Toby Lloyd on Fervour: A Meditation on Family, Faith and Generational Trauma
Fervour by Toby Lloyd is published in hardback, audio and eBook by Sceptre, £16.99.
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I really enjoyed your LARB piece about Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance. There’s a comment you make about how he ignores the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Did you take a similar approach with any of your own writing?
One answer to that is that [Fervour] – contra Dyer – is a heavily fictional novel. There’s very little disguised autobiography and not much based on my own life. But on the other hand, I think fiction that has an investment in realism has to draw on things that you’ve seen, felt and experienced. Otherwise, it doesn’t have any force.
I was really curious about the experience of writing about Yosef and how you navigated crafting his experience and incorporating that kind of historical truth into the narrative.
With Yosef, his story largely takes place in Poland during the Second World War which is obviously beyond my experience. I did a lot of research for his character – I read a lot of historical accounts of the time and also memoirs, including Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, Primo Levi, Władysław Szpilman, Fillip Müller and others.
Then, the difficulty with writing a fictional account is you can’t simply just take someone’s actual experience and pretend it all happened to a fictional character. You need to write an imagined narrative that is informed by the reality that you can get from these other sources. In such a historically sensitive subject, there are ethical considerations. One doesn’t want to tell lies about the Holocaust because the claim of fictionalisation is obviously a big part of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
So, it was all quite high stakes as far as I was concerned. And I think that’s in part why I decided Yosef’s narrative should be refracted through Hannah who hears Yosef’s story and then relays it to us. Crucially, we don’t have direct access to the experience through an omniscient narrator. Everything is blurred by time and the frailty of memory.
One of the core parts of the book is Elsie’s growing obsession with Jewish mysticism. I’m wondering how you broach that fine line between spiritual exploration and the potential dangers of delving too deep.
I am myself an atheist, and to my mind, all religious belief is to invest in non-realities and irrational ideas. Though there are some pretty good morals to be found in scripture, once you allow religious authorities to dictate your moral beliefs, I think you’re in pretty dangerous territory. Homophobia and the repression of women’s rights often ensue. That said, I never wanted the novel to be didactic or an attack on religion. It was important to take the characters’ investment in their religion seriously and to see the world through their eyes as much as I could.
Following on from that the book touches on rejecting these ancient ethical systems, and how that impacts Jewish identity. How do you feel this resonates with contemporary discussions about Jewish identity and how that’s involved in modern Britain?
The thing about contemporary Jewish identity is that it has become, to an extent, divorced from the religion, which is a relatively modern phenomenon. I don’t know how meaningful it was to be both an atheist and a Jew in the 18th century, for example. Whereas today, there are plenty of people who will – and I am one of them – consider themselves both Jewish and either an atheist or an agnostic.
But since being a Jew has become uncoupled from religious dogma, it makes it quite hard to pinpoint what it actually is. Is it about having a Jewish mother? A set of shared cultural touchstones? A very specific relationship to history? It’s a question I hope the book asks rather than answers.
The next thing I wanted to touch on was how you approach exploring intergenerational trauma, its impact and how that shapes the characters’ lives from parent to child, and so on.
I was interested in the idea from early on. Specifically the trauma of the Holocaust and what it means and what effects it has on Jewish identity changes with each generation. Even the language in which we talk about it changes. There’s always a debate, for instance, whether the catastrophe is discussed too much in Jewish life, or not enough. And the very idea of “trauma” has a different meaning to us today than it would have done to anyone just after the war.
How do you feel Fervour sits in today’s kind of contemporary landscape? And what compelled you to write it in the first place?
When I started writing it, I had no idea that other people would be interested in it.
When did you start writing?
2017-ish, so a little while ago. Of course, I wanted it to be published, but I thought it was a very strange idea to write a book about Orthodox Jews living in England that was tinged with horror and based on a biblical legend. These were things I was interested in, but not that anyone else would necessarily like to read about. When we did deals in the US and then in the UK, it was kind of a surprise – a very exciting surprise.
I wanted to write it partly because I felt – I still feel – that there’s a very strong body of fiction detailing the lives of American Jews, while there’s a comparatively thin body of fiction detailing the lives of British Jews.
And I particularly wanted to write something that draws on Jewish folklore. A lot of horror films trade in Christian symbols and ideas – demons, upside down crucifixes and so on. Jewish folklore is just as stuffed with goblins and witches and ghosts – all manner of fun things to play around with. So why shouldn’t they play a part in my modern Jewish novel?
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Toby Lloyd has published stories and essays in Carve Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU and was longlisted for the 2021 V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. He lives in London.
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