house and a lot of Friday night dinners were sort of tapped off by one of my parents telling us Jewish folktales. We had a lot of books of folklore, and that was really important in shaping my imagination. Shabbat itself was this really magical time and then to really be immersed in this weird, shape-shifty, demonic-angelic world of folktales … it was how I grew up. It’s a part of my makeup when I’d just started thinking about my own family’s history. For structural and systemic reasons—and because of forgetfulness and things that get lost in translation, over time—Eastern European Jewish families don’t have access to their full histories.
I don’t have the whole story about my family’s history, and I just started thinking how folktales are this middle place between memory and fabrication. It felt really powerful to me to use this sort of inheritance of mine to tell a speculative-fictional story about my own family.
WCP: How did laughter become such a central theme? Is the presence of subversive, threatening, out-of-control laughter in Jewish folklore or is that something you invented?
TF: Humor is so critical to so many Jewish people. There’s a Yiddish word that means like laughter through tears—[like] the emoji that’s laughing and crying. Laughter and grief are two sides of the same coin, and a lot of Jewish folklore (and thought) is an acceptance of bleakness and also the sort of fierce insistence on survival and connection with each other. That was important as a presence in the book.
I have a very loud laugh. I get a lot of dirty looks when I’m out in public …. But, I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it sooner—a couple of years ago I realized that my great-grandmother was from a place known for this famous badchen—Jewish wedding jester.
I was like, oh my god, what if that’s why I laugh like a hyena? What if I’m connected in a really physical way to that lineage? I followed that train of thought to its next natural step: What if my great-grandmother, who I remember as being gentle and quiet [with] the smilingest eyes, had been someone who had my laugh? What other things would have made her stand out? This isn’t about my real great-grandmother but a speculative sense of what if someone in her world had been unusual or had drawn attention to herself in a way that women were discouraged to do?
I’m loud, I’m queer, I’m a nonbinary, anti-Zionist Jew. Those things make me stand out in a way that might have affected someone differently—definitely would have affected someone differently—back then. So laughter became a stand-in for strangeness, otherness, and outsiderness, and it was really fun to follow that where it went.
Temim Fruchter discusses City of Laughter with Addie Tsai at 7 p.m. on Jan. 24 at Loyalty Bookstore’s Petworth location. Free to attend, but registration is required.
