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On Waiting, Tending Life, and Comedy at God’s Scale
A Q&A with author Courtney Sender
By Kevin Madigan
An MTS (2018) graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Courtney Sender took her BA from Yale College and an MFA from Johns Hopkins. In addition to writing for the New York Times and the Atlantic, she has published prize-winning short fiction in the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She has held several distinguished writing fellowships. Sender’s first novel, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me—a “braided story collection”—was published in the spring of 2023. The book has garnered effusive praise from Deesha Philyaw (“a stunner from the very first page”), Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, and Ann Patchett, who said: “Courtney Sender matches the light topic of youthful lost love with the extreme heft of the Holocaust.” Kevin Madigan, with whom Sender has studied and taught, interviews her here on the occasion of the book’s publication.
Bulletin: When did you start to think you’d want to write fiction?
Sender: I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and fiction has always been the only genre of interest to me. It’s not until recently that I interrogated why. I’ve written nonfiction, but it’s the great irony of self-revelation that I find myself cagey and self-protective in that genre. After all, the “I” there is me! No safety there to speak as myself at my most honest—self-contradictory and hypocritical and self-deceiving, as we all are. Paradoxically, it’s fiction where I can be my most honest. I can split myself into two characters and fight with myself; I can inhabit the mind of a different character viewing me from the outside; I can externalize internal weather, literalize what is only vague or hazy in my actual life. Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” That’s Tim O’Brien. It’s an axiom that always felt intuitive to me, though it took a few years to put words to it.
Bulletin: After graduating from Yale College, you went on to do your MFA at Johns Hopkins. Why did you decide to study religion at HDS?
Sender: The MFA was a great opportunity to be treated, for two years, like a writer. Long before I or my classmates had enough skill or experience to be professionals, we were taken seriously in a way that feels to me now a bit like playing house. You train in play-space. We had some nascent talent that hadn’t been sharpened through grit and time and hard work. Of course my professors were brilliant writers, putting pearls before people who could return to them in their fullness later. Perhaps that’s what all teaching is. I’m reading Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater now, and there’s a line where Sabbath is remembering a line from Lear that “could have meant nothing at all to him in the theater of the Bowery Basement Players in 1960”—in other words, when he spoke them as a younger man. I think about the MFA like that. Alice McDermott telling me to tell it straight: no pyrotechnics, chronological order, A to B to C to D. That’s the focus of the advice I tell myself now.
After that, I worked for years on a novel that I still stand behind, but it went nowhere. I got stuck. The craft work I did in the MFA started to feel like only half the equation of what it took to be a writer. Something more nebulous had to be the other half. Call it inspiration, the muse, the flow state—to me it feels spiritual, both the narrative voice or momentum that can arrive in the mind to spark a story and the capacity to start again and keep going in a field marked by continuous rejection and failure.
I was also working, then as now, on projects that take on spirituality as a subject, particularly Jewish spirituality. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and that’s left a profound mark on my life. Attending HDS was a way of starting to study the biblical, theological, exegetical, literary, and historical antecedents and consequences of an event of such magnitude, for the moral state or humanity and for the Jewish people and consciousness.
Bulletin: How has your study at HDS influenced your writing?
Sender: The class I took with you, Kevin, has been endlessly influential. We talked about the historical factors that led to the Holocaust, the development of antisemitism in Christendom and into early- and mid-twentieth-century Germany, the great man theory of history versus the belief in greater sociocultural forces, and—most interestingly to me—the theological impact of the Holocaust on Judaism.
My writing is often about the profoundly personal, often incongruous impact of the Holocaust on my life here in the twenty-first century. It’s an event that can lead me to wisdom and perspective and also can lead me astray. When are its lessons applicable to the present day? When aren’t they? How to tell the difference? HDS helped me place these questions in a paradigm bigger than myself, so I could in turn bring them to bear on my characters.
Kevin, you and I have also taught together in multiple classes about the literature and films of the Holocaust. You’ve given me the chance to revisit classics of the genre: Elie Wiesel’s Night and its companion Day—one of my favorite works of literature—and Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl.” And they’re classics because they reward that revisitation; they’re endlessly revealing something new to me.
Your classes also piqued my interest in Holocaust film, which was otherwise too gruesome or visceral for me. I generally prefer the pacing and cerebral interludes of literature. But the filmic vision and vocabulary has been very influential in my own crafting of scenes and thinking about audience for Holocaust literature.
I also want to mention a two-semester series I took with Andrew Teeter on the Hebrew Bible. He talks a lot about prospection in the Bible. Prospection being the way the Bible looks forward into the future—as contrasted with retrospection, a term I think we’re more familiar with. Teeter’s view of the Hebrew Bible was so inherently literary to me, I wound up learning a lot about the threading of narrative and theme over the course of a long work.
Bulletin: Your grandparents are survivors of the Holocaust. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with your grandmother? How did it shape your view of the world?
Sender: For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that my grandmother’s entire family—save one brother—was killed in the Holocaust. I’m sure there was a time in childhood when I didn’t know, but I can’t remember it. I felt immersed in the knowledge that the world is a place that systematically murders my family’s brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and parents and grandparents. And in a way, growing up like this desensitized me to the notion that the Holocaust is a unique event. The way I understood the world, such gruesomeness didn’t seem anomalous. It seemed to me that civilization and civility are the scrim on top of this base-level possibility of systematized violence. It’s not hate, exactly.
It’s very simple to call antisemitism or racist violence “hate.” But it’s bigger than that too: it’s social pressure, it’s normalization of a dehumanizing impulse that’s there and that societies resist a lot of the time, it’s Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.
I think it’s very simple to call antisemitism or racist violence “hate.” But it’s bigger than that too: it’s social pressure, it’s normalization of a dehumanizing impulse that’s there and that societies resist a lot of the time, it’s Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, it’s bureaucratic and routine to the point that it need not really be motivated by any particular hate.
With all this, I wasn’t an unhappy child! I was quite happy. The fact of the threat of Holocaust was neither a sad nor a happy fact of the world; it was just a fact. Every pessimist calls themselves a realist, but that’s how it feels. When you jump, you come back down. When you let a cultured people exist for long enough, they start killing your family.
It’s hard to articulate this better than I have in the book, which is just a way of saying I labored over these sentences. In one story, “To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved,” I put it this way: “I grew up . . . knowing any neighbor will pick up a gun against any neighbor and shoot them in the back of the head. It never surprised me, when people couldn’t love each other. It was more surprising when they could.”
The more positive side of this worldview has been a deep and abiding respect for life, even when that life is all suffering. This is very Jewish. In the first story in that suite, “I Am Going to Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved,” the character says: “It was life that kept my Nana going in the camps, that was all, not a gift but a fact, like the laws of physics or of gravity. You are given life, you tend it. You are struck on the knee, your leg jumps. An effect without a cause beyond the physical source. You need not hope for better to tend the life you have. God gave it: hate him for it, love him for it, disbelieve in him or spit on him or try to find his mother; you have it now.”
Bulletin: Your fiction encompasses many themes, including love, longing, and women in the modern world. The theme of trauma is profoundly linked in your writing to all your other themes. That said, I wonder if you can talk about how the Holocaust—as an event in history, as an event that directly impacted your grandmother, and as an event that impacts you as a member of the “third generation”—works in your fiction. That’s a big, complicated question. Let’s start with your short stories first.
Sender: In any individual short story, I hope to capture the way the Holocaust works on a contemporary inheritor—be it a direct descendent of survivors, as I am, or a member of the world that has existed since the humanitarian catastrophe that was the Holocaust. Though the pairing may seem unusual at first blush, the specter of the Holocaust seems to me to intersect naturally with themes of love, longing, and women in the modern world. The Holocaust wiped out two-thirds of European Jews. The global population of Jews today has still not recovered to pre-Holocaust numbers. So the question of repopulating arises, and attached is the question of reproduction. And that’s a burden that falls on women, particularly in a matrilineal religion. It’s a burden that’s attached to sexual and familial partnership, which is therefore attached to love and longing. The links to me are clear. Yet they can be unexpected to many, so the aim of any of my stories is to create a lens—a narrative perspective, a character, a voice, a worldview— through which the links seem organic.
Bulletin: How about In Other Lifetimes?
In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me
Sender: At the book length, the aim is to bring the reader through as many facets as possible of the relationship between the Holocaust and today. The central story of In Other Lifetimes is set in the camps; it’s a descent in and then a rising out. Many of my characters eschew hope. And yet the structure of the book is inherently life-affirming. We move out of the camps. This doesn’t mean, of course, that humanity is safe from a return in some form or another. But the spirit and the will emerge out of them.
Bulletin: Let me ask, too, how Jewish tradition works in your book. You seem to work by inversion. For example, in one of your stories, you seem to invert the Jewish notion of Tikkun Olam, “to save a life is to save a world.” That seems to be part of your craft, no?
Sender: “To lose one person is to lose a world.” That’s the line from “Missives,” referring to the loss of the Nana character who is common to all my characters in all my writing. Every one of my characters in all their different universes have the same Nana! She’s both based on and distinct from my own Nana, who was a survivor who lost her family but was not herself in the camps. There’s a photo of her family in the back of the book.
I’ll sometimes bring in Jewish tradition in explicit ways, as in the story from the perspective of Lilith about a love affair with Eve. And often the Jewish tradition is there in the play with smaller lines like the above. The last line of the book is “Believe, believe, believe,” which evokes to me “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh.”
Bulletin: Part of the craft is that the book is a collection of stories that, by the end, reads like a novel. Why did you choose that form? Or did it, so to speak, choose you?
Sender: My aim was to depict longed-for return after an interminable wait. The pain of waiting is often acute, sometimes barely bearable, but above all it feels long. As a writer, how do you capture the sheer length of the space between the action—the loss and the return—without boring the reader?
My answer was to write a book that reads like a story collection at first, so the reader experiences what the characters do: the end of the story. The loss of the characters. And if the reader is mourning or missing those characters, believing them gone for good, all the while meeting new characters—perfect. That’s the degree of loss I want the reader to feel.
Then the novel sneaks up from behind, and the lost characters return to us readers with all the shock of their return for the characters.
Of course, there’s more than a few hints of their return if you read the many paired titles in the table of contents. It’s fine with me to have a little hope!
Bulletin: Would it be true to say that the book is, among other things, a love story? If so, how have you attempted to stretch the traditional definition of that genre?
Sender: The book is absolutely a love story. It’s also a love letter from me, the author, to a set of concentric circles of people: above all, anyone who is lonely. And second, within that, people who are romantically lonely, who do not have a partner for this world. And within that, women who are experiencing that loneliness and longing.
So the book itself is, hopefully, a love story for the reader. It’s against platitude, which is to say against the easy and untrue insistence that circumstance will change just because we need it to. But it ends with “Believe, believe, believe.” And that belief may be that the longed-for love will return and be your partner. Or it may be that familial love, friendship love, self-love are not substitutes, because no form of love is a substitute for any other, but they are valuable. They are life-giving. There are many ways to live a good life. Not interchangeably or equivalently good, but equally good.
Bulletin: On another topic. How do you think about the relation between the Holocaust and the contemporary world, especially contemporary politics? Some writers and thinkers seem to want to cordon off the Holocaust from other realms of experience. My impression is you do not. Can you say why, and how might you respond to those who disagree?
Sender: It’s true that I don’t want to cordon off the Holocaust from analogy in the present day—though we must also be very careful, lest we degrade what it’s an analogy for. The scapegoating of an entire people, the systematic work to erase an entire people from the face of the planet, is an inappropriate analogy for many of the wrongs we see in the world today. Not just inappropriate morally, but inappropriate logically. There are closer and better parallels elsewhere.
With that said, I believe what’s often lost is that the Holocaust was not quite about “hate,” as it is so often simplified to help it map on to other -isms today (which may or may not be about “hate,” themselves). It was about a long and multigenerational history of the conspiracy theory that is antisemitism, which grew and spread over millennia of Christianity. It was root-deep in Europe at the time, even as Jews had largely assimilated in places like Berlin. So we’re looking here at the level not just of “hate” but of belief in a story about how the world works and why it isn’t working.
Fascism is characterized by, among other things, aesthetics—“The Docent” in my book is about this. It’s interested in the subsummation of the individual’s choice to the group identity of following the charismatic leader. It’s interested in the destruction of democratic norms and laws. These are the appropriate logical parallels to draw for society and the world writ large.
And of course there’s a part of the Holocaust, of antisemitism as a phenomenon, that’s specific to the threat to Jews. A group that is uniquely targeted, historically and today, by both right and left—either too assimilated and passing and therefore threatening, or else too strange and other. Somehow the enemy within and always the enemy without. I think we need to be very careful, on all sides, not to play into these tropes.
Bulletin: You use irony and even humor as literary devices. Can you talk a little bit about how humor works in your fiction? How does it relate to the horror and trauma of the Holocaust? To the Jewish comic tradition in literature?
Sender: Yes, thank you for pointing this out—with all of the above true about the contents of the book, it’s also funny! (I hope.) There’s such a wonderful tradition of Jewish gallows humor, from Sholem Aleichem to Bernard Malamud to Philip Roth to Grace Paley to Elisa Albert. To Sarah Silverman and Larry David!
At the very basic level, I think the Jewish culture is one of self-irony, of a pulling-back to see the ridiculous even within what’s only suffering when viewed up close.
At the very basic level, I think the Jewish culture is one of self-irony, of a pulling-back to see the ridiculous even within what’s only suffering when viewed up close. I just read Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater—a masterpiece that’s ultimately a passionate ode to life—and the voice is endlessly witty, even when contemplating disappearance and ruin and suicide.
Sometimes I think tragedy happens at the human scale and comedy happens at God’s scale. Everything is comic with enough distance. The famous axiom goes that comedy is tragedy plus time. I kind of think comedy is tragedy plus distance, of which time is a subcategory, but we can also think about distances of scale and geography. Zooming out enough to look at humanity scurrying about, it’s comic.
Then at other times, of course, I think it’s only God’s scale that can perceive the full weight of a tragedy like the Holocaust. And that the human instinct to make comic at a distance what is tragic up close can also foreclose our sympathy and empathy where we might need it.
Bulletin: Your relationship with contemporary Germany has changed recently. Can you tell me about that?
Sender: In February 2023, I was naturalized as a German citizen via restitution. It was a long process that involved tracking down and translating and apostilling documents during the height of the COVID pandemic. My father and aunt helped a lot.
I’d always felt complicatedly toward Germany. I visited years ago through Germany Close Up, a wonderful organization that reintroduces Jewish North Americans to Germany through the lens of the Holocaust. I felt profoundly uncomfortable there. If I was the granddaughter of survivors drinking at the bar, surely the grandchildren of Nazis were drinking in that bar, too. In the abstract, that’s a beautiful thing. In the moment, I was overwhelmed.
But after the January 6 insurrection, I pledged to act on what seemed the wisdom of my family: nowhere is safe and stable forever. More ways out are better than fewer. I wrote for Slate about what it felt like to walk into the German Consulate General Boston and receive the citizenship that was stripped from my grandfather. It’s a privilege I have as a direct result of a right he lost. I’m grateful to Germany. And the complicated history remains.
For anyone interested or eligible, the process is covered by Article 116(2), first sentence, of the Basic Law. Basically, it returns German nationality to descendants of those stripped of citizenship by the Nuremberg Race Laws, which declared that Jews were not of the Aryan race and therefore not German citizens.
Bulletin: Readers and writers are often interested in a writer’s writing and reading practices. Can you say a little bit about this? How do ideas come to you? How and where do you write?
Sender: Reading is my best inspiration. I’ll often start writing in the margins of other people’s books if something about the voice and choices of the writer compels me. I perk up especially when they make a choice I never would have thought of. A swerve in point of view or story direction that works for the story at hand but that wouldn’t have occurred to me as a writer: that’s where I’m learning. I’m trying to retrace what it would have felt like to be the mind that found that swerve. It’s all that’s necessary, I think, to improve as a writer.
Ever since my first book debuted, I’ve fallen in love with used books. Little Free Libraries, used bookstores, estate sales, anything where the marketing and PR departments are no longer relevant features of the reason the book is in front of me. Just me and the prose and nothing buzzy about it. That has been a deeply satisfying and authentic way of engaging with literature as I (attempt to) write it.
Bulletin: I understand that your next project uses humor not only in its title but as a central thematic and narrative device. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Sender: My next project is a novel that will approach the Holocaust, and the anxiety-vs.-wisdom quandary of applying its legacy today, in a more acerbic tone. I hope it’s biting, funny, surprising, irreverent as a portal to real reverence. It’s describing love from a narrative posture that’s much more post-love than In Other Lifetimes. HDS is in it! The labyrinth at HDS is in it, anyway. That’s all I’ll say for now.
Bulletin: In Other Lifetimes has gotten raves—and gotten them from some very distinguished writers. Congratulations.
Kevin Madigan is the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School. The author of many books, he most recently completed The Popes against the Protestants (Yale University Press, 2021).
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