Matthew Daub on becoming a writer and his first published novel, Leaving Eastern Parkway
Introduced and Interviewed by Matthew A. MacDonald
Matthew Daub writes with Hemingway-like clarity, brevity, and force, and speaks with warm, kind-hearted Socratic wisdom.
His debut novel, Leaving Eastern Parkway, is an immersive, improbably entertaining journey of self-discovery. It is deeply reflective, emotive, and thought-provoking, but also remarkably fast-paced and accessible despite being peppered with Yiddish and Hebrew words throughout (for which there is, thankfully, a glossary). In fact, this makes it feel more real.
It is a unique coming-of-age story about a Hasidic teenager named Zev Altshul who leaves his community in Brooklyn, New York City, after tragedy strikes. As he adjusts to his new life “off the derech,” readers travel with him as he journeys to Urbana and then Chicago, Illinois, before returning to Brooklyn. Along the way, we meet a colorful cast of characters, many of whom mirror, complement, or even contradict each other, and witness Zev transform. I felt that, in a certain sense, I grew along with him, and I can’t be alone in that.
The following is an edited version of an interview I had with Matthew Daub on November 4, 2022 about Leaving Eastern Parkway. It reveals minor plot details and characters, but it should not detract from the experience of reading the book. If anything, I hope it enriches it.
I strongly encourage you to order the book from your local, independent bookseller.
MacDonald: You were born in New York City, grew up Jewish, studied briefly at the Pratt Institute, and then Southern Illinois University at Cabondale. You are an accomplished painter specializing in watercolors, and you were an art professor for 32 years. Aside from that, who is Matthew Daub?
Daub: That’s a very complex question. And it would depend on when you asked me that question. In politics, they call it flip-flopping, but I’d just call it changing as new things open up to you as you get wiser, older, perhaps dumber, you know, whatever it is. I think my whole life, from start to finish, it’s been one of change, and one of learning, and the main thing that I would say in answer to that question,
I know one thing very important about myself, and that is I must be creating something, and that is what makes me happy.
People have all sorts of things that they may enjoy doing. And it’s not necessarily painting, it’s not necessarily writing. The house that we’re in right here, I designed it, I was the general contractor for it. This is going back almost twenty years ago. And I was obsessed with the entire process, selecting every fixture, I mean everything that we did, and I found it incredibly satisfying. So as long as I’m creating something, and can get thoroughly involved, then I know I’m being fulfilled. . . .
You know, I did the cover for the novel, at the publisher’s request. I wanted to get Ben Shahn’s handball painting. It’s a terrific painting, but we had to jump through hoops to work with the estate and whatever representation that it had. It was going to be costly, and frankly it was a pain in the ass. You couldn’t put any text over it, you couldn’t crop it, you couldn’t do anything with it.
So they said, well, why don’t you do it? I hadn’t done any artwork in three years, and I was a little afraid I wouldn’t be putting my best foot forward. But I was very pleased with the way it came out. And eventually my agent and the publisher were also pleased with it.
I found when I started writing fiction seriously about 11 years ago or so I never dreamed that I would stop painting. I always thought it was going to be a little side-line. But it just began to take over. And the last three years, when I started Leaving Eastern Parkway, I just stopped painting altogether.
It didn’t bother me. I thought it would. But as I said, as long as I’m creating something, and this satisfies those needs.
And the interesting thing about it, I’d been painting and drawing my whole life, professionally for 40 plus years, so I was at the point technically with watercolor and with drawing, like you saw on the cover, it wasn’t a terrible struggle to do what I wanted to do. Of course subject matter, choosing things that may be moving, et cetera, getting that mood in there, ok, that could be challenging, and they’re not all going to be winners, but I mean, technically, I could pretty much do what I’m going to do, and I could nail it. With the writing is a whole other story, because I’m not nearly as experienced or as competent as a writer as I am as a painter.
I remember in the early days of my painting, when I would get something, it would seem so miraculous, it would seem so wonderful. I would look at it, almost like I didn’t do it, and say, “oh my God, look at that!” And with the writing, you know, when you struggle, when you try to get at something, and then you get it, I get that same feeling, which I hadn’t had — that newness that I had in painting at one time.
MacDonald: The book jacket says this is your first novel. Why is this particular story about Zev Altshul so important to you?
Daub: First, I will say that this is not my first novel, it’s my first published novel. This is actually my fourth novel, and it’s the first one that I was able to get any traction with.
There are two others out of the four that I think are good and publishable with a little bit of work — they don’t quite have that hook that I had with Leaving Eastern Parkway.
I think it comes out swinging, if you know what I’m saying. I mean, you’re in the middle of the action on that first page. And I was very lucky with that, because I can’t say that I sat down and I planned all this out.
The first three sentences of the novel: My father died almost instantly. At least that is what they told my mother. She was standing right next to him when he was hit, his black fedora and shoes left at her feet, his body landing many yards down Eastern Parkway.
I’m a seat-of-the-pants guy. I didn’t know how it was going to end, I didn’t know really what was going to happen, I didn’t foresee the Joe Carcone character, nothing. It’s just, I sat down, and — I’ll tell you how the idea came to me . . .
I have to give credit to my best friend Jay Melvin. We’ve known each other for about 30 years, we’re both cyclists, and we rode — I don’t ride as much anymore, but we rode probably 4000 miles a year together — and so, when you’re on the bike at least two hours a day, and you’ve got only one person next to you, you have to have something to talk about.
Jay is a well-read guy, pretty smart fellow — very smart fellow, as a matter of fact — so, one of the things we’d talk about — he knew how much the writing meant to me — so we would talk about writing, we’d talk about books. So one time, we’re on a bike ride, and he says,
“you know what I think would be a good subject for a novel? A Hasidic kid who skips shul [synagogue] on Shabbos to play baseball and he comes home and he finds that his parents have been killed in a terrorist attack. And then he goes to West Point and he takes up boxing and he experiences anti-semitism and blah, blah, blah.” And you know, I’m just saying, “oh man, this sounds like shit!”
And then, the next day we’re riding — I didn’t say much to him then, I just went, “ah, ok” — and just out of the blue he says, “I don’t think it should be baseball, I think it should be handball.”
And for some reason — I’ve never played handball — back in the eighties I played racketball, everyone did back then, but I had never played handball, and I’m also not Hasidic and I didn’t come from that background — for some reason it was like the lightbulb just went on, and I said, “oh my God.” And I’ve always tried to get Jay to write and I said, “listen, I’m going to write the first five pages. I’m going to give them to you, and then I’d love to see what you could do with it.”
So literally, I sat down to write when I got home, and don’t ask me how it happened, but . . .
. . . it was like I inhabited Zev’s character from the moment I started, and those five pages are pretty much — the one’s that you read in the book are the ones that I wrote that first day and handed to my friend Jay in the parking lot while we’re getting ready to go out for a bike ride.
And he reads them, and he says, “I really like this but I’m too lazy, I’m never going to write it.”
So I said, “ok, fine, well I like it and I’m going to write it. But I’m just going to tell you, it’s not at all going to be your book and I don’t know if you’re going to like it or not or where I go with this.”
He says, “that’s fine, so do it.”
So I started writing, and I would say the first half of the book flew by. Well, I can’t say that completely, because I had to research. Since I knew nothing about handball — my wife watched, I can’t even tell you how many handball games with me in terms of videos — I read interviews, history, articles in magazines, you name it; I wanted to know as much as a layman could about handball. I did the same with Hasidism.
I read many dozens of letters from the Rebbe, I listened to interviews, I was on the Chabad website constantly. Now, they don’t think I was, because the Hasids hate my book.
For a while there, Twitter was going on about how I was lazy, didn’t do any research, misrepresented the Lubavitchers, you know, the whole deal. So I told my agent, “I’m keeping my head down.” He said, “don’t do that! I want you to get in there, I want you to slug it out with them. I’ve been praying for this. This is how we’re going to sell books.”
Well, it died down within a few days. Frankly, I’m thankful for it, because I don’t like to argue, I’m too old for that. I’m sorry they didn’t like the book. I think if they would have read it instead of paging through it looking for faults [they would have liked it], and I think it is an extremely Jewish book.
I think that most Jews who read the book, who are not looking to find fault, like it. Like the handball guys love it, they’re not looking to find fault, as far as I know. It’s making some rounds in the handball world as well — the president of the United States Handball Association loved the book, he said he wants to promote it among his members, a couple of famous handballers have gotten the book. I’m sure they found little things in it, as in every work of fiction, you must dramatize.
There are things that you want to do that may not be technically correct, but it makes for a better story. Well, the Hasids don’t get that. And I even told the Rabbi who was up in arms about it, I said, “this isn’t the Talmud, this is a work of fiction, it’s imaginary.” Well, that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. But now I think he’s forgotten about me.
MacDonald: Even though you are not Hasidic and you had never played handball before, the language in the novel makes it feel very authentic and immersive. A lot of this is likely just from your research, but can you tell me a bit about your first-hand experience of any of the things in the novel?
Daub: I grew up in New York, in the Bronx, not Brooklyn. I have been on Eastern Parkway, I’ve been to the Brooklyn Museum. It’s an interesting community. And you know, I wanted this foreign culture within our culture, and Brooklyn is way more interesting than some of the other locations, so that’s more or less why I chose Brooklyn.
My grandmother, who was an immigrant from Russia, and we’re talking, she was probably born in the late 1800s, I’m 71 years old. My gramma did not read or write English. She spoke English, but she was much more fluent in Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and I got that cadence [spoken by the Hasidic characters in the book] from her, and some of the misuse of words. I did listen to plenty of videos, et cetera, including Lubavitchers, but the Lubavitchers were very upset because no Lubavitchers really talk like that according to them. [We can agree to disagree,] but anyway, I want Zev to talk like that. And I wanted him to have the payos (side curls) too, even though Lubavitchers don’t wear payos. So I fixed that by simply saying that Zev’s Mom thought it looked cute and she didn’t cut his hair, so that was how he ended up with that.
MacDonald: The story feels almost like an elegy, and you draw explicit parallels between Zev and the character Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” throughout the novel. Can you discuss that?
Daub: “The Metamorphosis” is a tragedy. It’s way out there, but it’s a tragic story. Through no fault of his own, Gregor Samsa becomes a cockroach, or at least a large insect. And he was taking care of his entire family until he could do them no good any longer, and they all abandoned him, even his sister. So I mean, there’s the parallel right there. Zev’s sister abandons him, and she does it twice.
Now, you can understand it, and I’ve had this discussion with a lot of people. People all have questions about the sister. I am sympathetic with her, but only up to a point. She abandons Zev, and there’s just no getting around that. She may have had very good reasons for doing it, but especially the second time, when she was certainly I think old enough to know better . . . Now you could say, ok, Zev was already living with Joe Carcone up in Chicago, he’s being well taken care of, he’s got a guardian who seems to really love and care about him, so maybe she could feel justified. Ok. In all fairness, the money should have been divided equally among the two of them, but Jewish law doesn’t state that. Anyway, she didn’t ask.
The most telling moment was a very small thing but it was super intentional on my part. After Zev learns when he goes out to visit her in Taos that she didn’t leave because she was being abused by Paul Griffin, she left to pursue another relationship for her own happiness, this knocks Zev for a loop, and you notice that they’re very quiet on the drive back to the airport. And I think one of the most telling moments in the novel, which could hint at the future as well, is Zev is walking into the terminal after he’s taken his luggage out and he turns to say goodbye and she’s already gone. And I thought, whoa, that’s . . .
Little things like that, that leaves such an impression, and it’s just like in a painting, that so much of what you don’t realize and what you don’t see, or think you see, in a painting, it’s the way the artist has manipulated everything to make you feel what they want you to feel.
Zev throwing the gun in the ocean. A small thing, but it tells you so much about his character, and how immature he was in terms of, “well, I’m gonna get even with this guy.” But he could never do that. It wasn’t in his nature whatsoever. I love things like that in writing.
MacDonald: You mention painting, and one of your characters, Paul Griffin, who is the boyfriend of Zev’s sister Frida, is a painter. One of his paintings, “Tit for Tat,” depicting Frida stealing money from a man’s wallet as he lies on a bed, is described and discussed several times in the book. What is the significance of it? It seems to relate to her actions later in the novel.
Daub: So, “Tit for Tat” is a real painting, and unfortunately the acknowledgement somehow got left out. It was in one of the original drafts.
The artist, Jerome Witkin, is one of the great artists of the 20th to 21st century. Great figurative artist. Well-known, but under-known. . . . Jerome did this painting “Tit for Tat,” I asked his permission, I used the painting, and . . .
. . . did I know, at the time, how well it was going to fit in with what Frida did? I don’t think so. But the thing is, you go, you go, you go, and then you say, “oh, shit, that’s what that was about!”
Now I realize it. I didn’t see it at first. And then you see your opportunity. And so you say, “ok, now I can make something of this.” That’s how I think it happened.
MacDonald: At the end of the novel, Zev finds himself back in Brooklyn, and there are bedbugs in the room that he’s renting. It reminded me of Gregor Samsa and “The Metamorphosis,” because you refer multiple times to the bugs tormenting Zev, and of course, Gregor is transformed into an insect in Kafka’s story. Is there any relationship between the two? Do the insects in Zev’s room symbolize anything?
Daub: That’s a great question. I had not thought about it. I think what I wanted to do . . . there’s a couple of things. That horrible motel that he checked into when he first got back to Brooklyn. I wanted that to seem so squalid, nasty. And believe it or not, there is a hotel in that area there, and I am so crazy when I research things, I looked at all the reviews of this frickin’ hotel—they were horrible! And so I wanted to model this hotel, I wanted to make it as ugly and disgusting . . . and the underpants coming out from under the bed—and by the way, that actually happened to me.
It actually happened in Muskegon, Michigan, where I was judging for the Michigan Watercolor Society—it’s about ten years ago now. They put me up in one of the better hotels in town, but it was horrible. And I made the mistake of putting my shoes under the bed at night, and when I pulled them out, there was a pair of women’s underpants, described just like it was in the book—you have never seen anything like these.
As described in the novel: . . . when I slid my Nikes from under the bed, a pair of pink panties came out wrapped around the toe of one of them. They were fouled with every substance that could possibly ooze from a human body.
It was a memorable event. You know, you’ve got to file all of these things away, just like the light coming out of a window or whatever. It’s a big file cabinet. And all these things are in there and you pull them out as needed. So a lot of it comes from personal experience, or some of it does. At least an incident like that is too good not to create fiction around.
MacDonald: You say you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, which is certainly the impression I get from the way you describe your writing process. This makes me wonder if some of the things I thought must have been planned were actually planned, or if they just came to you in the moment. For example, at the beginning of the story you describe an elevator in Zev’s apartment building stopping at every floor automatically so that strictly observant Jews can take the elevator on Shabbos without having to “complete an electric circuit,” and later you use it as a simile to refer to Zev’s speech pattern as he tries to mimic Don Cornelieus’s voice on Soul Train.
From the novel: I watched reruns of Soul Train, taking pleasure in ogling the women’s round bottoms while imitating Don Cornelieus’s silky voice with my accent flipping back and forth between American and Yeshivish like an out-of-control Shabbos elevator.
You have some other striking metaphors that you use multiple times in the book, and whenever you do, it reminds me of where you used them previously in the book, which feels very painterly to me. For example, you refer to a broken vase that Zev’s mother painstakingly glued back together, and you include the devastatingly poetic lines, “The vase would never hold flowers or water again, but it appeared whole if you did not look too closely. I believe it is like that with families too.” Later, you refer to the vase in a different context as a metaphor. I noticed many other examples of this. Is this planned, or does it just come to you in the flow of your writing?
Daub: It is a combination. The broken vase, I loved the idea of it, I didn’t realize it would come back again. And the idea of piecing something together, whereas families, like Joe Carcone’s looked whole, if you don’t look too closely. That whole thing.
Once you see something and see that it works and then you say, “hey, I could apply this again, and it’ll be very effective.” So it’s a combination of just an invention, and then it gets repeated.
MacDonald: Who is your favorite character in the novel and why?
Daub: My favorite character is Joe. He’s a broken man with a sorry past. He comes alive with Zev. I liked him a lot, and was sorry [GIGANTIC SPOILER REMOVED—READ THE BOOK] but I think it was a necessary part of the narrative.
MacDonald: You mentioned earlier that you did not foresee the Joe Carcone character. What was your inspiration for him and why did you decide to make him such an important part of Zev’s life?
Daub: I honestly don’t remember where the Joe character came from. He appeared organically, as with so many turns in my writing. The narrative comes to a certain point and it becomes obvious. It’s like the character just shows up and I know he or she belongs to the story.
MacDonald: I feel there is great wisdom in both some of the things the Lubavitcher Rebbe says in the story, and that the Reform Rabbi Jerry Feinstein says. Do you agree? How do they complement or mirror each other?
Daub: I took almost all of the Rebbe’s dialogue directly from his letters; changing them enough to avoid plagiarism. This is why I reject the Hasids’ accusations that I demonized all of the Hasidic characters. I’d also point to the scene early in the novel where Zev’s father takes him to fill boxes of food for poor Jewish families. Even Rav Feldsher had compassion and was mostly tender to Zev. Rabbi Jerry was something of a surprise. He played a much more important role than I envisioned. He showed a less strident side of Judaism that helped shape Zev’s character in some ways.
MacDonald: Speaking of the Hasidic community, and without revealing too much, there are some horrible things Zev discovers about some people in his community later in the novel. Did you simply make that situation up, or is it based on something that really happened?
Daub: It was based on real crimes led by an ultra-orthodox rabbi in New Jersey.
MacDonald: Returning to metaphors, at the very beginning of the story you describe a consequence for the losers of the handball games behind Zev’s apartment house called “cans up,” where they have to bend over against the apartment house wall and have a ball thrown hard at their backsides. Zev narrates that he rarely had to face the wall, and then adds: “If you are not Jewish, you have no idea what this means.” Can you explain that? It feels like a metaphor that you want to be difficult for some readers to decipher.
Daub: Well, first of all, Zev was a heroic player even in his backyard. He didn’t have to go “cans up.” Now, “cans up,” if you’re not from New York, and maybe even from the Bronx—we had to go “cans up.” When we played Ace-King-Queen behind our apartment house, you lose, and you bend over, and they throw the ball at your ass. You don’t want to go “cans up” because it can sting. That was what it was.
Having this heroic, athletic, super-gifted, Jewish [kid] . . . I mean, this is not the way—and some people might get angry at me saying this—but Jews are so often portrayed, certainly as intellectuals, there’s no problem seeing them as scientists, but sports heroes? Nah. Not terribly often. And especially gifted. And so I love this book, and I think the ending of the book where Zev sort of returns to his identity as a Jew—not a religious Jew, but culturally as a Jew—
I love this book because it portrays at least a Jew in a way that they’re not that often portrayed. And I like the fact that Zev is a physical guy, and yet he maintains this strong identity as a Jew.
