A few weeks ago we reviewed NEXT STOP, the debut dystopian novel from Benjamin Rsenick. The book was challenging, and moving, but left me with so many questions. I decided to attempt emailing the author and asking for an interview. And he said yes! Below are the answers to my burning questions, and hopefully some of your too.
BookishlyJewish: I actually read NEXT STOP over the course of one Shabbat, but it stayed with me for much longer. When did the concept of this story first come to you?
Benjamin Resnick: I started on a first draft in the summer of 2021—toward the tail end of the pandemic when life for a lot of people was starting to get back to normal but wasn’t all the way there yet. My wife and I have two fairly young children, about Michael’s age in Next Stop, and being stuck at home with young kids through Covid was obviously its own specific kind of challenge. As I began writing I was thinking a lot about parenting under difficult and unpredictable circumstances and about how we try to keep our kids relatively happy and relatively safe regardless of what is going on in the world
There are, of course, many parents who contend daily with challenges far worse than what my wife and I faced as middle-class American Jews during lockdown—we had access to resources and our health and the health of our loved ones remained intact and I am very grateful for that. But it wasn’t easy, to say the least. So that whole experience was still very present for me when I started thinking about Next Stop. I knew I wanted to tell a story about parenting through a drastic disruption and about how our routines (and the assumptions that they are built around) are really very fragile. That is fundamentally true all of the time for everyone (and as a pulpit rabbi I often have a window into that reality), but I also think, historically, it has been particularly true for Jews, in large part because of antisemitism. And I wanted to tell a story about that as well.
BookishlyJewish: We get a very detailed and harrowing description of Ethan’s journey across town during a time of violence, and this served to both humanize him and also show how very tiny and powerless he is in the grand scope of things. However, when it is Ella’s turn to fight her way back to the Pale and rejoin her family, we see her triumphant return but have no idea what led to it. This made her feel superhuman to me. I am wondering if these choices were intentional?
Benjamin Resnick: What a great question! Ethan’s journey across town is one of my favorite episodes in the book. It was inspired, in part, by this wonderful section in Ursula LeGuinn’s magnificent The Left Hand Of Darkness, during which the two main characters go on a perilous journey across a vast, icy terrain. It’s phenomenally gripping and beautifully written and I guess I’m drawn to road stories in general.
You’re actually only the second reader to ask, specifically, about what Ella had to do in order to get back. In my mind, it’s likely that her journey looked a lot like Ethan’s—she made it back through a combination of determination and good fortune. The reason why I didn’t include it in the book—a fairly prosaic one—is simply that I thought it would be repetitive for readers, i.e. we already accompanied Ethan on one long journey through the city and we didn’t need to accompany Ella on a journey as well. It’s so interesting that, for you, that absence made Ella seem superhuman. I don’t see her that way, necessarily, but I also think that she is tougher than Ethan and there are probably things she would do to get back that he would not. That aspect of her characterization was absolutely intentional.
And she is also Michael’s mother. As close as Ethan and Michael become—and in many ways I see Next Stop as a love story between Ethan and Michael as much as it is a love story between Ethan and Ella—he is not Michael’s father.
BookishlyJewish: As someone who takes the subway to work every day, NEXT STOP has added some interesting feelings to my commute. I am wondering how you chose to feature subways so prominently and what the symbolism is there?
Benjamin Resnick: I don’t take the subway to work everyday anymore, but I’m a New Yorker and I did for many many years. I think a lot about the subway in general—about how it looks and feels and sounds, about the experience of going down in one place and coming up in a place that looks entirely different. It’s just a very unique and, for me, important experience.
Trains are also a pretty overdetermined and (pun intended, I suppose) freighted symbol in the Jewish imagination. Recently they recall the Kindertransport, of course, and also the sealed train cars to the camps.
There are also earlier resonances in midrash—I doubt many readers will think about those but they are present for me. One of them is the very strange and somewhat macabre image of Jewish bones rolling through underground tunnels on their way to Jerusalem for resurrection. Another is the ancient rabbinic idea, expressed in a few different ways, that unlike the people in Plato’s cave allegory (who need to ascend into the light to find truth) Jews find true illumination by exploring the dark depths.
So in my mind the subways are a hopeful symbol, but also a terrifying one.
BookishlyJewish: Obviously the book ends with a lot still unanswered. I won’t ask you to explain the anomaly, or what happened to the “OG Hole” jumpers, but I am curious if you yourself know those answers or if you are as much in the dark as the rest of us.
Benjamin Resnick: I’m not one hundred percent sure, but (quick spoiler alert) I think they might be somewhere down in the tunnels, i.e. in the same place that Ethan, Ella, and Michael go in the last section of the book. In my imagination there is a really big world down there and we really only see a small corner of it. There are probably places you can’t escape from and places that are hidden and inaccessible or that are governed by different kinds of rules.
Or they could just be gone, vanished entirely. I sometimes think about how because of the Holocaust I really know very few Jews who are able to trace their families back more than a couple of generations. Some can, but not many. In an amazing prose poem called “Alphabet of My Dead” Robert Pinsky, who is so brilliant, has a line that goes “X the unknown ancestors of my eight great-grandparents, unseen multitudes who have created my body, thousands of them reaching back into time, tens of thousands, kings and slaves, savages and sages, warriors and rapists, victims and perpetrators.” All of us have these secret, unrecoverable parts of ourselves. Where do they go? What kind of lives did they lead? I’ll never even know their names. There is something haunting about that.
I’ll also say that, symbolically, I think about the anomalies as physical manifestations of antisemitism—a dark presence that we Jews schlep around with us as an eternally haunted and hunted people. That’s not all we are, of course—we’re also a joyful, resilient and endlessly creative people—but schlepping around darkness has been a core part of our story for millenia and it remains so. My overall view of antisemitism—and I’ve said in other places—is that it’s like a monster under the bed. Sometimes it sleeps, but inevitably it wakes up and when it does it wreaks havoc. And in a lot of ways, Next Stop is one long footnote to the line in the Haggadah: “This is the promise: That not only one arose to destroy, but in every generation they arise to destroy us…” So the holes are a way of concretizing that in the story.
But I also think that the persistence of antisemitism—and its protean nature—is mysterious. That’s part of what makes it so scary, almost like Stephen King’s It, which can take many forms. Just recently, for example, several American voices blamed the Jews for the fires in L.A. and at least two groups suggested that their proliferation is the result of American support for Israel and the war in Gaza. That’s a pretty wild move—completely divorced from reality, of course, and deeply unsettling. And if you ask me where those kinds of bizarre ideations come from I’m going to say that honestly I don’t know. Jews have been trying to explain antisemitism for thousands of years and I could offer a few theories, but none of them are really satisfactory, at least not to me. So in that sense I’m as much in the dark as anyone.
BookishlyJewish: I’m never shy about how I mostly avoid horror and other heavy topics – I’m more of an escapist or “Jewish Joy” reader- but I’m glad I made an exception for NEXT STOP. I won’t pretend it didn’t keep me up at night, but it was also deeply moving and laced with moments of joy. Particularly right now, when so much is so uncertain, how did you walk that fine line between despair and hope?
Benjamin Resnick: Some of the most gratifying feedback I’ve received so far—and I’ve gotten it pretty consistently—is that despite a very heavy premise, Next Stop is not a horrific, grim slog. There is a place, perhaps, for gorgeously rendered grim slogs (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind) but I didn’t want Next Stop to be like that and for the most part I don’t think that’s how readers have experienced it. To the contrary, I’ve heard from a lot of readers that it moves very quickly and easily, that it pulls them along, and that there is a lightness to the book despite the fact that some pretty terrible things happen to the characters, objectively. That’s been very rewarding to hear because it was a very conscious goal on my part.
In many ways, Next Stop is a domestic story. It’s a love story and story about parenting and those aren’t easy subjects but they are beautiful and consoling ones. Reflecting again on our experience during the pandemic (and this describes the experience of most parents that I know), it was a very difficult and trying time. But it wasn’t unremittingly horrible. We were all together. We laughed, we fought, we watched Tiger King, we built this really cool sukkah on a tiny balcony. My older son learned to read. Like most people I know, I have good memories from that time as well.
And I think life is almost always like that. So we try to spend about a month every summer in Israel. And we went last summer, as usual. When we got back a lot of my congregants, many of whom haven’t yet been since October 7, wanted to know how it felt, what the atmosphere was like, etc. I always said that on one level it was very sad. You couldn’t walk ten feet without a reminder of everything going on. There was and still is a sense of sadness and trauma that pervades everything. But on another level, it was as it always is—a bustling, vibrant place, very much alive and full of people going to work and going to the beach and people out partying and so forth. And that’s normal and probably always is. Even in wartime people go out to eat or to the theatre; they read, laugh, and have children. Right now, for instance, there are people sitting in cafes in L.A. So for me the consoling elements in Next Stop reflect the basic reality that life is a pretty mixed bag, for most of us, most of the time. And it often remains that way even in extreme situations. Writing a book that was only despairing just wouldn’t have felt authentic to me because I don’t experience the world that way. Sometimes I despair. But I don’t only despair. Far from it.
BookishlyJewish: The timing of NEXT STOPs submission and publication is a shining example of what many writers call the “luck” portion of the process (although I realize it feels really awkward to use that term surrounding global tragedies). Do you think the book would have had a different reception if it was submitted at a different time? Do you think it would even have landed with the same publisher?
Benjamin Resnick: I think about these questions all the time. I like to imagine that the book would have found its way into a world without October 7 (it was submitted to my editor just a few days before). But I don’t live in that world so I ultimately don’t know and never really will. The disquieting aspect of my “luck” is also something that I think about constantly. I wrote a book that met the moment in a lot of ways and it was a horrible, tragic moment for our people and it is still ongoing. And I benefited from it in a very real way. I am still struggling to understand that. It haunts me.
BookishlyJewish: Speaking of reception, how has the public been viewing NEXT STOP? Any surprising moments for you?
Benjamin Resnick: So far the reception has been really positive overall and the book seems to have sparked a fair amount of conversation, which is, of course, very rewarding. And most of the reviews (including yours!) have been very nice and have engaged seriously with what I was trying to do.
It’s definitely not a pareve book. I knew when I wrote that it had a pretty strong taste, but maybe I’ve been a little bit surprised by how consistently it engenders strong feelings. I just haven’t gotten that many meh responses—people either seem to really like it or to really not like it. Of course I would prefer that all readers love it, but the fact that it consistently inspires strong reactions of whatever sort is gratifying, in a way.
BookishlyJewish: I was interested to learn you are also a Rabbi, how has your chosen profession impacted your writing?
Benjamin Resnick: Rabbis are storytellers and repositories of stories on many levels. And I often tell people that I basically talk for a living. My rabbinic job, as I see it, is primarily about building and maintaining relationships, so all day long I’m listening to stories and telling other stories and when you’re a rabbi people tend to open themselves to you and invite you into their lives. Sometimes my whole workday is spent on three or four coffee dates and that’s a day really well spent. I consider myself very lucky in that regard, especially when, in my imagination, I compare that kind of workday—a series of fascinating conversations with fascinating people—with some other kinds of work days I might have if I had a different day job. Though I’m not necessarily conscious of it as I write, I’m sure that all of that influences my writing in profound ways—not the details of people’s private lives, of course, which I keep in strict confidence, but the fact that my job requires me to engage deeply with so many different kinds of people, all of them endlessly interesting. It’s just a real privilege to move through the world that way.
Having said that, it’s also the case that my job as a rabbi feels very distinct from my work as a novelist. I wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be a rabbi and I’ve been working at it for much longer and in many ways it’s much harder for me. My rabbinic work is very important to me and I take it very seriously, but I could have wound up doing something else and, who knows, perhaps I will do something else someday in the future. But it’s hard for me to imagine not being a writer and that’s been true for a long time, since I was a child. It’s the first thing I can really remember wanting, which is kind of weird but true.
BookishlyJewish: This is an embarrassing admission, but when reading about the fringe group the “Rabbits” I did not realize it was supposed to be pronounced like the animal, which makes a lot of sense given what the group stood for. Instead, in my head, it was pronounced Rabbi-it’s. Which is ridiculous and makes no sense at all, and yet it happened. It probably says something about how I was raised, where I live now, and where my head has been this past year. Do you think different readers are having different experiences with NEXT STOP based on their connections – or lack thereof to Judaism?
Benjamin Resnick: Yes, absolutely. And I tried to include some of that in the book itself. Ethan and Ella come from very different Jewish backgrounds and that certainly influences how they interpret what is going on around them. In some ways the argument of the book is that it doesn’t really matter in the end—what they share, as Jews, far outweighs what they don’t share. I believe that’s very often true in the real Jewish world as well.
But I think it’s likely the case that someone who goes to shul twice a year (just for example) will experience the book differently from someone who is shomer shabbat, just as American Jewish readers and Israeli Jewish readers will likely experience it differently. And that’s great! But that’s always how it is no matter who we are—we can’t help but bring pieces of ourselves to our reading. For example, one thing that’s been interesting to me—not surprising, really, but certainly notable—is that readers who are parents tend to experience the book very differently from readers who do not have kids, and, hey, I just realized that’s part of the next question!
BookishlyJewish: The theme of parenting through crisis was very strong for me, and I appreciated your take on the pandemic which is a time many writers and readers are still shying away from. How did you approach that topic?
Benjamin Resnick: I’ve already talked about this (unprompted!) in a few of my answers, but I’ll just add (maybe it comes as no surprise) that parenting is probably the thing that I spend the most time thinking about. It’s just such an intense, all-consuming endeavor—I’m definitely not breaking any new ground with those proclamations!—and it’s also hard to write about without falling into cliche because it’s exactly how everyone says it’s going to be and it’s really the only thing I know of that is like that. It’s just as scary and just as wonderful and just as surprising and just as boring and just as inspiring and just as exhausting and just as revelatory on and on. So I’m glad I was able to write a novel about it and I’m planning to write more novels about it!
In terms of the pandemic? Well, the pandemic definitely informed some of the atmosphere of the book and it is present in the story in a somewhat attenuated way, sort of like a ghost or maybe like a healed wound. But Ethan and Ella were kids during their pandemic, about the same age my children were during Covid, so it’s a hazy memory for them. What do I really remember from first grade? Not much. I didn’t set out to write Covid novel and the pandemic is not a huge, defining moment in the lives of the main characters, just as I don’t think it will be a huge, defining moment in the lives of my own children. But it was such a generationally defining experience for me, for my wife, and for our friends (mostly millennials who have young kids now) that it just would have felt weird (and maybe impossible) not to address it in some way.
BookishlyJewish: Is there anything in particular you are hoping readers take away from the book?
Benjamin Resnick: That being Jewish is a precarious and sometimes dangerous thing to be, but that at the same time it is extraordinary and wonderful and a great privilege. Also that our children can save us.
BookishlyJewish: I always end by asking if you have a favorite Jewish (B.R: I assume you meant book?) to recommend.
Benjamin Resnick: Satan In Goray by I.B. Singer. It’s absolutely incredible—elemental, intense, highly troubling and very beautiful.
If you meant “favorite Jewish author” I’d probably go with Bernard Malamud.
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