Leonard Lopate Interviews Authors Susan Choi, Pete Hamill and Jonathan Safran Foer
Brooklyn College - Whitman Auditorium
November 7, 2005

Brooklyn College hosted the first in the “Brooklyn on My Mind” series on November 7, 2005 in Whitman Auditorium. WNYC Radio’s Leonard Lopate moderated the evening’s discussion with authors Susan Choi (American Woman), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and Pete Hamill (The Gift). A transcript follows.

Ellen Tremper: Good evening and welcome to all of you. I’m Ellen Tremper, chair of the English Department at Brooklyn College. I’m very happy to see students as well as paying guests. New York City, as elsewhere, has been enjoying, or suffering, a real estate boom. But this boom has been a boon for Brooklyn. A group of talented people who in another era might have settled over the bridge, in Greenwich Village or a little later the East Village, has been putting down roots in Brooklyn’s diverse neighborhoods. How lucky for Brooklyn. How lucky for them. Queens. I grew up in Queens. Queens? When’s the last or first time you read about the mythic life or importance of that borough, with its boring architecture, which shares space with us at the head of Long Island. By comparison, I’ve been told that one out of seven or eight Americans begins his or her life in Brooklyn. It’s no wonder then that our borough has figured in as a character in so many poems. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Brooklyn Bridge,” “There Was a Team in Brooklyn,” novels, A Tree Grows In... [audience: Brooklyn.] And plays, A View from the Bridge, and recently, Brooklyn Boy. Charlotte the spider, in Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White’s novel for children and imaginative adults, caught a current of warm air and sailed into Zuckerman’s barn -- spinning a web of literally life-saving friendship and some terrific words … with which she spared her friend Wilbur the pig a meeting with the butcher’s knife. The narrator praises her, calling her a good friend and a good writer. Like Charlotte, some of you in the audience have been carried through the air into Brooklyn to find friendship, a new start or turn in your lives. Some will be borne on other currents, like many of Charlotte’s daughters at the end of White’s story, to spin your webs elsewhere. But others will stay, like a few of them, to make your homes here. And perhaps, some will have left, or will leave (and I excuse those who have never lived here), will come back to re-attach yourselves to an old or build a new community. The people you will see tonight reflect the range of your experiences of place. Two were born here, but two caught a thermal, arriving from distant places to find and make a growing community a friendship in which words, as for Charlotte, played an important part.

I won’t say anymore now, but will turn the evening over to Leonard Lopate, host of The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC Radio, and our moderator and friend who will introduce the writer-panelists. Their subject is the very interesting one of how Brooklyn figures in their minds and lives.

Leonard Lopate: Brooklyn has been home to an amazing array of writers. Walt Whitman said that Leaves of Grass was a record of his 40 years living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. And Thomas Wolfe lived in the borough for a number of years and died here, which is perhaps only fitting for the man who joked, “Only the dead know Brooklyn.” Truman Capote wrote in A House on the Heights, “I live in Brooklyn by choice.” Kings County has been home to Hart Crane, Henry Miller, Louis Mumford, Betty Smith, Daniel Fuchs, W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, Isaac Asimov, Woody Allen, Frank McCourt, Philip Lopate, Spike Lee, even Gypsy Rose Lee. What has attracted writers to Brooklyn over the years and continues to? How relevant has their residence here been to their work? Well, this is the first in a series of discussions along those lines.

And it gives me great pleasure to bring out now three marvelous Brooklyn-connected writers. Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the best seller named Everything Is Illuminated, named book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards including the Guardian First Book prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions prize. A film version of it directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood was released earlier this year. Mr. Foer was one of Rolling Stone’s “People of the Year” and Esquire’s “Best and Brightest.” His second novel is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Susan Choi was born in Indiana and raised in Texas, but with a family lineage as complex as hers - Korean, Russian, Jewish - where else could she choose to live but Brooklyn? She won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award for Barnes & Noble for her first novel, The Foreign Student. With David Remnick she edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Pete Hamill grew up on the south side of Park Slope when it was considered unfashionable to venture beyond Ninth Street. He’s the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and after a stint in the Navy he studied art at Pratt Institute and then began his writing career at the New York Post in 1960. He’s the author of numerous books, novels, short story collections, memoirs, journalism collections and more. And his writing has appeared in most national magazines. He’s been a columnist at the New York Post, the Daily News and Newsday and editor-in-chief at both the Post and the News. So Susan, was I right? Was it inevitable that you came to Brooklyn based on your background?

Susan Choi: My father seemed to think so. My father seemed to think that I was destined to live in New York, which I thought was a romantic idea of his, but that was his opinion.

Lopate: Did you know other writers living here?

Choi: I knew a lot of other writers here. Actually I moved down to Brooklyn originally because a novelist named Jenny Offill was living on Court Street, on the corner of Bergen, and she told me that the people that she knew living in Manhattan seemed to be duped to her and that I should come check it out. And I had a boyfriend on Dean Street. That was my other bonafide.

Lopate: Jonathan, what brought you to Brooklyn?

Jonathan Safran Foer: I lived in Queens for three and a half years. These are the only two boroughs I’ve lived in in New York. I grew up in DC. I loved Queens, actually. I lived in Jackson Heights and I thought it was one of the best places in the world to live. But at a certain point it was time to move, and I had once met Siri Hustvedt, writer, lives in Brooklyn.

Lopate: Married to Paul Auster.

Foer: Right. I went to her house and thought; this would be a really nice place to live. It was sort of like The Cosby Show or Sesame Street. It evoked lots of really nice associations. And in fact, for better or for worse, that is lot like what Park Slope is like.

Lopate: You told the Village Voice that you wrote Illuminated “in the real world.” That is, the world of being a receptionist. That a community of writers would have been very stifling, and then you moved to Park Slope where there are more writers per square block than definitely there are in Queens.

Foer: Even in a neighborhood in which there are more writers per square block than in any other neighborhood, they’re still one out of every 2,000 people. It’s not as if you can’t help but run into someone who’s a writer and talk to them about writing. And in fact, virtually none of my social life has to do anything with writers. I don’t, for whatever reason, know that many. And I think most people tend to know the people on their street. Proximity has so much to do with who you become friends with and even who you marry probably, so the people I’m closest to are the people who I’m literally closest to.

Lopate: I would assume that it is easier to hang out with the people on your block in Brooklyn than it is in Manhattan, which is where Pete moved to by the way. You’re the only panelist who was born in Brooklyn, but you say in your book Downtown that the message you got from your parents was that Manhattan was the place to be. Do you think that’s still the message Brooklyn parents are sending to their kids?

Hamill: Well, they didn’t exactly say that, but [for] my father, Manhattan was once or twice a year because he had one leg. He lost a leg playing soccer in 1927, so he couldn’t negotiate the subways and the stairs. He couldn’t even negotiate the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. But my mother had a sense of ownership, that it was all one place. And we didn’t grow up with the sense that it was some other place across the river. We could see it from our window on Seventh Avenue and Eleventh Street. We could look out, and there’s the harbor. We thought for a long time that Manhattan was a kind of suburb of Brooklyn. Because we had a baseball team, we didn’t need the Giants of Manhattan. And the subway took us everywhere. By the time I was 10, and my brother was 8, an airplane in the summer of 1945 flew into the Empire State Building on a Saturday morning, a very foggy morning. And we heard it on the radio, there was no television, thank God. There was no Anderson Cooper to get up to the 83rd floor before the firemen, and we just got on the train and went. We were 10 and 8. There was no possibility of menace. There was no sense that we couldn’t do it. It was where we lived. And so I came to it in a slightly different way than, say, Norman Podhoretz, who lived out in Brownsville and couldn’t look out the window and see Manhattan. You know, it was literally an almost Balzacian journey to get to Manhattan.

Lopate: And that’s why he turned out so bad. (Audience laughter)

Hamill: If he’d only slowed down a little bit and spent a little more time somewhere else, but he couldn’t afford to live in Park Slope now if he chose to go there.

Lopate: But you know, I grew up in Williamsburg, which is a lot closer to Manhattan than Park Slope, and we walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, took the trolley over sometimes to downtown Lower East Side, but we always called it “The City.” And going to The City was something different, it was almost like suburbanites who come down to New York City.

Hamill: We didn’t call it “The City.” We said, “Let’s go over New York.” Literally, over - I’m sure - from the bridge. It was a sense that you went over something to get there. But even saying that, though, it was no sense that it was something mysterious or unattainable. Maybe in a way it should have been, but we had this dopey, cocky, Brooklyn wise-guy attitude that it was all ours, you know. And it was a very helpful and healthy thing.

Lopate: Susan, when you moved to Brooklyn, did you feel like you were moving to a place that had this long history, that had special things like Prospect Park and Coney Island and the things that Brooklynites associate with Brooklyn, or was it just a good place to move to because you could afford to live there?

Choi: That sounds so crass and unthinking, but it’s true that it initially seemed like a good place to move to because I could afford to live there. But it’s also true that I sensed that Brooklyn was a place that I could feel was my own in a way that Manhattan didn’t seem to be available. I moved to Brooklyn at a moment when my neighborhood - which was originally Boerum Hill - which was changing really rapidly, and that’s sort of a mixed blessing in a way. On the one hand, there was a lot to discover, and on the other hand the neighborhood was rapidly losing its previous character because of people just like me rushing in and saying, “Ooh look, a bistro, and oh, another bistro.” So I had mixed feelings about being a part of a huge wave of people just like me coming to Brooklyn and making Brooklyn more like them than like itself.

Lopate: But they’d have done it anyway.

Choi: True. And since moving to Brooklyn, I’ve become more of a passionate explorer of Brooklyn than I ever was of Manhattan.

Lopate: Were you a fact-checker at the time? You were a fact-checker at the New Yorker. You’d already completed your first novel, but were you at work on American Woman then? Did you write it while you were in Brooklyn?

Choi: I moved to New York between my two books, and somewhere in there I stopped fact-checking after the publication of my first book and before I started working on my second. When I first started working as a fact-checker I lived on the Upper West Side. I took the 1 and 9 train.

Hamill: So you moved between two books. Usually it’s moving between two husbands that draws people across the river.

Choi: No, I haven’t yet done that. And hope not to.

Lopate: Were you aware of Brooklyn’s special-ness, Jonathan? Coming from Queens, you didn’t even get off the island. But there’s a real sensibility difference, don’t you think?

Foer: There’s an incredible difference, but once people start moving to different places [for reasons] other than that they’re nice places to live, they start to destroy those places. You know, when you start having people moving to different places because it has history or because of ideas about a place, then it ends up becoming like Times Square - the least interesting place in New York because everybody thought it was the most interesting place in New York. So I think that there’s nothing crass or wrong about going where you think there will be people you can talk to, food you can eat, buildings you can live in. Jackson Heights is so ethnically different than Park Slope, and Queens is so ethnically different from Brooklyn - that has been my experience. I was surrounded in Jackson Heights by people who spoke Spanish, and that’s just really not the case in Park Slope. And everything follows that - the kinds or restaurants that there are. I feel like my digestive system went through this dramatic revolution the time that I moved because there were certain things that were staples of my diet that just no longer were, like plantains.

Hamill: You know, the odd thing, Leonard, is that Queens is one of the places that Brooklyn moved to. After the war, when the GIs came back … they had choices, basically. They could use the education benefits or they could use veterans’ mortgages and so on. A lot of them went to Queens. There was a couple years where you would see moving vans every Saturday loading up and taking off young guys out to Queens and then eventually to Long Island.

Lopate: But the ironic part of it is Brooklyn is the place where immigrants came to and then after they assimilated, they moved on to Queens, and eventually to Long Island. Now Queens is the most ethnically diverse part of New York City and Brooklyn has become the more established, gentrified one of the boroughs. Something very strange has happened there. And Pete, you wrote a story called “The Book Signing,” about gentrification in Park Slope, among other things. The narrator is ambivalent about the changes that have taken place and although that he has been living in California for many years and has never written about Brooklyn, he thinks, “I’ve never really left,” or to be more exact, “Those streets have never left me.” I wasn’t sure whether the message of that story was that you can’t or you can go home again.

Hamill: Oh, I think you can go home again, depending on where you live. I was lucky because I grew up on Seventh Avenue, and not far away was Windsor Terrace, which really didn’t change all that much. It never turned into the South Bronx. There were junkies around, for a certain period, and there was a sense of unravelment for a while, but then it sort of stabilized. And a lot of cops and firemen, those kinds of people, stayed. They knew the farther out they went, first of all, the more boring it would be, but second, more expensive just to get in and out. So it had a kind of stability that the South Bronx and parts of Manhattan didn’t have. So even after I had left, I had left young - I went off to the Navy when I was 17. And I kept coming back and coming back, but I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see what Manhattan was all about. I wanted to see what Ireland was like. I lived in Puerto Rico. I lived in Mexico and places like that. Always as a New Yorker, and in the fine-tuning of the phrase, always as a Brooklynite. So you carry it with you no matter where you are.

[Hamill reading follows.]

Lopate: Susan, your first novel took place in the South and dealt with race, history, class - things not unknown in this part of the United States. One critic compared the opening of The Foreign Student to the mystic dream time William Faulkner raised in Absalom, Absalom! or Eudora Welty evoked in her Morgana stories. Do you think that you were in danger of being categorized as a Southern writer then?

Choi: I felt, before the book was published, I was worried about being categorized as an Asian-American writer. And so, when I found myself being categorized as a Southern writer, I was really thrilled because it seemed like just the right kind of static. So no, I actually really enjoyed my invitations to the Birmingham Literary Festival, the Nashville Festival of the Book.

Lopate: But then you changed completely when you did your second book, American Woman.

Choi: That’s right, and I wasn’t invited back to Birmingham. I enjoyed my brief tenure as a Southern writer, but I wasn’t worried about hanging on to the title. I knew that I wasn’t going to keep the label, but I’m happy that it was a label so far from the label that I was initially concerned with.

Lopate: You broke so much with the Southern label that you named your second book after a misogynistic anti-American song by a Canadian group called The Guess Who.

Choi: That’s right. I went far to the North.

[Choi reading follows.]

Lopate: You’ve taught at the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop at the Yale summer programs, so that means that people think of you as an Asian-American writer. Do you think of yourself as such?

Choi: I don’t. Exactly why I was thrilled to be labeled a Southern writer, which I don’t think of myself as. I think every writer who could be labeled has the same uncomfortable, itchy relationship with the idea of a label. We don’t want to offend anyone by rejecting the label, but at the same time no one really likes it. I don’t think anyone doesn’t feel constraint.

Lopate: … Jonathan, the Jewish Book Council called you the next Philip Roth, another one of those labeling things. It’s a compliment, but do you think of yourself in that way?

Foer: I honestly don’t think of myself, and I’ve never met anybody who does. It’s not like you would walk down the street and say “The Jewish writer is going to get a bagel because that’s what Jewish people like.” You only think about those things when you’re asked about those things. That’s one of the dangers about publishing a book. It’s that you can enter into a whole bunch of different conversations that can take you away from the act of writing the book. It can be not only distracting, but really destructive because so much of writing, at least for me, depends upon not asking those questions, depends upon being open to intuitions, depends upon not worrying about what’s expected of you or what people might think of you. So, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Lopate: In the introduction to a book you edited, The Future Dictionary of America, you wrote, “All proceeds from the sales of this dictionary go directly to groups devoted to expressing their outrage over the Bush Administration’s assault on free speech, overtime, drinking water, truth, the rule of law, humility, the separation of church and state, a woman’s right to choose, clean air, and every other good idea this country’s ever had.” [Audience applause] So, do you see a direct relationship between literature and politics?

Foer: To be perfectly honest, I didn’t write that introduction. I see there’s no use to ’fessing up to that since it did get some applause, but just in the interest of full disclosure, I edited the book but I didn’t write the introduction. I think all literature is always political, whether you’re trying to write politically or not, whether you’re writing explicitly politically or not. I cannot think of a book that’s ever been written that at the end of the day was not about measuring the distance between people, trying to show how similar we are to one another or how different we are from one another. And that in itself is probably the most political thing one could ever do, is measure the distances. It’s one of the things that’s so sad about the world right now. We have no investment in just that, in figuring out how similar we are to our enemies, how different we are from them. There’s this idea that trying to converse with our so-called enemies, or trying to converse with the Arab world, has become like an unpatriotic idea. And it’s incredibly destructive and it’s really sad. To my knowledge, there isn’t a single translator of novels in Iraq right now. It’s almost impossible to translate into English from Arabic. The Treasury Department has set up all sorts of impediments, and the Patriot Act has literally made it virtually illegal to translate a book and publish it here. And if we’re not doing that, how can we ever have any sense of what it’s like to be somebody there? And if we have no sense of what it’s like to be somebody there, then it becomes very easy to disregard their humanity.

[Foer reading follows.]

Lopate: We’ll be taking some questions from the audience, and I think there are some microphones set up. Try to keep the questions as brief as possible because we don’t have a heck of a lot of time. I’m sure everyone wants to speak to this wonderful panel. While people are lining up, Pete, one of the themes of Downtown is the power of nostalgia. And you mentioned earlier that the Dodgers are remembered, but everyone’s forgotten the Giants, even though the Giants had Willie Mays and Mel Ott and a whole bunch of other great ballplayers. Why do you think that is? And why do you think that Brooklyn has been a borough that has a particularly strong sense of nostalgia?

Hamill: I think the nostalgia of the city at large comes in two things. One, the rapidity of change. That coffee shop you loved, you go away for two weeks and it’s gone somewhere.

Lopate: There’s a Starbucks right where I used to go have lunch down the street.

Hamill: And the other thing is immigration. We had literally millions of people who came here who left behind a whole country and in some cases a language. And as much as those countries drove them to emigrate, there had to be some feeling - you could hear when you walked through an Italian neighborhood, you could hear a certain kind of music playing from apartments before air conditioning, coming out of radios - there had to be some feeling for places where you were once 10 years old and ran in the fields. So I think those two things made the nostalgia more powerful. The baseball thing is, I think, based on something else altogether. In 1947, when Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers – remember this was seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, eights years before we ever heard of Martin Luther King – rooting for the Dodgers had a moral dimension. I can’t say that when I was 12, I was walking around talking about moral dimensions of any kind. If anything, my ambition was to be immoral. But it was there, and it was not present with the Giants. So, I think the old neighborhoods of Manhattan that supported the Giants, which is mostly the Irish West Side, the Italian and Jewish Lower East Side, they began to move away. If you take a walk through Little Italy right now, you find a one-block long Sopranos theme park, but you don’t find anybody living there anymore.

Lopate: No, everybody there is Chinese.

Hamill: And Umberto’s Clam House is a Chinese restaurant, speaking of Green-Wood Cemetery where Joey Gallo of sainted memory is buried, along with Boss Tweed and some other guys.

Lopate: Now, Susan and Jonathan, when you moved to Brooklyn, did you get caught up in the Brooklyn nostalgia? Or was that all the stuff of people you met, longtime Brooklynites?

Foer: I didn’t really get caught up in the nostalgia.

Lopate: You know who the Dodgers were?

Foer: Yeah, I’m an Orioles fan, actually. It’s residue from growing up in D.C. A lot of people in the neighborhood have lived there for 40 years. Still, it’s true. The people I’m closest to are three generations living in one house, and they’ve been there since God knows when. So in that sense, you have a feeling of the continuity, but any kind of nostalgia that isn’t connected to continuity is cheap. It’s not worth very much. It’s very self-serving actually. But when you feel like you are tapping into something that was there before you, and you can appreciate that not only was it there before you and you miss how it used to be, you are living through it. It perpetuates itself. That feels special. And being around people who have lived in the neighborhood that long really does mean something to me.

Lopate: Susan?

Choi: I think what Pete said is really true about the rapidity of change. I’m not caught up in the nostalgia of the Dodgers and the Giants. I’m caught up in my own Brooklyn nostalgia. I’m nostalgic for the Brooklyn that I moved to seven years ago. I’m actually nostalgic for several aspects of the Brooklyn that I knew seven months ago. I don’t say that facetiously. One of the reasons is that I moved to Boerum Hill sort of at the precise bistro-tipping point moment when the neighborhood went from having one restaurant to probably 30 overpriced restaurants, and watching social clubs that had been there for generations shutter. It’s actually like watching the character of the street changing before your eyes, and feeling as if part of the reason that that is happening is you. I don’t know if you would call that nostalgia, but there’s a certain regret, I think, always.

Hamill: I also think, if you weren’t there, making the attempt can only lead you to sentimentality, which is a bogus form of nostalgia. Nostalgia has to be for something that was there. When I was a young reporter I went out to do a piece about Ebbets Field, which closed at the end of ’57, and it was gone. There was a housing development there, a housing project, and there was a sign there that said “No Ballplaying Allowed.” I said this is forever. This is not coming back. With anybody my age, it’s 50 years since we finally beat the God damned Yankees, anybody that tries to feign that is going to fake the emotion, and for a writer, it’s fatal. You can tell when it’s being faked. And so it’s not surprising that it seems to me that the number of people with this passion for the Dodgers is shrinking by the year. It’s like being a World War II veteran or something.

Lopate: Do we have questions from the audience?

Audience member: I have one actually that ties in perfectly with what you’ve just been bringing up. It seems that Brooklyn is now in the cusp of the next permanent shift, like the closing of Ebbets Field and the end of the Dodgers. I mean, gentrification has been going on for a long time, and you’ve got Starbucks, and you’ve got mom and pop restaurants closing everywhere, but still with a down-turned economy, that could kind of shrink again - the gentrification and the commercialization of these immigrant neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint … But the next new change is the waterfront rezone and Ratnerville. What do you think about that? And that changes landscape. It puts skyscrapers taller than the Williamsburg Savings Bank. That’s permanent. Where does that fit in in the Brooklyn that we have? Lifelong resident, by the way. Born and raised.

Choi: I’m seizing on skyscrapers on the waterfront. I don’t know but I once had the privilege of dining with Ada Louise Huxtable who was The New York Times architecture critic and I think someone who single handedly brought a different sensibility to New Yorkers in terms of preservation of the city, things like the destruction of Penn Station that she brought attention to. And I was talking to her about just that issue -- how quickly the city was changing and just how quickly it was filling with characterless box condo developments and glass high rises. And she surprised me because she did not emit nostalgia or sentimentality for any single version of the city. She spoke to me almost as if I was some sort of hysterical child. She said, “Oh New York has always changed and it always will change.” And the span of change that she had witnessed had made her view the city as this cyclical organism and it just goes through these upheavals and downtimes, and its hide is constantly growing spots here and tails there and every year it looks different. And she seemed to think that that was very much the nature of the city, and I found that to be a helpful way to look at the huge changes happening now. When you say they’re forever, they’re not, perhaps.

Lopate: Another question?

Audience member: Yes, for Pete, a few points. I was shocked tonight when I saw the Starbucks. No Sugar Bowl? It’s not Brooklyn College anymore, sorry. But Pete, Farrell’s is still there.

Hamill: Does everybody know what he means by Farrell’s? It’s the famous place where Joe Flaherty once described the urinals as looking like stall showers for Toulouse-Lautrec. They’re all about this high, and I could never see that movie again without thinking about Jose Ferrer in Farrell’s.

Audience member: You mention Farrell’s in The Gift, and that’s why I bring it up. In The Gift, the details in your life are as specific as they are in Downtown. The address is given, and the names, and it does say “A Novel” on the cover. I was just wondering where does it veer from your real life?

Hamill: Well, some of the details have changed. Some of the names have obviously changed, or are composites. Some of the scenes have a neatness that they might not have had on a Saturday night at 17, so it’s fiction. But it’s a very autobiographical fiction. I could not have sustained it over much longer of the size of it, as it is, without finding myself in strange trouble. But I think you do that with fiction. Or you can do it; you don’t have to. If you’re writing a memoir that’s a different thing. You’re more or less constrained. But you’re always changing things if you’re a writer because a novel is a work of the imagination, not just recording something. And I remember this very clearly: A couple years ago I had a book out called Snow in August and I did a reading at the New York Historical Society and a guy I grew up with named Eddie Norris who ended up a very important man in the police department was there. And I hadn’t seen him in 25 years. And there’s a whole lot of people and I’m signing books, and he says, “Hey Pete, Eddie Norris.” I said, “Hi Eddie, how are you?” He said, “I read your book.” “What’d you think, Eddie?” “You got the pool room on the wrong side of the street.” [Audience laughter] “Eddie I needed it. I wanted the guy to look out the window and be able to see the pool room.” He said, “Yeah, but ptttfffff.”

You know, this is Brooklyn literary criticism. But it was cool. He understood why I was making it up. I didn’t have a golem in my neighborhood either. In a book like Downtown, it’s all, it’s nonfiction. And it’s as close as I can remember things. And I hope as accurate as it can be. But in a novel, you’re free to make it up.

Lopate: Another question?

Audience member: Yes. Pete Hamill has famously identified the three most evil men of the 20th century as Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley. Who would you add to that list in the 21st century? Osama bin Laden? Dick Cheney? Or someone comparable?

Hamill: I think Wellington Mara, who moved the Giants to New Jersey. Larry Merchant at the Times wrote a column where he said, “Never trust an Irishman whose first name is ‘Wellington.’”

Lopate: So you weren’t crying when he died recently like some of the others.

Hamill: No, I was away and I didn’t see all of the obits of Wellington Mara until I got back and I thought they were describing a different person to me …

Audience Member: I totally agree, but how do you - and this is addressed to all panelists - how do you grapple with evil in your novels? When I was growing up in Brooklyn it was very easy to tell the bad guys from the good guys. The bad guys had mustaches, wore black, and were often demanding that the girl pay the rent. And the good guys, they came in and they paid the rent. How do you do it now? It’s so much more complex.

Hamill: You find someone who’ll pay the rent, I guess. I think if you’re really trying to deal with the problem of evil, which is a gigantic problem - a gigantic factor of human life and has been for many, many centuries - that you better know something about it. I can’t stand headlines in the paper that say, “Nail this fiend.” You know, I don’t know any fiends. I never covered any. I’m reading a book now about the Third Reich coming to power, and you read about the guys who manned the SS and the Gestapo and some of these other people. They were not “fiends.” They were ordinary citizens, which makes it spookier by far. So that dealing with evil, if you’re dealing with the word at all, it has to be based on what people do, and not who you think the cartoon version is. … So you would have to listen and see and examine who these people are before you make gigantic judgments like, “He’s evil.”

Lopate: Jonathan, you were a philosophy major. You must have an answer. Or are you beyond good and evil? [Audience laughter]

Foer: I think we just use the word evil too much, actually. In America, we’ve become so comfortable speaking in these really sweeping absolutes - good and evil, terror and justice - as if they were the only polls on the spectrum. And we end up forgetting about perspectives, causes of evil, and effects, and why ordinary people do extraordinarily damaging things, why someone would take his own life, and again, even asking those questions, until very recently, was considered unpatriotic. The idea of “Why would somebody fly an airplane into the World Trade Center?” was a question you didn’t ask, because it assumes that the person can be engaged in a conversation. It assumes that the person can respond to reason or logic. Well, you can engage this person in a conversation and they do respond to reason and logic, and very clear reason. And I wish we used the word evil a lot less.

Lopate: Do you have anything to add, Susan? You’ve written about moral issues in your novels.

Choi: I think I just would second what Jonathan said in terms of trying to separate people, human beings, from acts. And I think that one of the wonderful things about novels, actually, is trying to delve into that space between humans and perhaps their despicable acts, trying to understand why they might perform these acts. I agree that asking the question, “Why would someone fly an airplane into a building to kill thousands of people?” is a question that should be asked, but it’s true that to even ask the question to confer humanity on the person who committed that act is somehow a moral crime now. And I think that that’s a disaster for social discourse, for a lot of our usual ways of understanding ourselves.

Lopate: We have five more minutes, so I think we have time for just one more.

Audience member: Well, I have a question for Ms. Choi in particular. It was said that your heritage is Korean, Russian and Jewish. I would assume that it is difficult to come by such a mix. I wondered if you have in roots in the Soviet Union or any personal experience there, and how, if they exist, those roots impacted you coming to New York especially.

Choi: It’s an interesting question. I was actually addressing it earlier today talking to someone from the Ukraine and explaining that I do have roots in Russia that I’m completely unfamiliar with. My maternal grandparents immigrated to the States in the teens, and my mother was the youngest of their nine children. By the time she came along, and I don’t say this facetiously, they were very tired. And the result is that my mother does not know much about her own parents’ background, and hence I know even less. My father was an immigrant and I’m more well-versed in his story and his origins. My father came here from South Korea in the mid 1950s after the conclusion of the Korean War. So I’ve always thought of myself - when I have thought of myself this way, and I do sometimes think of myself in these ways, but mostly when asked such questions - as a Korean-American. And I rarely think of myself as a Russian-American, I’m not even sure if that term is in currency. Because my father’s trajectory into this country is a story I know well, and I’ve only very recently started to think about the other half of my background, which is sort of erased underneath familial ignorance.

Lopate: Thank you all for coming out, and my great thanks to Jonathan Safran Foer, Susan Choi and Pete Hamill. It’s been a lot of fun, thank you.

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