Joshua Henkin

Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book; Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book; and The World Without You, which was named an Editors' Choice Book by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and was the winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. His short stories have been published widely [including in Glimmer Train Stories], cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, and broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

Pleasing Contradictions

Here are two stories I like to tell. The first is about my father who, in World War II, was scouting out enemy territory with three other American soldiers when they came upon a band of seventy armed Germans. My father and his battalion mates were unarmed, so the Germans were going to take them prisoner. But my father had gone to law school and he knew the art of persuasive argument. The problem was, he didn't speak German. He did, however, speak Yiddish. So in 1944, speaking what he calls "Teutonized Yiddish," my father convinced the Germans that they were about to lose the war and he got them to lay down their arms.

The second story takes place in 1968, when I was at nursery school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was Christmastime and there was hubbub that day; Santa Claus was visiting. All the kids were shouting, "Where's Santa Claus? Where's Santa Claus?" And then, in a moment of silence, a voice rang out: "Who's Santa Claus?" That was me.

A Jewish lieutenant speaking Yiddish to German soldiers in World War II. A boy of four, living in one of the biggest cities in the world, who doesn't know who Santa Claus is. These are what I like to call "pleasing contradictions," and they are, it seems to me, the lifeblood of a fiction writer. I teach writing now, to undergraduates and MFA students at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College, and when I tell my students that they need to find conflict in their stories, I'm really telling them to look for the pleasing contradictions, since contradiction is what makes fiction interesting, what allows a writer to explore character.