If you’re looking for a steamy novel to read around the fireplace this fall involving a Modern Orthodox mother, a night of wife swapping, and an affair with a married art teacher, I have just the book for you. “Olive Days,” written by Jessica Elisheva Emerson, is about Rina Kirsch, a Modern Orthodox Jewish mother in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, who participates in a wife swap at the suggestion of her husband. What’s supposed to be a night of fun to reinvigorate their marriage turns into a rekindled passion for painting and a wake-up call about her traditional gender role.
In her erotic debut novel, Emerson aptly details what it’s like to live a life that was never meant for you — a life molded by traditions and duties over desire. As readers, we get a front row seat to Rina’s inner dialogue as she relives her youth with her art teacher while navigating the confines of religion and domesticity. Emerson portrays what it’s like for one woman to experience the beauty and struggles of living a Jewish life.
Which life will Rina choose?
Kveller caught up with the author of ‘Olive Days,” which comes out on September 10, who answered all of our burning questions.
What inspired the plot of “Olive Days?”
For a number of years I lived in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood in Los Angeles. I’ve never been a Modern Orthodox Jew, but I’ve lived in many neighborhoods with a lot of Modern Orthodox Jews and a lot of my friends/family are Modern Orthodox.
Not long after I moved into Pico-Robertson, I first heard a story from a friend of mine who heard that there was this Orthodox wife swap. And I was like, “Tell me more.” So we had coffee, he told me more, and then I tried to seek out other people who could tell me this story. And I don’t mean to say that it’s endemic at all. All I’m saying is, it has happened, and I was able to talk to some more people about it. I never heard a first person story but I got some really good details and then I sat with it for a long time. I thought it might be the genesis of a story, but that’s not a whole story…
At first, I had an idea that it was going to be a love triangle between this woman and her husband and this other man that she sleeps with. But that didn’t feel very interesting to me.
Then I thought about what might it mean to a person who is living an observant life to be asked to do this [wife swap], and I could imagine a number of outcomes.
What type of audience do you hope reads your book?
Like most authors, I hope a wide audience reads my book. Like most books, it will probably be largely an audience of women between the ages of 25 and 65. I think that’s who reads most books. Every time a man reads it and loves it, I feel great about that because men should read stories about women’s desire and women’s sense of agency.
Do I think the Jews will read it? I think a lot of Jews will read it. It’s Jewish fiction. I hope a lot of non-Jews read it, too. I’m kind of glad I don’t live in Pico-Robertson anymore. It probably will be read within the Modern Orthodox community. And I don’t think that my book is so important it’s going to be polarizing. I would imagine that there will be mixed reactions. Some folks in the community will love it and find it to be a page turner; some people will probably be offended by it. There are some people who will be able to see it in its fullness, and some people who will just see the parts that aren’t as nice.
Do you think Modern Orthodox Jews will be offended?
It’s a book that shows a lot of the beauty of Judaism, of an observant life, of a life dictated by the Jewish calendar, and also shows the story of one person who’s really struggling with some of those containers.
It’s been a long time since there’s been a lot of Modern Orthodox representation in mainstream fiction. Chaim Potok set a lot of his books in a Modern Orthodox world, but people didn’t even have the language to call it that, or to recognize it as that. There’s an underrepresentation of Modern Orthodox life in modern fiction, art and TV. There’s been a resurgence about Haredi Judaism.
My hope is that people will see I really tried to write about the beauty as well as the parts of the life that Rina, my character, is rubbing up against.
What are your thoughts about the theme “duty over desire?”
I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I wrote this story because it’s a sad story about a character that felt it was mutually exclusive. She’s not sheltered before she gets married, but she hasn’t had agency over her own desire until she meets this man, Will, and falls in love with him. And that’s remarkable, because she’s in her 30s with two young children. I hope that some of the ways that Rina thinks about these olive days of her youth in the book helps people recognize that duty and desire are not mutually exclusive. I think a question for Rina is how much of her feeling stifled is about the culture of Modern Orthodoxy and how much of it is attributed to a bad marriage.
What do you hope readers get out of reading “Olive Days?”
I write about women’s desire, obsessive love, the constraints of belief and feminism in a lot of different ways. And for me, it’s really important for readers to think about what feminism looks like in different contexts, or in women’s lives who aren’t in what you might think of as mainstream in the pop cultural North American way. I hope that they get to either see something of themselves or a part of life that they don’t usually get to see and understand and empathize with the characters who are living these lives. I also hope that people will spend some time thinking about how women have the ability to actualize desire.
