Alumni Profile: Ari Goelman

Dahlia Shulman is not happy about wasting three weeks of her summer at a Jewish summer camp.  In fact, she's miserable about it.   But once she arrives, Camp Arava quickly proves more interesting than Dahlia expected. First she sees two little girls walk through the wall of her cabin. Then come the dreams about a young Jewish man getting chased through the streets of New York City.  The camp goofball makes Dahlia his best friend, while the camp caretaker seems to think she’s his worst enemy. And there’s a mysterious hedge maze none of the campers are allowed to get near . . .

This sets the scene for The Path of Names, the first novel written by Galil alumnus Ari Goelman, which will be released in May.  Save the date: Galil will be hosting a special reading and meet & greet with Ari in Philadelphia on Tuesday, May 28th.  In the mean time, get to know Ari and The Path of Names better!  Also, check out his website and Facebook page to keep up to date with Ari.

Name?  Ari Goelman

Hometown?  King of Prussia / Philadelphia

           

Current location?  Vancouver                  

When will The Path of Names be released?  May, 2013

Years at camp?  1983-1997.  I was a counselor from 1990-1994 & 1997, and on mazkirut in 1995 & 1996.

How did you learn about Galil? From my family:  my older brother and sister went to Galil, as did my uncle twenty years earlier.  My grandfather visited the site in the 1940s, a few years before it was acquired by Galil. In fact, imagining that visit - a teenager from the Lower East Side visiting rural Pennsylvania in the 1940s -  is part of what sparked the mystery at the heart of The Path of Names.

Favorite camp memory? That’s a tough one to answer.  I was at camp for a long time!  Here are a few:  playing frisbee after dinner until it was too dark to see the disc;  writing and watching the Friday night oneg skits; the seemingly constant need to dress up wearing a fedora  (the legacy of which has left me unable to wear a fedora as an adult, without some kind of excuse.)

Favorite camp activity? Same caveat as above, but I’ll go with the camper generated skits in front of the weekly bonfire.

Favorite special day or out-of-camp trip? I was always a fan of the rafting trips on the Delaware.  This is a little hard for me to explain since, as best I recall, these mostly involved lying on the raft, eating extremely soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and wishing you had brought more sunscreen.

Favorite camp song?  Sandwiches Are Beautiful.

How did your experience at Galil impact the creation of The Path of Names?  Other than the obvious familiarity in Camp Arava's map, are there other similarities to Galil?  I wrote the short story that eventually morphed into The Path of Names just a few summers after I had stopped going to Galil.  It was a beautiful summer in Seattle, and I found myself thinking of Galil a lot.  So my years of experience at Galil certainly inspired my decision to set the story in a summer camp.  

Also, the physical lay out of Camp Arava – where The Path of Names is set – is obviously similar to Galil.  Generally, I think it’s fair to say that I borrowed quite a bit from my memories of Galil in setting up the structure of the camp, but what I then filled that structure up with was purely fictional.  For instance, to my knowledge no one has ever died at Galil, and there are no ghosts wandering the fringes of the camp.  {Editor's Note: no one has ever died at Galil!}

Are any characters in Path of Names based on people you knew at Galil?  No, definitely not.  The characters are entirely fictional, except inasmuch as every author puts something of themselves in their characters. On the other hand, there are some specific incidents or sensory impressions in The Path of Names that are based on specific memories from my time at camp.   For instance, I definitely remember that the girl’s cabin always smelled much better than our cabin.  This was true at every age; it didn’t seemed to matter how often we cleaned the cabin or how many girls were jammed into a single cabin.  The girls’ cabin was always a more pleasant place to be.  

Are you still in touch with your former campmates?  Definitely.  There’s a handful of Galil friends I see every time I come back to Philadelphia.

Will you send your own children to Jewish camp one day? Very likely.  If they want to go.  There’s a thriving Jewish summer camp scene in Vancouver, Canada (where I now live) and I strongly suspect my children will wind up going to one of the local camps.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?  Write.  Be patient.  Keep writing.  Read and reread the books you wish you had written.  Feel deeply and thoroughly jealous of their author’s brilliance.  Then write more. 

Are you involved in your local Jewish community? Yes.  We’re active members in the Vancouver Jewish Community Centre – the hub of the local Jewish community.  In fact, my oldest child just finished daycare there, where she was in the same room as at least three kids whose parents I  met decades before through Habonim Dror.

Anything else you want to share with the Galil community? I wrote The Path of Names not long after my older daughter was born.  I wanted to write a middle grade novel that I’d want her to read when she was older.   Thus, I wanted a story with a strong, smart female main character who wasn’t obsessed with romance, nor defined by physical beauty.  I wanted a main character who was just as concerned with her female friends as her male friends, and who had plenty of concerns beyond her social life.  

Thinking about it, I realized I had known lots of girls like that when I was at summer camp.  Not just that, I had been at summer camp for enough years that I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of how teenage girls behave at summer camp – the ways that they’re mean, the ways that they’re nice, the ways  that they’re smart, the ways that sometimes they’re not so smart. 

Also, at that point I’d been thinking for years about writing a fantasy involving Jewish folklore.  I’d always been interested in stories about miracle-working rabbis and evil spirits.  Where better, I thought, to situate and update that kind of story than a Jewish summer camp?

Thanks, Ari!  We can't wait to read The Path of Names when it comes out in May!

Photo by John Goldsmith Photography.