Shani Boian­jiu​’s debut nov­el, The Peo­ple of For­ev­er Are Not Afraid, is now avail­able. She will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

The char­ac­ters in my nov­el, The Peo­ple of For­ev­er Are Not Afraid, are Israeli. Because of that, my writ­ing will undoubt­ed­ly be con­sid­ered to be Jew­ish fic­tion. Yet the truth is there are only a few instances in which Judaism as a reli­gion is a top­ic in the nov­el. The most sig­nif­i­cant instance involves the book of Jon­ah.

Reli­gious feel­ings, if we nar­row reli­gion to mean hav­ing some­thing to do with God, are per­haps not a large part of my nov­el because they haven’t been a big part of my life. For me, being Jew­ish had noth­ing to do with God or even the bible. All of my friends at school were Jew­ish. Near­ly all the peo­ple in my town were Jew­ish. I have fast­ed on Yom Kip­pur since I was in sec­ond grade and observed Passover, but nev­er once went to tem­ple while I was grow­ing up. In my house, we nev­er once dis­cussed the exis­tence of God, or the mean­ing of the bible.

At my sec­u­lar school, as in all Israeli schools, Bible was a required sub­ject. Yet our teach­ers nev­er stressed the­o­log­i­cal issues, and the bible was taught just as lit­er­a­ture was taught — the focus was on the bible as sto­ries. The empha­sis was placed on under­stand­ing what a para­ble meant, or on learn­ing to under­stand bib­li­cal gram­mar and vocabulary.

Although my first book is just being pub­lished, I’ve learned from the few inter­views I have already had that peo­ple love ask­ing writ­ers whether or not their fic­tion­al sto­ries are based on real life expe­ri­ences. I don’t know why that is. Almost none of my book is based on my own expe­ri­ences. The few details that I did draw from my own life are small moments that are in ser­vice of a larg­er nar­ra­tive that comes direct­ly from my imagination.

The part in the book that most close­ly resem­bles a per­son­al expe­ri­ence is the sec­tion in which one of my char­ac­ters describes study­ing the book of Jon­ah when she was in mid­dle school. My char­ac­ter, Yael, is frus­trat­ed by hav­ing to learn about the book of Jon­ah three times in the same year. She finds that even though she is lec­tured about the book repeat­ed­ly, it still does­n’t quite make sense to her.

When I was in sev­enth grade, I was forced to study the book of Jon­ah three times — the sec­ond time because of the change of a teacher, the third time because I think that new teacher had for­got­ten that we already spent months on the book of Jon­ah. One of the odd prod­ucts of a sec­u­lar edu­ca­tion in Israel is that the stu­dent is made to become an expert on cer­tain parts of the bible deemed test wor­thy by the min­is­ter of edu­ca­tion, while know­ing absolute­ly noth­ing about the oth­er parts of the bible.

Like my char­ac­ter, I was con­fused by the book of Jon­ah, no mat­ter how many times I had to study it. It is a strange tale, which many have found to be com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from the sto­ries of oth­er prophets.

Here’s what I think hap­pens: as far as I can under­stand, God tries to force Jon­ah into being a prophet and orders him to tell a city full of real­ly bad peo­ple that God is going to kill them all. Jon­ah is scared and does­n’t want to, because he does­n’t want the whole city to get pissed off at him. So he runs away from God, gets eat­en by a whale that lat­er vom­its him up (the best part!), and in the end he real­izes that run­ning away from God was just about the world’s a dumb­est idea (duh), so he becomes a prophet and tells all these bad peo­ple they are super bad and God is going to kill them all. The bad peo­ple turn out to be sur­pris­ing­ly recep­tive to crit­i­cism, so they repent and become good. God spares them all, and then Jon­ah gets real­ly pissed, because it is like so awk­ward— he already told all these peo­ple God is going to kill them. To top off the peachy month Jon­ah is hav­ing, he ends up in the desert and the heat almost kills him. The whole get­ting lost in the desert thing is actu­al­ly a part of God’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, so he cre­ates a tree that saves Jon­ah from dying. Jon­ah is hap­py to be saved, but then God kills the tree and Jon­ah is so pissed he is sui­ci­dal. Then God says some­thing to the effect of: ​“Ha! I got you Jon­ah! You see? You were so sad about the death of this tree, even though you did noth­ing to help it grow, and I am sup­posed to just kill all those peo­ple I worked so hard to create?”

This is where the sto­ry ends, and that’s also the part that makes no sense to me. Jon­ah was sad about the death of the tree because it was giv­ing him shade. He did­n’t love the tree, he need­ed it. But assum­ing there is a God, what does God need peo­ple for? I mean, the claim is he is almighty and all that. This metaphor makes zero sense to me. It did­n’t make sense to me in eighth grade, and it makes no sense still. In mid­dle school it was not cool to ask the kind of ques­tions that were not going to show up on a test. But I still won­der about it, which is maybe why I chose to include the book of Jon­ah in my nov­el, although I usu­al­ly nev­er write about real expe­ri­ences. What does the end­ing of Jon­ah’s sto­ry mean? And what does God need peo­ple for? I actu­al­ly want to know. If any­one can get back to me on that, do let me know!

Shani Boian­jiu was born in Jer­sualem in 1987. She served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years. Her fic­tion has appeared in The New York­er, Vice mag­a­zine and Zoetrope: All Sto­ry. Shani is the youngest recip­i­ent ever of the Nation­al Book Foundation’s 5 under 35, and The Peo­ple of For­ev­er are Not Afraid is her first nov­el. She lives in Israel.

Relat­ed Content:

• Joshua Max Feld­man: Why the Book of Jonah?
• Devan Sipher: The Path of a Wan­der­ing Jew
• Bible & Bib­li­cal­ly Inspired Sto­ries Read­ing List