It became something entirely different - a fun, fantastical tale - but it allowed me to discuss all my themes of immigration and alienation at the same time. And that’s really where the book took off. She challenged me to add an element of fantasy, and see if that changed things.

I was complaining to a friend in my workshop about it, and she pointed out something I hadn’t even considered: I was writing these very realist stories, but my first love was sci-fi and fantasy. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of awful. I was writing the short stories with an eye to pulling out those similarities, but the collection refused to gel. We’ve known each other over half my life now, and over the years I’ve been continually struck by how our families’ coming-to-America experiences have mirrored each other, even though we’re from two different (and, to many, opposing) cultures. It all started when I was at Columbia University, working on a collection of short stories that combined real-life tales from my own (Jewish) family with my husband’s (Arab American) family. The impetus for the book mostly came from the issue of immigration, but on a very personal level. What was your inspiration for the story of The Golem and the Jinni? Were you studying Jewish and Arabic mysticism? The Gilded Age? As I read, I found myself wondering a few times if the issue of immigration brought the concept to mind it’s as if you took the concept of “the Other” to an entirely new level.

New York is such a fairy tale city already, with all those layers of myth and fantasy and longing. “It seemed pretty obvious that if an immigrant golem and an immigrant jinni were going to run into each other in a city in the U.S., it would have to be in NYC.

The golem and the jinni book 3