MICHAEL CHABON signs a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” at Congregation Beth Israel Nov. 23.

AMY KAUFMAN PHOTO

Beth Israel hosts Michael Chabon

By AMY R. KAUFMAN

article created on: 2008-12-01T00:00:00

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon spoke before a crowd of 625 at Congregation Beth Israel Nov. 23, as a part of a series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the congregation.

The celebrated American novelist, screenwriter and short story writer received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”. His first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” (1988), was published when he was 25, and the film adaptation, starring Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard, will be released this year.

Chabon’s novel “Wonder Boys” (2000) became a film starring Michael Douglas. The Coen Brothers have bought the film rights to Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” which takes place in the alternate reality of the Jewish state in Alaska.

Chabon’s frank talk about family matters was loosely based on the theme of Toldot (Generations), the parsha of the week, but no sermon ever provoked so much laughter. While focusing on his failings as the father of four children, he sent barbs heavenward to the “capricious, brutal” father depicted in the Hebrew Bible, who, he said, was undoubtedly looking down on him as he spoke from the bima.

Chabon began with reflections on President-elect Barack Obama as a father.

“I felt heartbreak watching Obama in Grant Park,” said Chabon, who listened to the acceptance speech with his son Abraham on his shoulders. “I couldn’t stop thinking about his two little girls.”

He said he “pitied them for everything they would now lose,” especially their innocence. “That innocence…is rooted in their trust of you, which you will shortly be obliged to betray,” he said.

Chabon expressed remorse for all the times he has been on the road when his children needed him. “Being a father is a limitless obligation we can never hope to fulfill,” he said. “I have abandoned or failed them a thousand times.”

Gazing at his younger son the night before his circumcision, Chabon said he felt subjecting him to this “mutilation” was a form of betrayal. Other forms of betrayal he described in his talk were “deceiving and toying with children,” speaking with “sarcasm, the last thing they need,” “teaching lessons when none can be absorbed,” throwing away their artwork, and “squandering” countless memories.

“Father will always be right, ’til the end of time, and never more right than after he is wrong,” he said wryly.

Chabon confessed he “doesn’t really understand daughters.”

“I’m unable to cajole or sympathize with their social problems the way I do with the boys…There is a mystery in their heads that I will never be able to resolve,” he said.
He said each of his books has “come under deserved criticism for being a guy book,” and he has worked hard on his female characters.

When Chabon described his daughter’s bat mitzvah, all irreverence fell away.

“These ceremonies are designed to break your heart,” he said, allowing that he never thought the song “Sunrise, Sunset” would overwhelm him.

He spoke of perceiving “time’s unfathomable stillness—the fiction that there is such a thing as time.…She was not rising and I was not setting.”

One audience member asked Chabon whether he starts working at the beginning, the middle or the end of a novel.

“It starts at the beginning, and that’s as far as I ever get,” he quipped. “Even at the end, I feel I never got to where I was going. I always feel I’ve betrayed the initial vision somehow. That’s why I keep starting over.”
Another person asked whether it is true that the character of Bina in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is based on Chabon’s wife, writer Ayelet Waldman. Chabon admitted it is so, yet said his wife “read it seven times and never noticed.”

Responding to a question about why a film may not be faithful to the original book, Chabon said, “It does not serve either the book or the movie to try to be faithful.”
He said he spent five years as a screenwriter on “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and “came to loathe the author. I only got somewhere when I stepped away from the book, reimagined it, eliminated and consolidated characters.”

Chabon lives with his family in Berkeley, Calif.