Fantasy Island

In author Helene Wecker's works, realist stories of the immigrant experience come alive through make-believe

- Anushree Nande

Can magical beings live an ordinary" existence when they're not off saving the world? Can inherent nature evolve? What's the best way to embrace a new culture without forgoing the old or losing one's place in the world? What is the extent to which community, especially a like-minded one, matters? Can fundamental differences ever be overcome enough through equally strong and connective similarities?

Helene Wecker contends with these weighty questions and more in her Mythopoeic Award-winning debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, and its sequel, The Hidden Palace.

Part rich historical fantasy in turn-of-the20th-century New York, part adult folktale synthesising Jewish and Arab culture, part literary fiction contending with the immigrant experience, Wecker manages to make it all feel simultaneously expansive and intimate. I ask her why she chose fantasy, and why the themes of alienation and identity are so central to her books.

“As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, displacement and immigration were a huge undercurrent of my childhood [...] in my mind, all families came from somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't America," she says.

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