I met author Evan Fallenberg at an MFA residency in Vermont earlier this winter. He was there to give a workshop on translation and is in fact helping Vermont College of Fine Arts set up a program in the art. After he left I was perusing the books the local bookseller was peddling at one of the open readings, and I saw his novel, Light Fell among the titles. Curious, I bought it and proceeded to spend every free moment of the next few days completely absorbed in it.
Light Fell tells the story of Joseph Licht, a literature professor who is about to host a reunion with his with five sons and daughter-in-law for his 50th birthday. With him we look back at how Joseph arrived at the day of this event: his realization about his sexual orientation, his brief and tragic love affair with a married rabbi (I fell in love with Rabbi Rosenzweig too, I have to admit) and the repercussions these self-discoveries bring to his life. We follow Joseph through his struggles with identity, self-worth, spirituality and parenthood, and in the end we are lifted up with him as he achieves tremendous personal growth and rebuilds bonds with his sons.
Besides being beautifully written, the characterization is brilliantly rendered, and the conflicts are so realistic you can physically feel them as you rush to turn the pages. I was so drawn into the complexity of the parent/child relationships, that even after I put it down I continued to think about them, as if they were people I actually knew. In addition, I was impressed with the courage it took to write something that could be considered controversial. When I read the last word of the novel, I held it to my chest and said out loud, “I love this book.” There are few times in my middle-age life this has happened, and I knew I had to interview Fallenberg and help introduce people to this ground-breaking and gorgeous novel.
To give you some background, Evan Fallenberg is an Ohio-born writer and translator who has lived in Israel since 1985. In addition to being the author of Light Fell, his recent translations include Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy (winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem. He is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He was a MacDowell Colony fellow in 2002 and is the father of two sons. I had the pleasure of communicating with Evan via email between our homes in sunny dry Israel and snowstorm-ridden Vermont.
Article Author: Ann Hagman Cardinal
Ann Hagman Cardinal is a freelance writer as well as the Marketing Director for Vermont Collge of Fine Arts. Her first novel, Sister Chicas--co-authored with two other Latina writers—was released in 2006 by NAL/Penguin Books. …
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