An Interview with Saul Golubcow

by Paula Gail Benson

I became a Saul Golubcow fan when I read his first short story. Finding three of his stories compiled in The Cost of Living and Other Mysteries was a lovely gift. Now, Saul has written a full-length novel with his detective Holocaust survivor Frank Wolf and the narrator, Frank’s lawyer grandson, Joel.

You have said that Frank is based upon your father-in-law. Did you base your female characters on people you have known?

Paula, the emergence of Aliya as a central character in Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife? owes a great deal to you. In one of our conversations, you complimented me on the way I drew the characters of Frank Wolf and his grandson Joel. “But,” you added, “you don’t do much with female characters.” My reaction in that moment was to be defensive, and I mumbled some lame explanation. But then, I said, “I will give it some thought.” And I did. I admitted to myself that I come out of the boys’ locker room, and I had been more comfortable drawing male characters. I committed myself to challenging myself to get out of that comfort zone and incorporate more central and more involved women. Thus, Aliya joined the team in investigating the murder of her best friend’s mother.

Did I base Aliya on anyone I knew. Yes, indeed—my wife. She has helped me in these ways throughout our marriage. Like young Aliya, she valued tradition and family, but was the first in her college to protest curfews for women, an early member of NOW who decried the plight of women in the 1970s, and advocated for women’s equality in all spheres of their lives.

Not wholly, but that’s Aliya, including the temper when offended. So, based on Frank’s gentle counseling, Aliya has to separate her anger at Detective Carlucci’s male chauvinist behavior towards her from the positives he offers the team as they investigate.

In Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife?, another female character, Joel’s mother Molly (Malkeh), is in the chrysalis stage of emergence—which, in my drawn out of full cloth formulation, will have limitations. After all, she was a 20-year-old girl who came to a new country after six years of hiding with her father in a cellar during the Holocaust, doesn’t speak the language, yet obtains a college degree and runs a successful jewelry store. She is not plucky like Aliya. But though she is somewhat stunted, fearful, is hard on herself, she is fiercely protective of her family and proud of her religion and culture—shared values with Aliya allowing them to be not only good in-laws but also good friends. Readers will see a fuller emergence of Molly in my next book.

Aliya seems to blend seamlessly into the mix with Frank and Joel. How did you use her abilities to complement those of the existing duo?

One of my objectives in continuing a Frank Wolf mystery series is to make Joel, as narrator, interesting in his own right as part of a coming of age progression. Besides his grandfather’s loving, gentle guiding hand, he needed a helpmate, not only for a case, but to help him grow into adulthood, to care for him, to boost him when deserving, but also to put brakes on young male arrogance and emotional denial. Joel loves Aliya, and so his care and respect for her allows him to set aside momentary piques and grow, which, in turn, I hope, from a plot perspective, helps the “team” unravel the mystery.

And Frank loves his grandson’s kallah (bride/wife) because she loves Joel, and more so because they share values such as family and a drive for justice. Frank also sees the work a psychologist does in helping an individual unravel personal mysteries similar to the work of a private detective unraveling the societal, cultural, and interpersonal webs entwining certain violent crimes. Reciprocally, shared values on a team transcend age and bolster teamwork.

The novel is set in the late twentieth century. Did you have to research to verify what investigative methods were available at that time?

Oh my, yes. I sometimes have trouble falling asleep in fear of anachronisms invading my mind. For instance, I had played out one scene in the book where Joel needs to get in touch with his grandfather quickly so he picks up his cell phone and …Well, as I might write nearing the point of the call, “Saul slapped his head as he realized …” So next step was to add change to Joel’s pocket and place him near a pay phone.

Police work and investigative methods have been particularly challenging. I never was an investigator, nor an attorney, nor a criminologist. Of course, there are Google searches upon searches with checks and cross checks of what has been checked. Of great help, my friend Merrill was a police officer back then, my friend Michael, a pathologist who has helped me with forensic questions, my friend Larry who has helped me on lawyer questions, and you’d be pleasantly surprised how calling different university departments garners generous assistance from faculty.

I hope my readers smile when Frank lauds the Polaroid camera as “a great advance in the technology that supports our private investigative profession …” And there is Frank’s ability to foresee coming changes in investigative methods (advances in fingerprint detection, DNA) which he uses at times to bluff information out of suspects. Easy for me in my back to the future capacity.

How is writing short stories different from writing a novel?

I discovered writing freedom in the novel. When writing a short story, one looks at what the word limit is for a particular placement. So to sound dramatic, a sword of Damocles, would hang over me when writing a short story—word count at the bottom of the screen threatening me as I wrote.

Though I always took the advice of instructors to write early drafts with as many words as I wished, the cutting process was somewhat unpleasant. Yes, from a craft perspective, there was an aspect of satisfaction in cutting “non-essentials” to focus on the narrative (meaning plot), but for me, from an art perspective, cutting worried me that some nutrition of the “wheat” may have been thrown out with the chaff.

Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife? took me two years to complete. And not to sound masochistic and with no comparison of talent, I enjoyed every moment of the “agony” of writing the book as Irving Stone described Michaelangelo lying on his back for a few years lovingly painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I would not have taken two years to write a short story. But for all I know, Herman Melville took as much time writing Moby Dick as he did writing his magnificent short story, Bartleby the Scrivener.

My intent is to write mysteries that are not only page turners because of plots and twists, but more so because I wish to explore the surrounds, the histories, the cultures, the interpersonals that frame the mystery. The novel format offers me the freedom to accomplish this end.

What did you find most challenging in writing a novel? Did writing the short stories help you with those challenges?

A few challenges stand out.

 Keeping track of the narrative. As in real life, over a two year period one forgets what has been said and even done a while back. So, even though the events of Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife take place over an eight-day period, what happened on Monday, what was said on Monday, must align to what’s happening on Thursday. A challenge to memory even if I were younger. But Control-F is my everlasting friend.

2.      With the book taking place in the 1970s, getting locale (street names, banks no longer in business, subway stops back then different from today, synagogues and their structures) right is critical. So are signs of the time such as types of stores, movie houses and what they were showing. Speech patterns that have changed including New York’s polyglot resonance when walking a given street. And others. Again, Mr. Google is helpful. So are New York newspaper archives.

3.      Not boring the reader. There are many more interactions among the same characters in a novel than in a short story. I was challenged trying to make each interaction interesting not only for the newness of information and plot that is provided, but also in maintaining the relationships’ dynamics  without making them into a shtick. Think well done sitcoms versus duds—how to execute the similar differently. For instance, Frank has a certain sense of humor. He quips a few times that first he and Joel and then adding in Aliya, they would make a good private investigative firm. How often to make this quip, and how is the context and pronouncement of each different?

4.      At times, I found it difficult to extract myself from the world of Frank Wolf and the 1970s. Everyday life has multitudes of distractions. Added to them was my other life to which I wanted to return as soon as possible, at times to the disregard of some of those everyday demands. I was guilty of a version of daydreaming I called “lost in writing space.”

5.      The shorter Frank Wolf mysteries preceding my novel gave me the characters and histories of the main characters in the novel. They also establish background for why Frank is hired to work the case. But it also causes a problem in not only did I have to remember what happened narrative-wise a few days ago, but now I must remember references to events and characters that populated the stories that occurred three years earlier.

Did you always know you would write a series?

No, not in the least. As I write in the acknowledgement section of Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife?, I had intended to write “a” story about an elderly Holocaust survivor named Frank Wolf who becomes a private detective in Brooklyn and solves “a” case. It was to be part of a series of short stories about Holocaust survivors who come to the United States. But after publishing the short story version of The Cost of Living, I discovered how much I enjoyed spending time with Frank and his family. So I continued writing about how he, with his grandson Joel, solved additional mysteries in the 1970’s New York Jewish communities. The result was a compilation of three novella length stories in The Cost of Living and Other Mysteries released in 2022. Now, two years later, Aliya is part of the team.

 

Please tell us some more adventures are planned for Frank, Joel, and Aliya. What are you working on now?

Yes, there are more adventures planned. I am at work on another novel that involves the murder of a Holocaust survivor, with the roots of the murder going back to the Holocaust. Even though the four previous Frank Wolf mysteries involve violent crimes, this book is darker. But a book I feel I must write. Probably 15-18 months away from completion.

And while Aliya will always be part of the “team,” her involvement in the upcoming book will be less for reasons I cannot reveal to you without “spoiler alerting.”

What advice would you give to writers?

Wow, the hardest question of all. I think to give advice, one needs to know the particular individual to whom the advice is directed. So imagine the young William Faulkner and his personality who is planning to take three weeks locked away in a cabin with some food and a case of whiskey, and you say to him, “Son, write, write, and re-write.” He might look at you and respond, “Yes sir/ma’am,” and come back three weeks later with 100,000 words and a final version of The Sound and the Fury.

And of course, one needs to know the writing genre of the advisee—different keystrokes for different folks.

If there is one piece of global advice, get yourself draft readers (preferably not family or friends) who will be honest with you. Then, with your defensiveness constrained, re-write.

Thank you, Saul. I appreciate so much your fine writing and kind friendship.

If you haven’t already, please add Saul’s books to your “to be read” stack. You’ll be glad you did!