Maciej Hen is a well-known writer in Poland, awarded the Gombrowicz Literary Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Angelus Central European Literature Award. Perhaps because the twentieth century was cruel to his Jewish family—himself being persecuted as a child in 1968 when the Polish government launched a campaign against the Jews—the writer writes primarily historical novels, describing the world at the precipice of immense change. In his debut work, According to Her, readers observe the birth of Christianity; in the following Solfatara, he describes ten days of revolution in mid-seventeenth-century Naples; in the third, a lonely, older hero from Warsaw goes on an unplanned journey amidst a change in regime, and discovers that his ancestor was at the head of a bloody people’s rebellion. Hen told me that in a new work—one which is not yet published—Doctor Faustus will be written as a woman. It seems to me that if the books of Maciej Hen were to be widely translated into other languages, he would become a contender for the Nobel Prize; his writing is visionary. With According to Her to be published soon in English translation by Holland House Books, readers in the Anglophone will now be introduced to this beautifully written book about the alternative life of Jesus Christ, told from the perspective of his old Jewish mother. I was moved and delighted by it; someone finally gave the voice to the Virgin Mary.
Wioletta Greg (WG): In According to Her, the story of a son is told by nearly a woman named Mariamne, who is almost a hundred years old, and uncannily resembles Mary of Galilea. A bold idea for an author who lives in a Catholic country.
Maciej Hen (MH): Not only do I live in a Catholic country, but worse still, I’m a Jew living in a Catholic country. And, to top it all, I’m a Jewish atheist. Actually, I grew up separated from the basics of Judaism, because my parents belonged to the first generation of Jews who felt that religion was not so important for their children.
WG: I’m curious why you published your book under the pen name Maciej Nawariak. Were you afraid of being attacked for re-describing the life of Jesus from a Jewish perspective?
MH: I took the pen name from pure vanity. My father is a writer who had earned himself a reputation long before I came up with my debut book, and I was so sure my publication would be a success, that, in order to fully enjoy it, I would have to disqualify in advance any suggestions people might put forward about my father’s name helping me enter the literary world.
WG: Your parents survived the Holocaust as refugees in Central Asia, and they met in Uzbekistan.
MH: Yes, they met in Samarkand in 1943. My mother was twenty-one at the time, and my father just under twenty. He was from Warsaw, and she was from a village outside Lwów. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, they both evacuated eastwards and finally settled for a while in Samarkand, the former capital of Tamerlane. After the war, they returned to Warsaw. Out of their families—both once very large, as per custom—only five people survived, including themselves. My father changed his surname from Cukier to Hen, in time becoming a highly regarded writer in Poland, and my mother took care of the household, raising my sister and me—for a few years she was also a Russian language teacher.
WG: Did you always want to be a writer, like your father? I’m asking because by the time of your literary debut, you had worked many other jobs.
MH: Indeed, I had tried quite a few. I’m a trained cinematographer, I graduated from the famous National Film School in Łódź, so of course I did my best to follow the footsteps of my more fortunate colleagues, winners of Oscars and Emmys, but my best turned out to be insufficient for standing out in that field. I also tried to be a rock musician, a journalist, an English translator—having learned some English mainly from Beatles songs—and eventually landed in television as a lighting director.
WG: As for According to Her, how did you come up with the idea of writing such a story? Did being raised in a Jewish family help or hinder you in taking up this Christian subject?
MH: To tell you the truth, my parents, as left-wing progressive Jewish rebels, forgot most of what they were taught before the war, so they couldn’t convey that to me even if they wanted to. But, perhaps unwittingly, they fed me with Christian tradition, which permeates the whole of European culture; you simply cannot be a well-read person without knowing it. So, in fact, until my late thirties, I was quite versed in the Christian stuff, but pig-ignorant about Jewish matters. Then, I met people whose mission was to teach Judaism to stray Jews like me, and to my surprise, I discovered it was exciting. I studied it all with so much enthusiasm that some people began to take me erroneously for an extremely religious person.
Little by little, I realised that many passages from the New Testament don’t tally with what I’ve learned—as if its authors were just as ignorant in Judaism as I used to be. Long story short, the idea suddenly came to tell that all anew, to try and make the Jewish content of the story more credible.
WG: I realised that you are actually the first writer to give voice to a character who is, in the Christian religion, the Mother of God. Why is she the narrator?
MH: Well, I probably thought the story should be told by someone who stood aside, uninvolved in the rivalry between different factions of disciples, and at the same time someone who, at least in her own belief, knew their adored guru better than anyone else. And I must have felt that she also represents the archetype of the Jewish mum, thus giving the reader the feeling I intended to saturate my book with. As much as she is loving, she is sober—a folk type.
WG: What is the archetype of the Jewish mum?
MH: The very first thing that comes to mind is that she is a very garrulous mother. She has her own opinion on every topic, which is often quite insightful and accurate, but she tends to force it down her children’s throats. At the same time, she is tender, loving, and protective—sometimes even over-protective—and she’s completely convinced that her children are all prodigies—or at least one of them (her favourite) is, so she wants all the world to see it.
WG: Sometimes it seems as if Mariamne is a real woman next door with a tart sense of humour. She speaks a colloquial language, but why did you call her Mariamne and not Mary?
MH: I decided to call her Mariamne and not Miriam, the Hebrew equivalent of Mary, or Mariam in Aramaic . . . I decided to change many details on purpose, to demonstrate from the very beginning that I was not going to add colours to their story; I wanted to tell my own, how I believe it had been. Mariamne was, at the time, a popular Jewish given name, possibly after the hapless Maccabee wife of Herod the Great.
WG: Since we’re already talking about names, I also would like to ask about Hoshi, who is. . . Well, just who is Jesus in your version?
MH: He’s a very brilliant and charismatic young man, a self-taught physician, herbalist and healer, a natural-born philosopher—or a folk sage if you prefer, and a kind, warm-hearted person, though at times flying into rage, which he later regrets. Also, until the very end, he is not completely defined; there is a taste of mystery about him that lingers, something that remains unexplained, and I give my readers freedom to interpret it whichever way they like.
WG: Your novel is full of Jewish anecdotes, beautiful descriptions of customs and ceremonies. Where did you obtain your knowledge for the novel?
MH: I remember, after the book was finally published, I overheard my mother asking my father: “How does Maciek know all this?” And my father said: “From books. He reads a lot.” He was right. I went through tons of books on related topics—Greek and Roman antiquity, history of Jews, ancient stages of Judaism and its various trends, Talmudic parables, early Christianity and other mystic movements of the time—everything I could get my hands on. Only in the final stage of writing did I gain access to the Internet and learned to make use of it; you see, those were the very first years of the twenty-first century, and the technology never worked properly.
WG: Giving a voice to Mary is symbolically giving a voice to all the women who, over the centuries, have been silenced, as one of the reviews for your books noted. Are you a feminist?
MH: I am, certainly, if I understand the term correctly. I just believe women are equal to men—just as intelligent, talented, ambitious, energetic, or just as dull-witted and idle in some cases, and absolutely deserve to be treated the same way, have the same rights, and not to be forced into a traditional, patriarchal scheme. But of course I don’t see anything wrong if a woman chooses to live the old school way if she likes it, provided she doesn’t try to preach it to other women who feel differently.
WG: The Irish writer Colm Tóibín has written a novel called The Testament of Mary; have you heard of it?
MH: I found out about its existence from my British publisher, Robert Peett. Fortunately, I wrote my novel first, and managed to publish it in Poland eight years before Colm Tóibín’s premiere. I say “fortunately,” because while writing According to Her, I was still a literary beginner, thus very vulnerable to discouragement. I deliberately avoided any close contact with any other literary apocrypha—although when I was starting to write, it was already too late for me to avoid Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Shalom Ash’s The Man of Nazareth, and I cannot explain how I managed not to be blocked or influenced by either of those two novels.
WG: For me, the most important sentence in your book is the one about freedom: “They all agreed that one way or another, it was all about us being free. Which would mean people not listening to stupid propaganda.” It is interesting to me that Jesus in your book puts freedom above love. How do you understand this sentence? What is freedom for you?
MH: I’m not sure whether he puts freedom above love. Freedom is something people around him discuss most passionately, but Hoshi himself seems to avoid meddling in politics, more or less the same way as Jesus, described in New Testament, did—though for different reasons. But we know that freedom is not just some high-flown concept and a slogan useful in political campaigns, but simply one of the basic human needs that must be satisfied if we are to be happy. It’s not something abstract, it’s very tangible. Of course there is no place in the world where you can enjoy perfect freedom and there’s much left to do in this field, but what’s worse, as we see, there are countries like mine, where many aspects of freedom, which seemed to have been secured in the past decades, are now seriously jeopardised or even annihilated: women’s rights, free speech, independent judicial power. . . So, on second thought, I can say: yes, Hoshi, my main character, he is a man of freedom. He respects other people’s rights to follow their own will, and he himself follows his, without asking anybody for permission.
WG: In a video on your official Facebook page, I saw you surrounded by a group of enraged Polish nationalists during a ceremony commemorating the Jews murdered by their Catholic neighbours in Jedwabne during the war.
MH: I remember that. It was last year, on the eightieth anniversary of the Jedwabne crime. In 1941, after the Nazis invaded that part of Poland, formerly occupied by the Soviets, a crowd of Jedwabne people drove all local Jews—a thousand people more or less—to a barn on the outskirts of the town, locked them inside, and set the shed on fire. Last year, I joined a group of non-Jewish Polish volunteers who travel there every year to commemorate the victims and also to bear witness to the truth, taking a stand against those who still deny the facts. So I went there with them as the only Jew in the group. And after our ceremony, as we were leaving the place, I was surrounded by a group of young Polish nationalists, who had travelled to Jedwabne from all corners of Poland on that day to shout things like: “I won’t apologise for Jedwabne,” “Jews slander Poles to whitewash Germans,” and so forth. They were very excited to see me in a kipa and some of them started to call me names, but mostly they were just throwing provocative questions, probably expecting me to reply just as offensively so they could film and distribute it through social media, as an irrefutable proof of Jewish baseness. But I genuinely preferred to talk to them in a friendly manner, taking their questions seriously and simply sharing my mind on the issues they were bringing up. And I felt that maybe one or two of them started to see things just a little differently.
Either we shall fight until we wipe each other out, or we shall talk and build mutual understanding. Of course, in a case when someone rushes to you, brandishing a cudgel, it’s not the right time to talk: you either run for your life or, better, take another weapon and knock out the cudgel from the attacker’s hand.
WG: According to Her was translated from Polish into English by Anna Blasiak. What was your collaboration like?
MH: I can more or less communicate in English, but of course my knowledge is not sufficient to judge the subtle literary choices a translator has to make in almost every sentence, in terms of style, subtexts, emotional temperature. Nevertheless, Anna was kind enough to invite me to go through her draft and share my remarks. Then, when I had a few comments here and there, she embraced most of them and made suitable alterations in the text. It was a perfect cooperation, and I’m very grateful to her for that.
WG: Finally, I will ask you, just like Mariamne asks the Greek who visits her in Galilee, in the first sentence of your book, “Do you like goat’s cheese, dearie?”
MH: Ha! I do, but frankly, my favourite cheese is a sheep milk cheese—pecorino romano. I have even replaced parmesan with it for a dish I usually prepare for Rosh Ha-Shana—the Jewish New Year—generally based on the recipe from Clarissa Hyman’s Jewish Kitchen: venetian pumpkin risotto. Pecorino gives it a little bit more of a kick.
Maciej Hen is a Polish writer, the author of three novels: According to Her, Solfatara and Deutsch for Intermediates. He has also published a non-fiction book focusing on the reception of The Beatles in Poland. He lives in Warsaw.
Wioletta Greg is a Polish writer who lives in England. She was nominated for The Booker Prize for her book Swallowing Mercury. In the past she was also a journalist.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: