The interview with Lee Kofman was conducted via email in July-August 2022. At the time Lee was travelling Australia promoting her new book, The Writer Laid Bare, giving interviews, conducting writing workshops and appearing at writers festivals. On top of that she had to look after her family. I hated pestering her with an ever-growing line of questions that kept coming out of responses to my earlier questions. But I was hooked on her insights and revelations and wanted to keep going, at the risk of annoying her or adding to her responsibilities.

I’ve known Lee for a decade. Many of my questions are extensions of our private conversations about books and life in general, over dinners and drinks. I’d say I know Lee very well. She is passionate and unconventional; she doesn’t beat around the bush, and she is warm and generous to a fault. Best of all, she isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, even as she hesitates to hurt or offend sensitivities. Nevertheless, even I was surprised by the speed and candour with which her responses came, revealing family background, formative experiences and personal struggles.

The Interview

DMETRI KAKMI:
I want to begin with life in Russia. Who are your parents? Where did they live and what did they do for a living?

LEE KOFMAN:
My parents met in one of Russia’s best universities – Siberia’s Novosibirsk State University. My mother is a Siberian Jew and my father is a Ukrainian Jew who moved from Odessa to study in Novosibirsk, because in the Soviet Union Jews were only allowed into other universities, closer to his home, in small quotas. My mother was doing an MA in English and my father a PhD in physics. They got married, finished their degrees and ended up leading an incongruous life, being hyper-educated and at the same time almost always poor; as well as superstitious, always chasing ideologies – first communism and then, once they grew disillusioned with it, turning to Judaism. They initially worked in their professions. My mother as a teacher and translator of English and my father as a physicist. But once they became religious dissidents my mother was fired from her job and became a street cleaner. Whereas my father remained in his profession, but his already small salary was cut down further. I ended up spending my childhood and youth, both in Russia and Israel, in apartments full of books, many of them religious, and always in the poorest neighborhoods, with the worst infrastructure, which matters when you’re a family that can’t afford a car. So when people classify others according to their socio-economic status, I am skeptical. In our case, we never fitted any box.

DK:
Do you have siblings and what was life like in Russia?

LK:
I was born with heart defects and had open-heart surgery. It was unclear whether I’d live into adulthood. My health troubles have been probably the most formative experiences for me, shaping me in many ways. One of the effects was that I spent most of my young years in a sickbed – whether at home or in hospitals – reading books, and so I had no choice but to develop a rich inner life.

In some ways my external life was also rich with action (albeit not necessarily a good kind of action). I had my taste of the deep-seated Russian anti-Semitism on those infrequent occasions when I made appearances at school. Mostly, though, I successfully avoided school (either because of my illnesses or because I used my heart as an excuse). Instead, I enmeshed myself in my parents’ dissident activities and struggles with the KGB, which was constantly watching us on account of my parents’ religious practices, study of the Hebrew language and contacts with Jews who lived overseas. Both at school and at home I was leading an outsider’s life, always lurking on social margins. It is not an easy kind of existence, but it is useful if you’re a budding writer.

My three brothers came along much later. My parents wanted more children, but they decided first to nurse their oldest child – me – to health, and then have more. This way I had the disorienting experience of being the only, preciously fussed over, child for my first nine years, and then suddenly I got three little brothers, all in a rapid succession. Soon I also became their carer, because my mother worked long hours; we couldn’t manage on my father’s salary. I suspect that experience, too, contributed to the way I think and write.

DK:
When you were still quite young, you suffered a terrible accident that affected your life.

LK:
Yes! Not long after I recovered from that open heart surgery – I was about 10 – I crossed a road and a bus rode over me, injuring my left leg severely. (When I fictionalised that story in my first book, my editor told me this was contrived. He was right. Real life is often contrived, in my experience! That’s perhaps why we read fiction – for the comfort of plausibility…) More hospitalisations and surgeries followed. I suppose I can say now, in retrospect – and kinda gleefully – that’s even better to make me a writer! I emerged from all those health troubles with far too many scars for me to feel I was a ‘normative’ woman. That redesigning of my body had a bad impact on my confidence and my sexuality too. But once again, I did get two books out of those scars. My first novel was called – surprise surprise – Scars. More recently I wrote a memoir called Imperfect, where I examine how those scars continue to shape my life.

DK:
When did the family emigrate to Israel?

LK:
Even in this respect we were outliers. We arrived in Israel in 1985, a few months before Glasnost and Perestroika began. By then we were already refuseniks (Soviet Jews who were refused applications to leave for Israel) for six years. During those years our family home became a hub for local Jewish dissidents, and the KGB expended much money and manpower to maintain pretty much continuous surveillance over us. Finally, they had enough of us (I suppose my very pregnant mother’s promise to burn herself in front of KGB headquarters if they refused us again didn’t help) and so they let us go at a time when very few Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

DK:
How old were you when you discovered reading and which titles/authors seduced you?

LK:
I was obscenely young when I became totally consumed by whatever books there were in our apartment – mostly adult classics (this was before my parents turned to God and started collecting holy books). I started reading independently at the age of four. At seven I made my first forays into adult literature. And let me tell you, what I found there wasn’t particularly pretty. Quartered and beheaded individuals, whipped women (not for sexual purposes, as far as I’m aware), cholera epidemics and such. Considering my preoccupation with death, I can say I related to a lot in those stories. I also became fascinated with the mountains of romance I found there – swooning ladies, gallant warriors, that sort of stuff. Maybe this too is why love and the fragility of the body feature so much in my own work.

DK:
Did wanting to be a writer follow from the initial discovery of reading, or did you have to wait a while?

LK:
I suspect I was primed to be a writer even before I began reading. My mother tells me that until the age of three I was so quiet she worried I’d never speak. But I must have been a good listener, because I went from not speaking to speaking in fully formed sentences. I told stories. I think this happened thanks to my mother, who is a wonderful storyteller. While throughout my childhood I recall her mostly being busy and exhausted, she always had enough energy to tell me stories – about her own childhood, about me, summaries of movies, books and plays she loved, fairytales. I grew up experiencing life as a series of stories. It’s possible that my becoming a writer was a kind of organic continuation of those narratives.

DK:
While living in Israel you published two novels and a collection of short stories in Hebrew.

LK:
I’ve been writing very bad stories, poems, plays and diaries since about the age of eight. When I arrived in Israel, my writing became more than an urge. It became my means to construct an appealing identity for myself. I was a shy adolescent from a poor neighborhood; I had an embarrassing accent and scars from my operations. But when I was 16 and my journalism and short fiction began appearing in a popular youth magazine, I felt as if writing elevated me from Freak to Journalist. Later, when I published my first novel at the age of 20, I was Author. So really my published writing originated in vanity. But also, as always, in the need to understand myself and the world around me. As a migrant, and living in such a complex, multifaceted country perpetually in conflict and populated with migrants literally from all over the world, there was so much I needed to understand. I think those first books of mine only scratched the surface of my enquiry into a life in Israel, as well as into my Russian past. As well as more generally into what it means to be a human.

DK:
What are the preoccupations of those three books, if you can reduce them to their essence?

LK:
They are pretty much the same preoccupations I still have – living between rather than within several worlds, mortality, war, the female body, shades of sexual desire and of love, mothers and daughters, grappling with Jewish identity in a world where anti-Semitism is always lurking, my love-hate relationship with Russia (mostly hate right now with all that is happening in Ukraine). And places. Always places. I am fascinated by how places shape humans and by how we shape them.

DK:
In Australia you are known as a memoirist or ‘creative nonfiction writer’, as you call it. What pushed you in this direction?

LK:
I’ve always been the kind of a writer who draws their themes, stories and characters from life. Even though a lot of my fiction is written in first person male perspective, it is still mostly about me, my anxieties and the people who matter to me. Initially, I wrote fiction partly because I didn’t know I could write something else. The genre of creative nonfiction (CNF) wasn’t well-known in Israel during the 1990s (CNF first became popular in the US and only relatively recently spread beyond America).

I discovered CNF at 31, accidentally, as a writer rather than a reader. I had been in Australia four years when I came across a call for submissions by Griffith Review, asking for personal essays on the theme of communities. I had never written a personal essay, but ‘communities’? What freshly minted migrant will not have something to say on the subject? So I wrote a piece about how, of all places, it was in Australia that I reconnected to my Russian roots after meeting Russian-Australians.

Not knowing anything about the genre, I nevertheless intuitively felt freedom as I worked on that essay, to the extent I’d never experienced writing fiction. I felt I could say what I wanted directly; there was no need to couch anything in an imagined story, set the stage, develop a plausible plot. In short, I didn’t have to use any of the artifice fiction requires. I incorporated some research about the Russian community in Australia and about Israel without laboriously disguising it within narrative. But I still enjoyed employing fictional devices whenever I felt the need, using snippets of dialogue, sketching scenes, crafting my sentences with care. This eclectic writing process felt organic and so I started reading CNF works and kept working in this genre.

DK:
The Dangerous Bride and Imperfect are books about sensation, desire, passion and the body. For me, even your latest book, The Writer Laid Bare, is about immersion in the body and its evocation of the senses. Talk about your fascination with the body.

LK:
Thank you for mentioning The Writer Laid Bare in this context. I’m so glad you noticed that the body is important there too. Writers sometimes forget how physical the writing act is – how much our posture, arms and hands have to do with this; how physical activity can cajole our muses and fatigue or illness – to drive them away.

The body holds such importance to me because I’ve always experienced it paradoxically. I have a strong tendency to live in my head, but I am also a very affectionate person. I love sex, and my primary language of love is touch. During my childhood, my sick body on the one hand gave me much grief, but on the other hand, to escape it and the painful treatments it required, I succeeded in spending a lot of my time outside it. In my mind. My body is scars that I feel compelled to conceal, but sometimes it is also my ticket into places I want to go because I look presentable (with my clothes on). Another paradox is that, being a writer, I spend sedentary hours working, totally caught up in my head, forgetting to eat, forgetting where I am. But then there are some moments when writing goes particularly well and it becomes a sensual experience that gives me physical pleasure akin to sex. There is something deeply erotic in engaging closely with language.

As you can see, I’m totally confused by my body, by the relationship between body and mind. And it is in contradictions and confusions that I find my inspiration. When I have an urgent question I need to resolve, my natural way of tackling it is to write something. A story, an essay, a book.

DK:
Imperfect is about scars, both physical and emotional. Reading it made me think about other writers. Are we all primarily writing about our scars?

LK:
Possibly. Most books I’ve ever loved I had that feeling about them. That the stakes were high, not just on the page, but for their authors too. Of course, I could be totally wrong.

DK:
As a fiction editor for many decades, I see the same authors return again and again to the same topic, scenario or theme, like scratching at an old sore. Trying to understand something that is at the core of who they are and what they are writing about. Perhaps even they don’t know what it is. I know I do it with my fiction.

LK:
This resonates with me. As I said earlier, I also always write about the same stuff, be it in fiction or creative nonfiction. Isaac Bashevis Singer said in an interview, ‘Every writer must write… the things he is pondering about, or brooding over. This is in part what gives the writer his charm and makes him genuine. It’s only the amateur who will take any topic.’ I think he’s right on the money. Few people have a large number of fierce preoccupations of the kind that are fit to power a story. But this doesn’t need to limit the number of works an author can produce. Most of Chekhov’s stories and plays can be summarised along the lines of ‘It’s a story about bored, unfulfilled, defeated people’. Yet I can never get enough of Chekhov.

DK:
Me too. He’s my favourite Russian. You’ve said that, of late, you prefer memoir or creative nonfiction to fiction. Why?

LK:
I did say that, mostly because of that freedom I find in CNF, which I mentioned earlier. But then, temperamentally, I am non-monogamous, both in love and in art. Lately I’ve been feeling the pull of fiction again.

The freedom of CNF is in form, but in content you do have to stick to basic facts – and I’ve missed the certain carelessness of imagination that you can find in fiction. Or maybe it’s just that some of the things I have to say right now need to be said as fiction. I realised, having had a four-year-long writer’s block while trying to fictionalise what later became my first memoir, The Dangerous Bride, that you can’t tell your work what to be. These choices don’t come, to me at least, intellectually. I had to take the risks associated with writing a revealing memoir to do justice to such a risqué subject as non-monogamy. But my next project wants to be fiction for reasons I’m still trying to understand. My hunch is that because it’s about something still painful, where I don’t have enough emotional distance yet, I need to create fictional characters to carry that subject, so that I can watch their story unfold more remotely, like a film.

DK:
The subtitle of The Writer Laid Bare is ‘Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Craft and Life’. What does emotional honesty mean to you?

LK:
It is my most foundational principle, as a writer. I believe one of the main causes of the writer’s block I mentioned earlier was that I was disconnected from how I saw the world around me. Partly out of fear (it takes courage to point out life’s complexities) and partly because I was a new migrant, transitioning into writing in English. At the time, I couldn’t see who I was becoming in my new country and language. So whatever I wrote, I then airbrushed. I smoothed the corners of even mildly controversial topics. And I skimmed the surface of my characters’ minds, staying with the easier basics: Does she love him or not? Is he a loner because he had a difficult childhood? I ignored the ambivalences inherent in romantic love (she may love him a little and need him a lot?) or how someone’s solitary nature is likely to be formed by a mix of factors (is he also an introvert with a rich inner world?). When I eventually managed to resolve that writer’s block, I emerged a different writer, no longer taking for granted that what I put on the page was ‘true’, even if it was true factually. For me now, emotional honesty is a prerequisite before anything else in the text and I trust that once I’ve nailed it, many other issues (like the voice and narrative) will start being resolved.

DK:
How does place shape a writer and how does the writer shape a place? What form does it take for you?

LK:
Places are powerful. They can generate passions, or hatreds, strong enough to power an artist’s entire oeuvre. I’m thinking about Elena Ferrante’s Naples, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, Tim Winton’s Western Australian coast. I’m also a writer obsessed with places, but I’m not monogamous, not faithful to one location. I’ve moved around so much ever since I was a small child – I lived in Siberian towns and villages, in Ukraine, in various cities in Israel, including Tel Aviv. Even in Melbourne, where I’ve lived for 22 years, I’ve been moving between suburbs. Sometimes I feel like the embodiment of the Wandering Jew cliché. And perhaps because place for me has always been conditional, impermanent, the geography of my past has congealed into a myth in my mind, and personal mythology makes for a powerful writing subject. So I keep writing about Siberian towns choked with coal, Odessa’s roasted chestnuts, about Tel Aviv the dancing queen, and even about the blue shadows of the Australian bush. But I’m not interested in just evoking a sense of place. My main interest lays in exploring the interface between humans and their environments, because I believe places shape us all, not just the writers among us. I know that the snow of my childhood still flows in my veins, making me dream; and that the salty sea air I have breathed in most of the cities I’ve lived in has infected me with certain restlessness.

DK:
What’s a ‘normative’ woman and how do scars affect her sexuality and the way she is perceived?

LK:
A normative woman of today is not normative at all – she is perfect, unmarked by age or life generally. But as unreal as she is, she is everywhere, be this on the ads that come while you watch the news or in the photoshopped images of your social media feed. And even before the earthquake of internet, when I was growing up, all those abnormal-normative women accompanied my every step, whether looming large on billboards or staring at me from the pages of youth magazines I used to read and write for. So I grew up feeling my scars were unwomanly and I was a freak. And, of course, who would want to have sex with a freak?

I must add that the men I ended up dating seemed to hold less prejudices about scars than I did. They were more interested in sex with me than I initially assumed they would be. So a lot of this stuff was in my head. But at the same time, when it came to sex, I mostly slept with men who I knew were really into me. So I didn’t give myself the opportunity to test to what extent my scars potentially repelled a prospective lover. These days, being monogamously married, I regret I limited myself so much in the past, because by nature I am actually drawn to sexual adventures, like the occasional sex party or a random lover. The few times I ventured into stuff like this were exhilarating. So while I don’t think I’ve had an utterly conservative sexual life, I do think it ended up being far more conservative than it could have been, if I wasn’t anxious that revealing my scars would compromise me and offend others.

DK:
What’s a writer’s worst enemy?

LK:
Oh goodness, we have so many enemies… Overly active self-doubt, fear of failure, the fear of causing offence, self-righteousness, sentimentality… I can make a longer list.

DK:
You said earlier you are skeptical when people are classified according to their socio-economic status. Do you think the way we talk about life has become simplistic of late? For instance, I always wonder about the speaker’s state of mind when he or she says ‘white privilege’ or that a white person will always have an easier life than a black or brown individual. Given yours and my very complicated backgrounds, can people or a life be classified so easily?

LK:
Of course not. And this is what good literature always does – it goes beyond clichés and focuses on the individual. If I focus on myself as an individual – it’s easy to classify me as an ‘educated white-Jewish mostly-heterosexual woman’. But what does it really tell you about me and the kind of a life I’ve lived? Nothing much.

For example, what we mean by ‘white privilege’ – that one goes through life unnoticed and not discriminated against – never applied to me. Me and my big Jewish nose always seem to be noticed. As I already mentioned, I grew up in the shadow of anti-Semitism in Russia . I was discriminated at school by teachers, and copped a lot of verbal abuse, and some physical abuse from my classmates. In my childhood and youth and during some of my adulthood, I lived in poverty. I’ve also experienced my share of anti-Semitism in Australia, sadly from both the right and the left, from white and non-white people. Then, being the only Russian-Israeli writer in Australia I know of, I also often feel like a (very tiny) minority in what is supposed to be my tribe – the local literary scene. Plus, I am perpetually aware that the Jewish community is not safe here. Just this weekend someone drew, yet again, a swastika on a Jewish institution’s building in Melbourne.

So no, I don’t think easy classifications work. At least not in my experience. I’m always trying to find the right words to describe such not-easily-classifiable experiences as mine and I find some consolation in the fact that I am – and you are – not the only ‘unclassifiable people’ in the world. There are quite a few of us, I suspect, and maybe this is our tribe?