Michael Chabon on Obama

Jews on ice | Salon Books:

We sent out an e-mail to pretty much everybody we had an e-mail address for who we felt like we had a right to pull on their sleeve. You can create this page through the Obama campaign where you solicit donations and people just click on the link and they can donate any small amount. It seemed like a really great way to raise money for Barack Obama, of whom I'm just completely enamored. I've been voting since 1984 and in every election I've always had to hold my nose, or at best I was all right with the idea of whoever it was I was voting for. I mean I've never been completely certain, completely passionate about a candidate in my entire life as a voter until Barack Obama and it's such a strange, exciting feeling.

What is it about him that you like so much?

In addition to that he's of my generation, he's the same age I am and I feel like he speaks my language in some way --

Not Yiddish?

No, not Yiddish, at least as far as I know. For one thing the guy can write. He's a really good writer and that means a lot to me and is not true of almost anyone else who's ever run for office since I've been voting. I know that might seem silly, but that means something to me. But it's not just that he can write, it's that his writing, especially when he writes about America and American history, displays this sense of complete ambivalence. Of being fully conscious of both what's great and what's terrible about America and American history. The ills, the evils, the massacres, the injustices that have been done, and at the same time a sense of pride and faith and optimism that's coupled with a totally clear-eyed sense of the grimness that's there as well.

Michael Chabon on past and future in Judaism

From Salon Books:

Is there something about Jews and Jewishness that makes the 'what if' story so appealing?

Michael Chabon: I don't know. Certainly it's hard to think of something that would be more focused simultaneously on the past and on the future than Judaism, because Judaism is all about history and what happened to us and how we got where we are. The patterns of our history and the crucial moments -- the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht, these key moments, these dates that both seem to change everything and yet merely were repeating, in some way, the last time.

And yet at the same time Judaism, in its truest form, is very focused on the future, on the coming of the Messiah, on the redemption of the world. To have that sort of simultaneous sense of looking backward and looking forward -- I think it does definitely lend itself to the kind of speculative, hypothetical thinking of the counterfactual novel. You're looking at history ... and asking, 'Where are the moments where things changed, where history forked and it could have gone this way?'