Capitalism, of course, is concerned with acquiring goods rather than compassion social media, where so much of our discourse now takes place, seems lately like it’s largely about pitting groups against each other rather than finding common ground. And yet, as you suggest, very little in our society supports the development of empathy. As novelists, we have to be acutely tuned in to our inner lives, and I can’t help but think the world would be a better place if it was set up to afford everyone this opportunity. Can you perhaps talk a bit about this borderland of soul and society, where our visions can soar or crash, so vulnerable?Īlison Pick: I don’t know if I have an answer but I find myself agreeing with your question. Do we hold latent compassion and softness in our human-scale souls, while externally bent on expressing polarized ideologies and hard conflict? We feel this schism acutely now, yet it is intimated in your novel set nearly a hundred years ago. Our external social order and our inner lives feel very far apart now. I sense we could all use your novel’s empathic vision these days. I felt myself hovering over then being progressively drawn into intimacy, beauty, and harrowing tension. I found myself flying with ease from the book’s bird’s-eye cinematic opening upon the early Jewish settlement that was to become Israel, to the inner hearts of the characters so intimately drawn.

Kathleen Winter: Alison, it was a wondrous pleasure to read Strangers with the Same Dream. The conversation has been lightly edited. Kathleen Winter and Alison Pick recently spoke over email on the occasion of the publication of their new novels-respectively, Lost in September, a powerful and contemporary reimagining of the story of the historical soldier James Wolfe, and Strangers with the Same Dream, about Jewish pioneers arriving in Palestine to escape violence in the 1920s, attempting to settle an already-populated land, and the dark ironies therein.

Lost in September by Kathleen Winter