You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfurblad, and welcome to Bookworm. My guest today is Richard

Elman, the author most recently of Tar Beach, and I began reading this book and discovered gradually

that I thought it was a kind of Jewish Ulysses. How much was that kind of novel on your mind?

It is a book of voices and sounds and smells and the scent of a city in 1947.

But...

Yeah, I guess I thought to myself at some point in my life, why not when I read Ulysses and when I read Call It Sleep,

which is a Jewish Ulysses in the way, Henry Roth's great book. But when I read Ulysses,

I thought to myself in some way, why not do with language in some way what he was doing in Ulysses.

And we used to read it aloud to each other when I was growing up in Brooklyn,

because it was the only way we could really follow all of it, was reading it aloud.

So sure, I mean, it was deeply, and I think, you know, the fact that Joyce was really using street sounds, street language,

the demotic was very powerful and very convincing.

I had been to graduate school and all that,

and I was supposed to write like Henry James,

and I was appalled by the idea after a while

because I couldn't do it.

I was all elbows.

My professor at Stanford said,

...