Interview by Joy Manning
A CONVERSATION WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN, AUTHOR OF PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN (New Door Books)
In Nathaniel Popkin’s fourth novel, Partly Strong, Partly Broken a progressive rabbi tries to hold her community together in the month leading up to October 7, 2023. Set across thirty-three days in a New Jersey synagogue, the novel ends just as news of Hamas’s attack breaks on a hospital waiting room television. Much of the novel’s tension arises from the fact that the reader knows everything that’s coming; the characters do not.
Popkin had completed early drafts of the book before October 7 and rewrote it after. He says as a result of that, a more serious and timely work emerged. In our conversation, he talked about the choice to end on the threshold, the role of inherited trauma, and the surprising fact that one of the book’s minor characters may carry more of the author’s own perspective than the rabbi at the center of it all.
Joy Manning: The novel is told largely through Rabbi Adinah’s point of view. What drew you to her, and how did you find her voice? Did she arrive fully formed, or did you have to write your way there?
Nathaniel Popkin: The earlier versions of the book did kind of arrive fully formed, and I had a sense of her. But she really did evolve. For example, she’s a very giving person and also a very willful person, and I knew both of those things were real. She had this thing where she’s coming back from traveling and she’s got gifts for everyone. I knew she had those gifts, but it took me a while to understand that they were really intentional on her part—that she had something in mind by them. In the final version, where one of those gifts is the hamsas that go to Celia and Fami, that’s when it really clicked for me—the idea that one shows up for other people in that sort of way, by giving.
Joy: Adinah is a lesbian whose great love is Sana, a Palestinian Israeli. That triangulation isn’t exactly a conventional pairing in contemporary American Jewish fiction. What did that relationship let you explore?
Nathaniel: This is one way in which her reality came to me fully formed—the outlines of who she was, where she had spent her time, who she had committed herself to and why. The formative years she spent with Sana in Israel and Palestine were in a milieu of a different version of Israel, though one already hardening toward the horror of today. That was so formative to her—I’m not sure I can explain it. I never considered a different sort of rabbi nor a different sort of reality for her.
The novel evolved a lot in the writing and the rewriting. But the global perspective of it—when Adinah came to me in my head—was who she was on the page. I’m not sure where that comes from, honestly.
Joy: The novel keeps returning to the idea that we carry our ancestors’ wounds—through your characters’ interest in epigenetics, through the theme of Cain and Abel, and through the histories the characters bring with them. Why did inherited trauma become such a central theme?
Nathaniel: Because everyone in this circumstance is injured in some way and carries the injuries of past generations before them. I felt that truth is what we often miss when we’re just engaged in blaming each other. Obviously, the American Jewish community carries an inherited reality from the Holocaust that is the most decisively important thing. Previously it wasn’t, of course—the American Jewish community began in the 1850s and evolved in the late 19th century with the big wave of immigration from the Pale of Settlement. There was no Holocaust yet. Even into the 1930s, American Jews were thinking about Palestine as a project they were related to, but it didn’t involve the Holocaust because the Holocaust hadn’t existed yet.
There’s all this new scientific research about epigenetics—how it can be measured, how our genes adjust to the environment. And the environment that Jewish people have inherited has caused tremendous trauma. The same is desperately true if we’re talking about Palestinians. One of the most horrifying things at the base of my torment over this is the way Israelis have never acknowledged the Nakba and the effects of removing people in 1948 from their villages. In the lack of acknowledgment, it creates the cycle of humiliation. In the acknowledgment, there’s a possibility for healing.
Joy: Yaacov Attai struck me as a moral center of the novel—the Israeli American who teaches Theo about restorative justice, whose mother runs the Listening Project. Was he always meant to play that role, or did he grow into it?
Nathaniel: I’d say there are multiple moral centers, but I agree, because he carries a story of restorative justice, because his mother has created this really extraordinary reality, and because he himself chose to leave—a political step, on his own—to come to the U.S. He’s an Israeli who in the American context is far more pro-Palestinian than some other people. He certainly carries my political, my moral center. The rabbi does as well, but perhaps Yaacov carries more of my perspective than anyone, which is kind of surprising.
His role really took off as I was writing. I realized how important he was within the rabbi’s world. I wanted to make sure the political positioning of the characters wasn’t trope, wasn’t clichéd; that’s why you have someone like Richard Rodgers, a left-wing union organizer who is very pro-Israel.
To me, Yaacov represents the possibility, and also the path untaken. He inserts into the novel the key possibility that the reader knows, after the events of October 7, are not going to happen. And that’s the tragedy.
Joy: The title comes from a tiny scroll inside Adinah’s nineteenth-century talisman box—Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a beast with feet part iron and part clay. What came first: the title or the image?
Nathaniel: The title came first. The novel was completed in its first drafts, even in some revisions, in about July 2023. Then it got rewritten after October 7. But in that earlier version, I had just dumped myself into Scripture and was reading stuff I hadn’t read before. The image and the title both come from the story of Daniel.
I had a longer version of the title earlier in the process. The Kingdom Shall Be Partly Strong and Partly Broken. I really loved that. Then I needed a way, without weighing the early chapters down or taking the reader too far out of the action, to create a metaphor for the book that the reader could carry with them through the rest of it. That’s what the beast does. There are versions of that beast that have been created over the centuries, and I just loved the possibility of the crumbling and the strength at the same time. In Israel’s blindness, it’s created so much strength and yet has made itself so vulnerable.
You know how it is with writing: you absorb things from the ether you didn’t realize were there. There had been a Hurricane Daniel that year. I sort of fictionalized it. Those are the weird things a novel can work with.
Joy: The arsonist in your story isn’t an outsider antisemite but Louis, the synagogue’s fired building manager. His is an act of personal humiliation dressed as a hate crime. Why that choice? It refuses the more obvious narrative.
Nathaniel: Like Abraham Lincoln said about America in the 1850s, the danger is from within. Louis is kind of in and out. He’s part of the congregation, but he’s really just an employee. I do believe each of us is responsible for ourselves. When you’re talking about a community that is partly strong and partly broken, well, that’s coming from inside of it. It would be easy to place a villain outside of the community, but that’s not really the subject of this book.
It’s very obvious that the actions of the Israeli government are causing more antisemitism in the world. It would be stupid to say otherwise. But antisemitism wasn’t really a theme in this novel. The danger was coming from our inability to hear each other. No one ever could listen to Louis. That was his own damn fault, but he carried so much personal shame and humiliation and, at the end of the day, lashed out.
Joy: The book ends right at the threshold of October 7, with the news breaking on the waiting room television. You’d completed earlier drafts before the attack and rewrote afterward. What made you stop there rather than carry forward?
Nathaniel: The earlier version was a more satiric, funnier book, written before October 7. It had many of the same characters and the same tensions. But when October 7 and its aftermath happened, the total reality changed. And it’s now changed forever. I realized we really are at an inflection point, where a given dynamic of society is in the process of truly changing—the relationship between American Jews and Israel and, therefore, American Jews to each other.
I turned to my old favorite, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, the famous novel of Sicily in the 1850s when the world of the oligarchs and the aristocracy is about to end. That helped me think about how to write a moment of evolution.
But I really struggled with how to refashion the novel. Some people said, “You have to carry it past October 7. That’s the novel people are going to want to read.” A close longtime friend who is a literary person said, “You can’t.” And my gut told me that if I tried to portray people in the immediate aftermath—weeks or days after—it would be a terrible cartoon. Everyone was injured. People who didn’t know anything about anything were saying all kinds of things, on either side. So I said, well, the reader knows what’s going to happen, but the characters don’t. That seemed like a really interesting tension to carry through the book.
Writing this novel was my way of coping. There were people who wanted to know how Rabbi Adinah was going to respond after October 7. But that would have made her so vulnerable in ways she didn’t deserve to be. I couldn’t do it to her.
Joy: Trudy Sugar, right-wing and pro-Netanyahu, is the most uncomfortable character in the book. How difficult was she to write, and did she become softer or harder in revision?
Nathaniel: She became softer. She started out, in the earlier version, even less nuanced than she is now—which is not terribly nuanced. She’s more real now. Her story makes sense to me. The type is obvious; we’ve all met that type. But she’s also a person. I would say she’s not a bad person. I want her to be happy. If we were to sit down with her, we would find her misguided. She’s insecure, so she plays power games with the rabbi right away. She forces herself onto people in a way that will make them uncomfortable. I think she’s really afraid of vulnerability.
I’m reading László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming right now, and that novel is filled with people you don’t really like. They’re cartoonish, and yet they’re also real. It’s about seeing them being vulnerable. I hope I’ve done enough to show Trudy as a vulnerable human being—also a victim of epigenetics, like everyone else. She was the biggest struggle to write. I loved her. I didn’t like her.
Joy: A lot of your work is set in Philadelphia, but this novel is set in suburban New Jersey. How did you choose the setting?
Nathaniel: I didn’t, really. It just happened. I never saw Philadelphia as the setting for this. I know too much about the very particularities of the place in regard to Philadelphia; it would have been a distraction for me and the reader. Adinah, I just didn’t see her here.
Suburban congregations are far more weighted toward being pro-Israel kind of blindly than city ones. I wanted a place that was sophisticated, but didn’t carry the particularities of being an urban congregation. There are some things, like the Multifaith Coalition, which exist everywhere—I’m quite aware of POWER, which exists in Philadelphia and has been at the front lines of multiple social justice fights over the years. But I just never thought of this as a Philadelphia book. I was hoping there would be no barrier to entry for the reader.
Partly Strong, Partly Broken by Nathaniel Popkin was published May 5, 2026 by New Door Books.
Nathaniel Popkin is the author of four novels, including Partly Strong, Partly Broken, and eight books in total. He is also the co-editor of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? In the novels The Year of the Return and Everything Is Borrowed and in the book-length essay To Reach the Spring, Popkin examines intersections of Jewish ideals and lived realities. Popkin is a writer and producer of history documentary films, the co-founder of the website and public history and journalism project Hidden City, and formerly a writer of criticism for the Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, Public Books, and Cleaver Magazine, among other publications. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Tablet, and Gulf Coast.
Joy Manning is a reviews and interviews editor for Cleaver magazine. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Call Me [Brackets], The First Line, and Foofaraw Anthology and her journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, Prevention, Philadelphia magazine, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for the James Beard and IACP Awards and anthologized in Best Food Writing. She earned her MA in creative writing from Temple University.
Read more from Cleaver’s Interviews.
