Featured Interview With Ahuva Batya Scharff
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am the daughter of Jewish pork producers (Truth!) and spent the first 11 years of my life on a hog ranch outside of Fresno, California. We also had raisins, but that’s perhaps not as interesting as Jews raising pigs.
When my parents divorced, I moved to Oregon with my mother and brother to live on a hobby farm in the Willamette Valley. Though I lived in Los Angeles for 15 years after university, I prefer rural areas with lots of trees and make my home in NW Washington, near Bellingham, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I live in what is essentially a writer’s retreat filled with folk and tribal art from my travels, with two cats and a miniature schnauzer. My animals all have Hebrew names and love to sleep in the bed while I’m writing.
By training, I am a mental health researcher with a doctorate in the transdisciplinary field of transformative studies. Transformative studies looks at how change occurs–in humans, systems, organizations, etc. Our research is generally focused on solving a problem rather than “advancing the knowledge base” of a field. I don’t look at a problem through the lens of psychology or anthropology to advance our understanding of psychology or anthropology. Instead I use information from many fields to find solutions to sometimes very complex issues. In my case, I look at how we can improve wellbeing and resilience in humans around the world.
To that end, I am the founder of and principal investigator for the Institute for Complementary and Indigenous Mental Health Research. I am an explorer who travels to some of the most remote communities in the world to learn how non-Western, indigenous, and often marginalized groups address mental health concerns. It has been a fascinating area of inquiry that has given me the opportunity to learn from wonderful people in every part of the world. These encounters not only inform my writing, but have given me opportunities to learn new ways of connecting with the world around me and appreciating human resilience and courage.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I was a little girl growing up on the farm, I dreamed of being a writer and an anthropologist. I longed to travel to far off lands to meet the people who lived there, and write about my adventures. And that’s what I do. While I write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, my “work” is to learn about complementary and indigenous mental health practices to improve overall wellbeing among people worldwide. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between trauma and climate change.
That’s where my novel, “The Path to God’s Promise” was born. How might people deal with potential hardships related to climate change, and are we willing to make changes–including radical changes–to prevent the worst outcomes? Fiction gives me room to explore those themes and ideas in a way that nonfiction doesn’t.
Funny story. When I was in kindergarten in the late 1970s, we were taken to the school library weekly for a reading circle. Kindergarteners were not allowed to check out books. It was assumed that we couldn’t read. I didn’t understand that we were only at the library to hear stories, not get books. I had been to the public library and thought that libraries were a place where you chose books you wanted to read. What I failed to grasp was the concept of the library card, that one had to have permission to take books, to check them out. I thought that if you were taken to the library, you had permission to take a book. I was five; what did I know? I was caught “stealing” a library book. In point of fact, I was returning a book I had borrowed. The principal wanted to expel me. Can you imagine expelling a kindergarten student for stealing a library book? My mom was called. I should probably mention that she spent more than 30 years as an elementary school teacher. Long story short, I was not expelled and the following day, there was a small reading group set up for the handful of kindergarten students who were already readers.
My first published work was in the fourth grade. I was taken on a school trip to the zoo and asked to write a poem about any animal that caught my fancy. I wrote a poem about a pygmy hippo. The poem was deemed so good that it, and a drawing of a hippo, were put into the school’s newsletter. My first brush with literary fame!
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Margaret Atwood. Barbara Kingsolver. Neil Gaiman. Stephen King. Octavia Butler. Alexander McCall Smith. Jorge Luis Borges.
I like fantasy, often choosing stories that are about our contemporary world with a little magical overlay. Or books with ghosts. Or jinn. Or witches. Seanan McGuire does an excellent job of mixing the contemporary with the completely fantastic in the Wayward Children series.
I love stories centered on people from other cultures. I love folklore and learning about people who have vastly different lives and worldviews. How do the characters see the world? What are their motivations? Do they inspire me to action? Plus incorporate an angel or mad scientist if it works with the context. That’s what I like about Borges, a South American take on fantasy.
I like stories about wonderful characters. While not fantasy, I’m crazy about Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Ramotswe and Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. They’re brilliant people who I would love to meet in “real” life. I am not alone in wanting to have tea and fat cakes in Gaborone with Mma Ramotswe. While I might not want to meet her in my home or my dreams, Butler’s Shori Matthews is an interesting take on the vampire (and prejudice). I want to read characters who become alive through the telling of their story.
I love Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, especially “Oryx and Crake.” I love the way Atwood draws on science, history, and the genuinely possible to create her dystopian worlds. My outlook is more hopeful than Atwood’s, but I aspire to her masterful world creation.
I don’t generally like when authors read their own works, with the notable exception of Neil Gaiman. “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” is an even more intriguing story when read by Gaiman. The oddity of his voice is the perfect match for the strangeness of his tales. Too, Gaiman’s ability to add magic to anything is exceptional. I am simply crazy about “The Graveyard Book.”
I also like that many of these authors talk about the process of writing. I know he isn’t the originator of the idea, but I consistently remind myself of King’s, “Kill your darlings…” as I edit. I read “It” on a canoe trip down a river in Oregon with a group of Girl Scouts and was pretty sure that a clown was going to come out from under the canoes and kill us all. “The Stand” is one of my favorites among King’s works. I also really enjoyed “Needful Things.”
Tell us a little about your latest book?
If God asked you to be a prophet, would you do it? Before you say yes, consider that doing so likely means giving up your goals for yourself and almost certain ridicule in your community. I mean really, if someone got on TV and said they were speaking on God’s behalf, wouldn’t most people laugh?
Yet that’s exactly what God asks of Elinor Simentov in “The Path to God’s Promise.” God’s request is loaded for Elinor. Prophecy is not accepted in contemporary Jewish practice. And Elinor isn’t “special.” She’s a recovered alcoholic and a trauma survivor who has no exemplars to recommend her for the job, except that she talks with God, and despite how she sees herself, God believes she’s exactly the right person to share His message.
Originally, I was going to write a nonfiction book about climate change, but with all the anti-intellectual pushback against climate scientists as propagating “fake news,” I decided instead to write fiction. Writing a fictional story allowed me to look at climate change from a different angle than nonfiction. I got to jump into the “what ifs” by taking Elinor through past historical and mythological (depending on your religious views) events, and potential futures, so that we could learn together what might happen if we indulge the best and the worst in us.
In Elinor, we have an unlikely hero. But then, aren’t we all unlikely heroes? The story doesn’t work if Elinor is exceptional. If she is, then there’s little hope for humankind. If we’re going to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, we’ll have to take collective action, not wait for the best and brightest to “save” us. Elinor has to look at herself–her feelings of low self-worth and the negative stories she tells herself that limit what she can accomplish. As much as the book is a climate change warning, it’s also about the deeply personal struggles we have to see the best in ourselves. If we’re going to change anything, climate/politics/community, we have to stop hoping solutions will come from outside. Elinor shows a path for us to become more empowered versions of ourselves.
It took me a decade to write the book. I dove deep into the history in and of the Torah, Jewish mysticism, and the roles of prophets and angels in Jewish stories. I studied Talmud and Jewish folktales. I also researched climate change projections and recent examples of extreme storms, fires, and other natural disasters in various parts of the world. Whether she was in the distant past or here and now, I wanted the world in which Elinor lives to become real.
Books take on a life of their own after they are published. Sometimes new themes develop that I didn’t initially see as the author. What surprised me is how much of the waves of antisemitism that are part of the book have played out since the novel was published a few months ago. “The Path to God’s Promise” came out only days after the October 7 massacre in Israel. It has been disheartening to see this particular potential future come to pass.
While it may be difficult to be a Jewish author at a time when antisemitism is at an unfortunate high, I have genuinely enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten from readers, including and especially those who are not Jewish. What I call “service oriented” Christians and Catholics have rallied behind the story. By service oriented, I mean people who see their expression of faith to be through acts of service. At a book signing, one Christian reader shared that she fell in love with Elinor precisely because she was so broken. She appreciated the ways in which Elinor fights through her deficits in a commitment to her relationship with God. It’s a spiritual story I’m told inspires those of us who might need a boost. As an author, such feedback is heartening.
Because the book has moved so many Christian and “spiritual but not religious” readers, I feel I must underscore what prophecy is in a Jewish context. Prophecy is a warning, not a reading of a predestined future. It’s a parent saying to a teen, “put on your sunscreen so you don’t get burned.” We don’t force them to act, but do warn of potential consequences. The best prophets are those who are heeded and horrific outcomes averted. I hope that Elinor does not become a fortuneteller. I hope that like Job, she is able to be one of the voices to whom people listen and motivate all of us to create change.
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