I interviewed Joshua Cohen, author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, by phone in his Brooklyn apartment. He began by reminiscing about driving to New Hampshire in his mom’s Pontiac Bonneville in search of a summer camp where some “cousins” of his had gotten hired as cooks. After we covered the Bermuda Triangle-like effect that New Hampshire can have on radio stations, we hunkered down to address more literary matters.
Are you from New York, originally?
No; I’m from Atlantic City, New Jersey, two hours south—the capital of the Northeast, as far as certain activities are concerned. My parents are first generation out of New York, first generation born in America. I was over there, Europe, for a while, living in Prague and working all over the East for various newspapers, including The Forward, which used to be called The Jewish Daily Forward, or the Forverts, back when it was in Yiddish, and daily. I returned to America about a year ago, and have been in Brooklyn ever since, near Coney Island, the ocean. Now I’m a book critic for The Forward. The pay’s not that great. I’ve got creditors, you know—and so it seems I’m less “freelance” than I am a freelance conduit, a middleman. The money comes in, the money goes out. I don’t know how long I can keep this up. Money for book reviewing seems to have dried up—or maybe it’s just me.
Let’s talk about Schneidermann. Tell me about the writing of the book, and this character—how did you conceive of him? He’s sort of a larger-than-life figure. Was he in your head for a long time?
You know, the Schneidermann character is really just a conflation of every geriatric Jew I’ve ever met; the kind of people who read a great book and say, “You know, I would’ve written it better;” the kind who go to a concert and say, “If I practiced, I would’ve played the piano better than that.” They’re hard, but hardest on themselves, and they tend to have these fantastically developed, overdeveloped, inner lives. There’s one person, whom I’d rather not name, very much older, he’s a friend of mine, and a kind of mentor, a brilliant character—a survivor of the Holocaust, not a musician at all, an academic, actually. English, which he acquired in Canada, was his sixth or seventh language. There are certain phrases and words in this book I could never have come up with if it wasn’t for him, his example. Once he met a friend of mine who’s married, and the first thing he asked was, “Are you married?” and then he asked, “Is your wife fat?” and my friend says no, and so he says, “Good. How much money do you make?” Everything hangs out. He’d old, very old, and he has this 1960s, ‘70s slang delivered with a formality that’s utter Austro-Hungary.