S5: E6:Michelle Ephraim on her memoir Green World—a powerful dialogue between lived experience and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice

Michelle Ephraim discusses memoir writing, Jewish women in Shakespeare’s time, teaching Shakespeare, and her moving memoir Green World—a powerful dialogue between lived experience and The Merchant of Venice

For a complete episode transcript, click http://www.womenandshakespeare.com

Michelle Ephraim's Website: https://michelleephraim.com/

Interviewer: Varsha Panjwani
Guest: Michelle Ephraim
Producer: Bryony Fishpool
Transcript: Benjamin Poore
Artwork: Wenqi Wan

Suggested Citation:  Ephraim, Michelle in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2025). Michelle Ephraim on her memoir Green World—a powerful dialogue between lived experience and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Women & Shakespeare [Podcast], Series 5, Ep.6. http://womenandshakespeare.com/

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Email: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

Transcript

Varsha: Hello, dear listeners. Welcome to the final episode of the fifth series of the Women and Shakespeare podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Varsha Panjwani, and I'm thinking about silences. It might seem unusual, perhaps even contradictory, that someone who advocates public speaking and hosts a podcast spends rather a lot of time actually contemplating silence.

Varsha: But I believe that speech and silence is deeply entwined. If you have ever been silenced, you know about the desire to speak. You are going to fight to have the privilege of speaking. If you have been silenced, you might learn to speak through it powerfully. You know that silence is not simply absence. It holds meaning.

Varsha: I encourage my [00:01:00] students to unfold silences like a letter that might reveal fear, uncertainty, resignation, or even resistance or contentment. My students focus on silences in Shakespeare's plays and come up with their own interpretations. They have said that silence could mean, ‘I'm not sure about this’. Or, ‘I don't feel I will be heard, so I won't say anything’, or ‘I'm scared to say anything’, or ‘with this silence, I withhold my consent’. One silence that often unsettles my students comes from Jessica, Shylock’s daughter in The Merchant of Venice. When we explore Jessica's silences, I get students to think about the ethics of filling someone else's silence. I ask students to not only look inward to their own life experiences, but outward towards women [00:02:00] in Shakespeare's world and in ours, who may have felt similarly constrained.

Varsha: If I were to teach this play again, I'd recommend a memoir that brings remarkable depth to this character Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare by our podcast guest, Professor Michelle Ephraim. In it, she draws on her own lived experience to better understand Jessica, while also viewing her own life through the lens of Jessica.

Varsha: The book, which won the 2023 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2024, is both insightful and affecting. Michelle is also the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage and teaches Shakespeare and Fiction at Worcester Polytechnic [00:03:00] Institute, WPI, in Massachusetts, USA. Michelle and Caroline Bicks, a fellow Shakespearean, wrote a literary humour book called Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas.

Varsha: And I'm a fan of their podcast Everyday Shakespeare, which explores all the weird, wonderful, and hilarious ways that Shakespeare can shed some light on our modern problems. Michelle, it's so lovely to have you on the Women and Shakespeare podcast. I stayed up a few nights reading your beautiful memoir, so you are very welcome to the podcast.

Michelle: Oh, it's such a delight to be here. Thank you. 

Varsha: I'm gonna start as I always start by asking everybody, when did you first encounter Shakespeare, and what was the nature of that encounter?  

Michelle: That's a interesting answer for me because I didn't [00:04:00] read a Shakespeare play until I was in my twenties. It was a conscious decision to some extent to avoid Shakespeare.

Michelle: I was a bit intimidated, actually, more than a bit. And I encountered Shakespeare for the first time in graduate school. I was doing an English PhD and it was becoming increasingly stressful that I had never read any Shakespeare before. And it was really at a particular party that I went to that I became enchanted by Shakespeare and felt for the first time that his work might be accessible.

Varsha: Wow. That would be so inspiring to so many people listening out there, I'm sure, because usually I get answers like, oh, my mum read out Shakespeare and so on. And that's very intimidating to people who've come to Shakespeare later in life. 

Michelle: Absolutely. My parents were not fans of Shakespeare. We never talked about Shakespeare. We never talked about a lot of those classic, famous authors. I think my parents to some [00:05:00] extent felt intimidated by them and also hostile about what they represented to them. They felt very excluded by people like Shakespeare, even though he's not alive anymore.

Varsha: No, I can certainly understand that Shakespeare sometimes has this kind of really snooty reputation. 

Michelle: Yes, snooty. And also I think the sense that if you weren't brought up, introduced to Shakespeare, maybe you know, your parents taking you to see productions or having old, beautiful copies around the house.

Michelle: And I felt okay, those people can understand Shakespeare, but I don't. I'd never been to a Shakespeare play. Nothing like that. The Shakespeare was not endorsed by my parents in any way. I felt like I had no business studying Shakespeare. 

Varsha: I hear you completely. And actually on that note, it's really fun to be talking to a fellow podcaster, and I feel like your podcast really makes Shakespeare accessible. Along with Caroline Bicks, you host this wonderful and hilarious [00:06:00] Everyday Shakespeare podcast. I laughed so hard when I listened to your episode on Lady Macbeth's Fitbit. That was great.

Varsha: So please tell us a little bit more about your podcast, why you started it, and where should listeners tune in? 

Michelle: Caroline and I are both Shakespeare professors and we met many years ago and bonded immediately over many things. And as we became close friends, our Shakespeare world got mixed into our friendship in a very natural. organic way where we would laughingly compare our children to Lear's children and things like that. And we had so much fun with that. We started a blog. So this is obviously back in the olden days when people started blogs. So we started a blog. And from that blog we started writing things.

Michelle: We had short humour pieces published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. And then we got a book [00:07:00] idea to do a Shakespeare themed cocktail book. And I think this, honestly, I think we were at the Cheesecake Factory or something and we were making up recipes that Falstaff might like, or Lady Macbeth might like. What would her cocktail be called?

Michelle: So then we decided this could be a book. So we wrote the book. And that was very fun. So we've done a lot of collaborative work and a couple years ago, Caroline and I we wanted another collaborative project. And we love the idea of exploring a new medium.

Michelle: I think we like to challenge ourselves. And neither of us had done a podcast before. We were total newbies and happily we knew a producer who was interested in doing the podcast with us, so that was very lucky. And so really it was largely an excuse to do some collaborative creative work and, um, we love creating stuff like this together. And to reach a wider audience, we both love that very much.

Varsha: Where should we listen to it? 

Michelle: Ah, yes. So you can listen [00:08:00] to it anywhere that podcasts exist. Any kind of podcast platform, you can find Everyday Shakespeare. 

Varsha: Perfect. And Michelle, you've written this beautiful memoir titled Green World which I have just finished reading, but I actually wanna say that I've just finished feeling it, because of how vivid and poignant it is. But before I ask you about it, I wondered if you could tell our listeners about memoir writing in Shakespeare's time, even if they didn't call it a memoir. Did people write about their lives and more importantly, did women write about their lives in Shakespeare's time? 

Michelle: Yeah, so Caroline and I did an episode devoted to this. One of our Everyday Shakespeare podcast episodes was devoted to life writing. And I have to say I learned a lot doing research for that episode.

Michelle: We always tend to do lots of research for these episodes, and there were people I knew about – the Medieval mystic, Margery [00:09:00] Kempe, who dictated a memoir. 

Michelle: So this is a woman who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. She was a Catholic mystic, known about town for her very public displays of crying and emotional expression. She was also someone who expressed what we might call mental illness now. She had many children, some scholars talk about her suffering from what we would now call postpartum depression.

Michelle: Very interesting woman. She dictated a memoir, so I knew about her. I knew about Anne Askew, who is a Protestant martyr who lived when Henry VIII was king. So before the Protestant Reformation in England. So she was tortured and ultimately executed. 

Michelle: She was made famous by the inclusion of her account of being tortured and persecuted in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs that was published in the 17th century. So his account of Protestants who stood by their cause and were tortured as a result, so [00:10:00] she's in there. Then Margaret Cavendish, who was a very wealthy woman who was a scholar, a philosopher, a poet; she had a memoir as well, but the memoirist, or the life-writing writer that I found out about was a woman named Elizabeth Isham.

Michelle: I hadn't heard of her. And she wrote in the 17th century. So in, in 1638 she wrote what I think is the closest thing in the early modern period that I've seen, that I know about – there might be other things out there, of course –  but that I know about that most resembles the modern memoir.

Michelle: So this is her reflecting on her life and like the other authors I've mentioned. Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Askew – people who wrote accounts of their lives – there's religious content, but also very personal content. Her family, the prospect of marriage, the fact that she doesn't want to get married even though she's supposed to.

Michelle: Her feelings about her siblings. A lot of sibling [00:11:00] rivalry. Her feelings about her mother who suffered from mental illness. And her mother connected that mental illness with having children very early in life. So this was a kind of warning to Elizabeth Isham that maybe that wasn't such a good idea for her own wellness.

Michelle: The content is similar to, in terms of the subject matter, as the other writers I've mentioned, but the way that she talks about these themes is very different. She's very reflective and very conscious of constructing a narrative, coming to a conclusion about herself that's very crafted.

Michelle: So it's very modern. Margaret Cavendish, for example, wrote what we might call now a kind of celebrity memoir: ‘This is what I ate for breakfast, or this is what I like to wear and I'm wealthy and famous, so you want to know these things about me’. But Elizabeth Isham writes something, she's not famous, but she gets so deep with her emotions and her feelings, really trying to make sense of them [00:12:00] in a way that ultimately constructs a story about herself that a reader can really relate to. So it's very different from the other works that I'm familiar with.

Varsha: I think most of us would find that very illuminating. And especially because there's such a stigma against women writing about themselves, right? I feel even now.

Michelle: Especially I think with Elizabeth Isham, she's struggling with all these ‘shoulds’ in society. Not to say that men don't struggle with those, but in a particularly gendered sense given when she was writing. But I think it's something that is, again, very relevant today: ‘Should I get married? What would it look like to other people? If I don't, what do I value instead of marriage? How do I wanna spend my time? What's really important to me?’. 

Michelle: I'm just thinking of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert's very famous memoir. Obviously there's many memoirs, but that's one that a lot of people know and [00:13:00] where it's a narrative about a woman who is no longer married and is single in the world and trying to figure out how people are gonna perceive her, the judgment that people might have about her. Again, the world of ‘shoulds’: ‘I should get married, I should have children’.

Michelle: Obviously this was even more true in the 17th century than it is today, but, ‘how do I really wanna spend my life? What is meaningful to me?’. And getting out from under those societal expectations and also the expectations that your family has for you as well.

Michelle: So even in the home, in your private world, what's expected of you? I think that's something that everyone can relate to. ‘How will I disappoint my parents? Am I going to live up to what they want me to be? What are other people gonna think of me?’. These are things that we all think about and feel, and Elizabeth Isham really taps into that, by talking about herself in such a thoughtful way, she is able to reach other people.

Michelle: I've talked about [00:14:00] this before when I've talked about memoir with people, that there's something very ironic about the genre that in order to effectively talk about yourself, you have to get away from yourself. You have to tap into those universal themes.

Michelle: And I think that Elizabeth Isham does that very successfully. And going back to your point about gendered writing, I think there is this, sort of conception of writing about yourself as naval gazing. And of course that is a thing. But I think, if you're talking about a successful piece of life writing, a memoir that works, so to speak, is one that isn't about naval gazing at all. It's about puzzling out a universal issue or a universal conflict in a way that a reader can relate to and is drawn into very successfully. 

Varsha: Oh, I absolutely agree that the best in this kind are always about tackling social questions that everyone might have. And [00:15:00] your memoir is interlaced with Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice which is a play about tense relationships between Christians and Jews, amongst other things.

Varsha: And I think you were attracted to the play partly because your parents are Holocaust survivors. So for listeners who are yet to read your memoir, might you please give us a brief glimpse into your identity as a Jewish woman? 

Michelle: Yeah. So I am an only child of Holocaust survivors. My parents each fled Germany. They came to America via very convoluted routes. And I was born in Washington, DC so again, an only child to parents who were at that time older, older than my friend's parents. So we lived in a Jewish neighbourhood. And even though we lived in that Jewish neighbourhood, my parents were very alienated from the families around us.

Michelle: So they very much felt like immigrants and the Jewish families around us, generally [00:16:00] speaking, they were not immigrants. They had gone to college in America. My parents I think, felt, they never talked about this explicitly, but looking back, I would say that they felt intimidated by them and they felt very insecure around them.

Michelle: And they probably weren't completely wrong about being judged by them as being weird immigrants in some way. And I think that the other Jewish families felt a bit superior, tried to assert their superiority in certain ways. Not all of them, if you're listening, but there was definitely an element of that.

Michelle: My Jewish identity was very much feeling like I didn't know where I belonged. My parents didn't feel comfortable around American Jews. But they were not religious, they were very anti-religion. My mother grew up in a very orthodox family and she was very anti-religion as a result of that.

Michelle: But yet we were very Jewish. Their experiences surviving the Holocaust and losing many family [00:17:00] members, being very traumatized – that was a huge part of our identity. My Jewish identity felt very alienating because I wasn't like the other Jewish kids around me. 

Michelle: I'd never had a bat mitzvah, which many Jewish kids have in America. It's a real rite of passage, as much religious as it is social, arguably much more social. It's very much about being part of a community. So I didn't have one of those. So I was really not really sure where I fit in as someone Jewish actually, despite feeling very Jewish and having a connection to Jewish history in a way that my Jewish friends didn't have.

Michelle: So it was a very confusing spot to be in, in terms of my identity, and I didn't like it, actually. It felt very uncomfortable to me. 

Varsha: And I think that is why it's really important to talk about these various identities like within communities as well. Because sometimes what happens is people say things like, oh, [00:18:00] American Jews, or people of colour in the UK, as if they're all the same, but it's not. We have so many different experiences within that too. So thank you for bringing that in. 

Varsha: But before your memoir, you wrote an academic book, Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage. Now, why did you think it was so important to explore this intersectional identity? A woman who's also Jewish. 

Varsha: And what were your biggest findings about how they are represented and also why they are represented on stage? 'Cause we often hear this very cited fact, right? That Jews were technically banned from England in Shakespeare's lifetime, so Shakespeare wouldn't have encountered so many of them.

Michelle: I was very excited to come upon this topic. I'm not sure how you describe when you pick your dissertation topic. It picks you, you pick them. I'm not [00:19:00] sure. But I was very excited to discover how much of the Hebrew scripture was in Shakespeare. Not that I was any kind of Bible scholar, but I just thought, wow, Shakespeare was interested in Jewish scripture and he's got these Jewish characters in The Merchant of Venice. Who knew? I didn't. So I was excited about that.

Michelle: When I started thinking about this, what did Shakespeare know about Jews? Then I found out that Jews had been legally exiled from England in 1290, and weren't legally readmitted until the mid-17th century. So this is hundreds of years, but yet, Jews come up in Shakespeare.

Michelle: There's references to Jews. You've got Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare's who died tragically very young, but he wrote a play called The Jew of Malta. Why are these people talking about Jews? Why were they of interest?

Michelle: And so I went down that route. I was very influenced by James Shapiro's amazing book, Shakespeare and the Jews, which came out as I was starting to get interested [00:20:00] in this. It was wonderful timing. And I realized that the Elizabethans, so people in Shakespeare's day, were thinking a lot about Jews for, I would say, two major reasons.

Michelle: One is that they were very concerned with conversion. That here you have a country where people are converting from Catholicism to Protestantism, or at least they're supposed to. And yet there's anxiety about whether people have really embraced this Protestant faith that is the official faith now of the country, Queen Elizabeth.

Michelle: They're in big trouble if they're not Protestant. And there were a lot of threats against Queen Elizabeth by Catholic insurgents, also her successor, King James. So Catholics were of concern. And again, this conversion, how do you know what people really believe?

Michelle: So there were people in England who were Jewish converts, or converted to Christianity from Judaism, who had come over from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition. So conversion was a big deal. Who's [00:21:00] who really? How do you know if someone's secretly still Jewish and just pretending to be Christian?

Michelle: So that was one issue why Jews were of interest. The other main one was the Hebrew scripture. So this was a time when the Bible was being translated into English. So again, that shift from listening to the Bible read in Latin in church which is what would've happened in Catholic England, to a shift – I'm making broad generalizations here – to the Bible being accessible in English to everyone.

Michelle: With that, there was interest in the Bible written in Hebrew. People were studying Hebrew language scholars to try to read the Bible in the original Hebrew language.

Michelle: And there was the sense that the word of God in scripture was so valuable, so important to English identity, to have that proximity, that intimacy with it, and Jews theoretically were connected to that word of God in scripture. So Jews were people [00:22:00] who were very important, the chosen people of God on the one hand.

Michelle: And on the other hand, they were people who had rejected Christ, possibly killed him – did kill him, according to most people. And we're associated with all these bad things: ritual, murder, et cetera, et cetera, poisoning. So there was a deep ambivalence about Jews, but because of their connection to the Hebrew scripture, there was reverence for them, at least in theory.

Michelle: There weren't Jews walking around that you were hanging out and talking to in England. But in theory, they were sacred people. And this interest in the Hebrew scripture, what I started to see was this connection between Queen Elizabeth and all these women in the Hebrew scripture.

Michelle: The judge Deborah, for example, she's often compared to the judge Deborah and to all these women from the scripture. And it happens all the time. It happens in literature, it happens in sermons, it happens in her public pageants. It's all over the place. So this real interest in [00:23:00] connecting Queen Elizabeth to the actual women in the Hebrew scripture was paramount, not just to show praise for Elizabeth, but it felt to me like a project of national identity.

Michelle: ‘We as an English people are intimately connected to the scripture. It is our scripture. It's not the Catholic's scripture, it's our scripture. And we're gonna connect Elizabeth to all these women in the Hebrew scripture to give her that connection’. So I thought, wow, Jewish women are super important. And that's how the project of that book got started.

Varsha: So in a way, they are thinking through this identity of a Jewish woman and linking it to Elizabeth. Okay. I think that imaginative national identity construction is going on here.

Michelle: Yes, yes.

Varsha: Let's get back to your memoir, which is titled The Green World, which I think is an allusion to the green spaces such as [00:24:00] forests and woods in Shakespeare's plays. 

Michelle: Yeah. So ‘green world’ is a literary term that I learned in graduate school that Shakespeare scholars use to describe a green space, a forest, as you say, and in plays like As You Like It and Midsummer Night's Dream, probably most famously, where young people run to escape their families. So you've got the city as a place of conflict where you have to deal with oppressive fathers who don't like the decisions that you're making as a young person. So you run to the forest with your friends and/or lover and you escape.

Michelle: You always have to come back from that green world. So the green world signifies a place of escape, something away from real life, the pressures of real life. But it, in my memoir, it has another meaning as well, which is the green world of Wisconsin, which is where I lived for several years and is a very green space and, for me, [00:25:00] signified a place of escape as well.

Varsha: Did you find that was because of the people around you as well as the green spaces? What I'm trying to get at is it both physical and theoretical that we are talking about here? 

Michelle: Yeah. Such a good question. Yeah. So it is literal, but then also what makes something a green world beyond the physicality of it.

Michelle: And I think for me, looking back, Wisconsin was so weird, I'd never been there before. And I basically just arrived there to start graduate school and it was like I'd arrived on a different planet. I hadn't spent any time in the Midwest. So culturally very different.

Michelle: People, again, this is a broad generalization. I was in Madison, which is a college town. I'd never lived in a place like that. I didn't know people who were farmers. I was meeting people. Just the whole culture of it was so different. So I think for me it was the shock of being in a very different [00:26:00] place.

Michelle: And you can find that kind of place really anywhere. Anywhere you find yourself outside of your comfort zone. And you don't necessarily have to get into an airplane to go to that place. But for me, everything about Wisconsin was strange, but not ‘bad-strange’. So I think the strangeness about a place that you go to, can be a green world as well. 

Varsha: I totally get what you are saying. I have found London to be that place because no matter how weird I am, you know that there's gonna be someone else who's weirder. And sometimes that can actually sharpen questions and what you are seeing so I totally get it, and I think that's definitely what I also understand by green space in Shakespeare. It's somewhere else to go and think about what you know and maybe unlearn what you know.

Michelle: That's right. 

Varsha: Although things are [00:27:00] changing now, I think in academia there seems to be a very lingering suspicion that personal and autobiographical lens is not real or serious scholarship. But this is very important to you.

Varsha: And in your memoir you write that when you were teaching, and I'm quoting you – which is odd in front of you – but I love this sentence. You say, ‘For all of us, Shakespeare felt like a touchstone that we were bringing into the classroom. With it, you could rouse matters closest to your heart’. So have you faced challenges with publication or has your pedagogy been criticized at all for encouraging a reading of Shakespeare's characters through the lens of personal experiences?

Michelle: I think for me, the classroom is always a very welcoming space for those kinds of connections. I remember that once I was teaching a Shakespeare class and it was an introductory Shakespeare class at my [00:28:00] university. So a lot of people who hadn't maybe read any Shakespeare. And I decided to do an exercise where I had them pick out a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream and relate it to their life.

Michelle: And I think I said they could also draw a picture if they wanted. And they came into class and they were just talking and talking – ‘This reminds me of my boyfriend that I had once, and he was so clingy’ – and they just started talking about their lives. And I do think it's that age, people between 18 and 22 do enjoy talking about their personal lives a lot, generally speaking.

Michelle: So Shakespeare is a great way to get a lot of people open up around those topics. So the classroom is always a really open space for those kinds of connections. And I think students appreciate those connections. They enjoy it and it makes them understand the text more, I think.

Michelle: But in terms of colleagues, yeah, I think, I'm not sure if this is just my [00:29:00] perception, but I found that more and more academics I know are craving that personal connection. More interested in writing about personal connection to literary texts and engaging people through those kinds of conversations.

Michelle: So again, maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I am seeing that a lot of my friends who are academics writing more personal pieces or writing more crossover pieces. I'm not sure why that is, it's a zeitgeisty thing. Some people are taken aback that I would put myself out there and talk about personal matters so publicly. I think less a matter of, ‘that's not serious enough with regards to scholarship’, less about that than it is about disclosing.

Michelle: So I think that can make people not necessarily uncomfortable, but I guess they’re amazed that I would do that. Kind of, ‘Why are you walking [00:30:00] around naked? I don't understand. I would never do that’. So that when someone starts talking about their personal life, for some people that's just very surprising. 

Varsha: No, I agree with you. I also tend to think through my experiences and through the body. And in the classroom, I have found this approach wonderfully yielding, as you say.

Varsha: So might you give our listeners a few instances of how your lived experience has given you insight into nuanced ways of reading Shylock and Jessica's dialogues or actions or their silences. And has the knowledge you gained through personal experience enabled you to add nuance to prevailing critical assumptions about these characters?

Michelle: In Merchant of Venice, generally speaking, Shylock and Jessica's relationship is understood as very fraught. She lives alone with her father. He comes off as very controlling. In the history of scholarship [00:31:00] of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock was read as he is bad, she is good.

Michelle: And that's become more nuanced in recent scholarship over the last few decades. People understand Shylock as a more complex character and someone who is very much a victim in the play, that there's Christian hypocrisy, et cetera. It's not so much of a binary opposition as it used to be with regards to how those characters are being read.

Michelle: That said, the plot in the play is that Jessica elopes with her Christian lover, so a man that Shylock hates, and she steals all this stuff from Shylock, money, jewels, et cetera. She leaves while he's out for the evening and that's it. She never sees him again after that. And she doesn't express clear remorse. 

Michelle: But one of the things that I feel about the play, having looked at it very closely for many years now, is that their [00:32:00] relationship is very complicated and it remains complicated even though they're not together on stage for most of the play. They're together in exactly one scene in the play at the beginning. 

Michelle: At the end of the play, after Shylock is – spoiler alert for the plot – Shylock is determined at fault. He is ordered to hand over all of his belongings to the Christians and he's sentenced to conversion to Christianity. But, question mark, what is that gonna look like? No one knows. So we never see that in the play.

Michelle: But Jessica is on stage in the last 200 and something lines of the play, and she's silent. And the last exchange that she has with her new husband, the Christian Lorenzo, is very awkward. 

Michelle: And the last line she has in the play is, ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’. This is after he's ‘oh, everyone likes music. There's beautiful music. Jessica, only animals don't like music. Wait, no, even animals like music’. And she [00:33:00] says, ‘I'm never merry when I hear sweet music’. And that's it. And then she's standing there or doing something for 200 plus lines while everyone is celebrating the defeat of Shylock and ignoring her.

Michelle: And I've seen productions of this play where she's kissing Lorenzo her husband, or I've seen productions where she's sitting in the corner and sad. The point is that there's this silence with Jessica at the end of the play. And it's really unclear to me how she's processing everything that's happened.

Michelle: The Christians don't really seem to accept her. They're still referring to her as an infidel. She's had this tense conversation with her new husband. Everyone is crowing over the defeat of her father and what is she doing? So I think my own fraught relationship with my parents, the death of my father, which I talk about in in my memoir, and my mother's essential breakdown –  losing my parents, basically, in very sad ways – made me think about what [00:34:00] Jessica's going through, actually.

Michelle: You can have a problematic parent, you can have a parent with whom you have a difficult relationship, and sometimes it's harder to know what to do to grieve them, or the grieving is more fraught or it's more complex than if you had a very solid, wonderful relationship with someone who you consider a hero in your life.

Michelle: I can't make a statement for other people and their experiences of grief, of course, and I don't wanna make a generalization, but I guess it was the particular experience of losing a parent that you have very fraught feelings about. Because the fact of the matter is that I don't think you can get away from the deep feelings you have for a parent.

Michelle: No matter what, no matter how well you knew them or how long you had with them or anything, they still represent something very big in your life. And you can't get away from that. And I [00:35:00] really felt like it was a window into Jessica in that play. It's really important that she's on stage but silent in the last chunk of that play because we don't know what's going on with her and there's a lot of things that are unresolved for her.

Michelle: And Shakespeare makes that very clear in the exchanges she has with people that things are not wrapped up and neat for her in any way, shape or form. So I thought about that a lot when I was going through what I was going through with my parents, and I still think about it a lot, how he really captured that experience in a way that's mind-blowing to me.

Michelle: This particular experience of being a child of this traumatized Jewish man. Because that's what I was. And you don't wanna be the child of the traumatized Jewish man. You don't want your parent to be traumatized. You want them to be a much happier person and not carry this weight around them and not be such a hater, but they are, so now [00:36:00] what? And that's very much what I saw in Jessica. 

Varsha: I really love the way in which you are reading these silences with such complexity. I really think that is one of the great benefits of maybe talking from experience of such situations that silence is not just read as something to be dismissed, but actually something to be explored.

Michelle: Yes. 

Varsha: One last question: we have been talking about The Merchant of Venice. And this is a play that people are sometimes really afraid to teach. In your memoir you write that a professor told you that she would never teach the play, and she was saying, what if her Jewish students took offense? What if Shylock made the non-Jewish students anti-Semitic?

Varsha: And I think people are cagey around it. Would you have any advice to someone planning to teach the play? 

Michelle: Oh my gosh. That, that cannot be answered neatly or shortly, especially now. I always teach it in my intro Shakespeare class. And yes, I [00:37:00] am gonna continue teaching that play. Do I have a neat lesson plan right now for addressing issues? No, I do not. 

Michelle: But I think I have grappled with that question of, what if Shylock comes off really badly to people? Because he does. What if people are like, ‘Oh, right, now I get it. Shylock the Jew is really greedy for money and wants to kill Christians. Got it’. That's not okay. But at the same time, what I certainly can't and won't do is tell my students they have to have a certain reading of the play.

Michelle: So it's a line I have to walk where I want them to have interpretive freedom. It's their experience reading and interpreting as long as they're doing it with textual evidence, et cetera. But it's not to say they have to come away with the same reading I do or agree with me or whatever.

Michelle: What I find that's useful is to get meta in the classroom. And I learned this from a student 'cause I was teaching this play once several years ago, and a student raised her [00:38:00] hand and she said, ‘Do you have a hard time teaching this play because you are Jewish?’. And I was so taken aback, I'm like [intake of breath].

Michelle: But then it taught me and I answered the question and I felt ‘oh, okay’. So I feel like to put it on the table: I'm Jewish, and this is in some ways an uncomfortable play for me. And I want you to have your own experience with it. I don't want you to ever feel that you have to say something a certain way or you have to make a certain argument.

Michelle: So I just basically address that from the very beginning. And then we talk about, why might this be a hard play to teach? Why might this be a hard play to read? And we talk about it in that meta way that I get them very involved in, especially as I'm telling them like, ‘Yes, we connect Shakespeare to everyday life, isn't that awesome? Except when it's not’.

Michelle: How might that be difficult now given what's going on in the world with regards to these issues that the play brings up surrounding Jewish [00:39:00] identity. Why might this be particularly difficult to talk about or teach right now?

Michelle: So I'm sure that I will get very meta with them and talk about our experiences teaching and reading it together and talking about it, and why is it so hard to connect literature to real life? It's wonderful and I am an advocate for that, but sometimes it can be hard. What might be the benefits, what might be the risks? That's probably what I will do. 

Varsha: So get into the messiness of it and figure out together why even that discussion might be important. I love it. Thank you so much for all of this, and I'm sure there are so many new things to follow up on and grounds to revisit. Thank you so much, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh my gosh, Varsha, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. I'm a big fan of it, so it's a joy to actually be a guest on it myself. Thank you so much. 

Varsha: That was Professor [00:40:00] Michelle Ephraim speaking about memoir writing. Jewish women in Shakespeare's time, teaching Shakespeare, and her moving memoir Green World, a powerful dialogue between lived experience and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.

Varsha: And with that, I bid you adieu, adieu, adieu. But remember to tune in to Women and Shakespeare, streaming at Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you want to listen to the podcast with a full transcript, head over to the website, www.womenandshakespeare.com.

Varsha: Until then, keep smashing the patriarchy with speech or with silence.