//features//
Spring 2021
Spring 2021
Interview with David Hopen,
Author of The Orchard
Daniel Meadvin and DJ Presser
David Hopen’s debut novel, The Orchard, follows Ari Eden’s journey from his quiet days in a Brooklyn yeshiva to a ritzy, Modern Orthodox Jewish prep school in South Florida.
As graduates of Modern Orthodox prep schools ourselves, we found The Orchard to be an engaging look at both the trials and successes of these unique institutions. Interested in learning more about how The Orchard came to be, we conducted an email interview with David Hopen.
DJ and Daniel: To start, we’d love to hear a little bit about you. Where are you from? Where did you go to school, and what did you study? When did you start writing The Orchard?
David Hopen: I grew up in Hollywood, Florida—the superior Hollywood. I attended a wonderful yeshiva high school before going off to college at Yale and earning my master’s at Oxford. My research interests involve legal and moral philosophy as well as literary studies. At present, I enjoy my double life: Yale Law School 1L [first-year] by day, novelist by night. (At least I think that’s the right division.) I began The Orchard as a high school senior and wrote the bulk of the novel as an undergraduate.
DJ and D: One of the most striking aspects of The Orchard for us, an alumni of Modern Orthodox Jewish day schools, was how it effectively captures that world and lifestyle. On the other hand, some choices in the book seem exaggerated (extreme opulence and partying come to mind). How did your background inform the world of The Orchard, and what inspired any digressions from your own experiences?
DH: My background impacted the way I constructed the universe of Zion Hills: the rigor and richness of a dual curriculum, the depth of lifelong friendships, the sense of communal warmth and insularity, the complex relationship among character, status, and religious norms. I wanted to ground this story in a world that understood a delicate balancing of tradition and modern life and that could embrace unique commitments to myth-making, textual study, ritual, transcendence. And so, in that sense, my experience informed those pillars of the novel. Yet in terms of the novel’s explosive and/or Gatsbian aspects, I’m afraid I owe such elements to my imagination.
DJ and D: On the topic of Modern Orthodox literature, the other day I [Daniel] was browsing a local bookstore in Morningside Heights (Book Culture, for our Columbia readers) and noticed The Orchard prominently featured on the “New Fiction” shelf. I’m not familiar with too many novels, or any really, about Modern Orthodox teenagers that have achieved similar success. Are there any particular literary or plot choices that you feel helped the novel appeal to a broader audience––that is, beyond Modern Orthodox Jewry?
DH: I think the novel appeals to a wide range of readers because it offers a universal story. Everyone remembers what it’s like to come of age, to feel a need to belong, to experience first love, first heartbreak. The steady march toward adulthood demands reckoning with yearning and transformation and natural opportunities to redefine how we constitute ourselves—demands that persist for decades to come, as readers of all backgrounds and ages assure me. The long and short of it, I suppose, is that the novel was never intended to exist exclusively for one audience. This is a book that belongs to all readers.
DJ and D: The novel follows a gang of four title characters, each with his own distinctive archetype: Ari is unassuming, but deeply thoughtful under the surface; Evan, the antagonist, is supremely intelligent, and sometimes crippled by his own abilities; Amir is an ever-ambitious student, devoted at his core to his family and faith; Noah is simply kind hearted. When writing the book, did you see yourself in any of these characters? Or in all of them? Did you consider that one of these models is optimal in some sense?
DH: I do find fragments of myself in these characters—and not only in those characters. My hope was to breathe life into personalities with which diverse audiences might identify, and I’ve been humbled to see readers undergo that phenomenon of identification. But I’m not certain I tried engineering one optimal model. These are characters marked by ambition, idiosyncrasies, secrets, loss. Characters who carry extraordinary gifts, extraordinary flaws. In wandering through The Orchard, so to speak, I think readers piece together some moral geometry, a personalized sense of how these traits might combine to facilitate fulfillment.
DJ and D: In that vein, the middle part of the book includes a series of in-depth discussions and debates between the friend group and their high school principal Rabbi Bloom, addressing timeless philosophical questions like subjective morality or God’s existence. Accompanying the characters on these philosophical expeditions required much more brain power than, say, reading about Ari’s latest romantic encounter. The fact that you included these sections knowing they wouldn’t be easy for all seems like a deliberate choice. Why did you feel these denser, more academic portions of the book were critical? And what message are you hoping readers will take away from them?
DH: I can’t believe you didn’t think Ari’s romantic moments required equal brain power! Yes: it was, of course, deliberate. It felt natural. The students are bright, ambitious, preternaturally hungry, increasingly focused on questions that render smaller other daily elements of life. I wanted to replicate how those discussions might take place, attuned to the intensity, dreams, humor, and fears of this group. These inquiries formed an essential backbone of the story, even if the topics proved challenging. Still, if I may suggest, the novel features sufficient alternatives, let’s call them, for those less interested in philosophical explorations and more interested in the heart-stopping, the supernatural, the crueler and psychologically thrilling events of life. I’ve always appreciated stories that can function on multiple levels, that might provide different journeys for different readers, and it’s my hope that The Orchard might offer that experience. In some ways, this is a novel that fuses at least two stories into one.
DJ and D: One more follow-up to that point. A consistent undercurrent of the meetings discussed above and the rest of the book in general is Evan developing a personal guiding philosophy––a sort of mashup between Nietzsche and Jewish mysticism. Did you intend for Evan’s world-view to be your own addition to the philosophical conversations, Western and Jewish, into which the book delves? Or, was it a plot device, not to be read into too deeply?
DH: Evan’s burgeoning philosophy facilitates dangerous events and unhinged behavior. Yet embedded within his explorations are earnest theories of value—theories that utilize and revise Lucretius, Nietzsche, the Zohar, Sidgwick and that focus on the limits of selfhood, sacrifice, and dark beauty. All this to say: I’m happy that readers extract coherent contributions to topics in ethics, theology, and aesthetics, but that they nevertheless recognize where such investigations derail.
DJ and D: A key allusion utilized in the novel is the Talmud’s story of Pardes, the mythical garden of knowledge into which four Tanaitic sages entered. The story is one of the Talmud’s most intriguing. What inspired you to choose Pardes as the grounding framework for The Orchard?
DH: The myth just blows me away, and has for a long while now. It’s eerie, it’s haunting, it pushes us to grapple with the weight we afford biblical legend and how religious practice differentiates between metaphor and belief. Plus, the story gives a peek behind the curtains at the divine machinery and at what might be called higher conceptions of justice. Most concretely, though, I think the myth touches upon how we think about holiness and worth and how we build civic identities. So, all in all, I thought Pardes served as a perfect organizing principle for the story I wanted to tell. If, growing up, one is surrounded by Talmudic study, one internalizes these types of stories, though without always stepping back to appreciate their depth, their shock value, their modern applications. The exercise—and joy—of writing this book allowed me to engage with these questions in new and clarifying light.
DJ and D: Some readers of The Orchard may observe its thematic similarities to Chaim Potok novels like The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev: in all three, a young Brooklyn Jew is confronted with the wonders––and dangers––of secular wisdom and culture. In writing The Orchard, did you consider Potok’s works to be a key influence? In what ways did you choose to incorporate or jettison his tropes and why?
DH: In all honesty—no, Potok wasn’t on my mind. Reading The Chosen, as a kid, was an enjoyable experience, but I wouldn’t say it exerted much in the way of influence. I think it’s more accurate to say that the thinkers whose work impacted my early literary development, particularly while first formulating my vision for The Orchard, include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Donna Tartt, Lawrence Durrell, Marisha Pessl, and, of course, Willy Shakespeare.
DJ and D: One critique I’ve seen of The Orchard is that its female characters occupy the backseat; the main gang is four boys, and their primary role-model, Rabbi Bloom, is also male. Was this a descriptive choice meant to reflect the reality of yeshiva high schools and the typical roles male and female students fill in them? Are these merely the characters from whose perspective you felt most comfortable writing?
DH: Part of the experience of publishing and entering the public sphere, as I’ve learned throughout this process, is embracing the reality that an author surrenders some degree of ownership once the book travels through the world and assumes a life of its own. That said, I’ll gently register my disagreement with the assessment that a character such as, say, Sophia Winter occupies a backseat. In Sophia, one finds breathtaking intelligence coupled with a complex and sophisticated interior life. Above all else, what I focused on capturing was a force of depth, a surpassing enigma, someone against whom others attempt—and fail—to measure themselves.
DJ and D: One final question: we include ourselves among the many readers who enjoyed The Orchard. Many of us are wondering will we get to read more David Hopen? What’re your authorial plans going forward? Should we expect another adventure in the same genre or was The Orchard a one off personal project?
DH: There’s more to come. Currently, when I’m not doing schoolwork, I’m developing a TV adaptation of The Orchard. And I’m also at work on my second novel, an entirely different story about which I’m very excited. So, more adventures await.
//DANIEL MEADVIN is a sophomore in Columbia College and politics editor at The Current. He can be reached at dm3517@columbia.edu.
//DJ PRESSER is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He can be reached at djp2157@columbia.edu.
Cover of The Orchard
As graduates of Modern Orthodox prep schools ourselves, we found The Orchard to be an engaging look at both the trials and successes of these unique institutions. Interested in learning more about how The Orchard came to be, we conducted an email interview with David Hopen.
DJ and Daniel: To start, we’d love to hear a little bit about you. Where are you from? Where did you go to school, and what did you study? When did you start writing The Orchard?
David Hopen: I grew up in Hollywood, Florida—the superior Hollywood. I attended a wonderful yeshiva high school before going off to college at Yale and earning my master’s at Oxford. My research interests involve legal and moral philosophy as well as literary studies. At present, I enjoy my double life: Yale Law School 1L [first-year] by day, novelist by night. (At least I think that’s the right division.) I began The Orchard as a high school senior and wrote the bulk of the novel as an undergraduate.
DJ and D: One of the most striking aspects of The Orchard for us, an alumni of Modern Orthodox Jewish day schools, was how it effectively captures that world and lifestyle. On the other hand, some choices in the book seem exaggerated (extreme opulence and partying come to mind). How did your background inform the world of The Orchard, and what inspired any digressions from your own experiences?
DH: My background impacted the way I constructed the universe of Zion Hills: the rigor and richness of a dual curriculum, the depth of lifelong friendships, the sense of communal warmth and insularity, the complex relationship among character, status, and religious norms. I wanted to ground this story in a world that understood a delicate balancing of tradition and modern life and that could embrace unique commitments to myth-making, textual study, ritual, transcendence. And so, in that sense, my experience informed those pillars of the novel. Yet in terms of the novel’s explosive and/or Gatsbian aspects, I’m afraid I owe such elements to my imagination.
DJ and D: On the topic of Modern Orthodox literature, the other day I [Daniel] was browsing a local bookstore in Morningside Heights (Book Culture, for our Columbia readers) and noticed The Orchard prominently featured on the “New Fiction” shelf. I’m not familiar with too many novels, or any really, about Modern Orthodox teenagers that have achieved similar success. Are there any particular literary or plot choices that you feel helped the novel appeal to a broader audience––that is, beyond Modern Orthodox Jewry?
DH: I think the novel appeals to a wide range of readers because it offers a universal story. Everyone remembers what it’s like to come of age, to feel a need to belong, to experience first love, first heartbreak. The steady march toward adulthood demands reckoning with yearning and transformation and natural opportunities to redefine how we constitute ourselves—demands that persist for decades to come, as readers of all backgrounds and ages assure me. The long and short of it, I suppose, is that the novel was never intended to exist exclusively for one audience. This is a book that belongs to all readers.
DJ and D: The novel follows a gang of four title characters, each with his own distinctive archetype: Ari is unassuming, but deeply thoughtful under the surface; Evan, the antagonist, is supremely intelligent, and sometimes crippled by his own abilities; Amir is an ever-ambitious student, devoted at his core to his family and faith; Noah is simply kind hearted. When writing the book, did you see yourself in any of these characters? Or in all of them? Did you consider that one of these models is optimal in some sense?
DH: I do find fragments of myself in these characters—and not only in those characters. My hope was to breathe life into personalities with which diverse audiences might identify, and I’ve been humbled to see readers undergo that phenomenon of identification. But I’m not certain I tried engineering one optimal model. These are characters marked by ambition, idiosyncrasies, secrets, loss. Characters who carry extraordinary gifts, extraordinary flaws. In wandering through The Orchard, so to speak, I think readers piece together some moral geometry, a personalized sense of how these traits might combine to facilitate fulfillment.
DJ and D: In that vein, the middle part of the book includes a series of in-depth discussions and debates between the friend group and their high school principal Rabbi Bloom, addressing timeless philosophical questions like subjective morality or God’s existence. Accompanying the characters on these philosophical expeditions required much more brain power than, say, reading about Ari’s latest romantic encounter. The fact that you included these sections knowing they wouldn’t be easy for all seems like a deliberate choice. Why did you feel these denser, more academic portions of the book were critical? And what message are you hoping readers will take away from them?
DH: I can’t believe you didn’t think Ari’s romantic moments required equal brain power! Yes: it was, of course, deliberate. It felt natural. The students are bright, ambitious, preternaturally hungry, increasingly focused on questions that render smaller other daily elements of life. I wanted to replicate how those discussions might take place, attuned to the intensity, dreams, humor, and fears of this group. These inquiries formed an essential backbone of the story, even if the topics proved challenging. Still, if I may suggest, the novel features sufficient alternatives, let’s call them, for those less interested in philosophical explorations and more interested in the heart-stopping, the supernatural, the crueler and psychologically thrilling events of life. I’ve always appreciated stories that can function on multiple levels, that might provide different journeys for different readers, and it’s my hope that The Orchard might offer that experience. In some ways, this is a novel that fuses at least two stories into one.
DJ and D: One more follow-up to that point. A consistent undercurrent of the meetings discussed above and the rest of the book in general is Evan developing a personal guiding philosophy––a sort of mashup between Nietzsche and Jewish mysticism. Did you intend for Evan’s world-view to be your own addition to the philosophical conversations, Western and Jewish, into which the book delves? Or, was it a plot device, not to be read into too deeply?
DH: Evan’s burgeoning philosophy facilitates dangerous events and unhinged behavior. Yet embedded within his explorations are earnest theories of value—theories that utilize and revise Lucretius, Nietzsche, the Zohar, Sidgwick and that focus on the limits of selfhood, sacrifice, and dark beauty. All this to say: I’m happy that readers extract coherent contributions to topics in ethics, theology, and aesthetics, but that they nevertheless recognize where such investigations derail.
DJ and D: A key allusion utilized in the novel is the Talmud’s story of Pardes, the mythical garden of knowledge into which four Tanaitic sages entered. The story is one of the Talmud’s most intriguing. What inspired you to choose Pardes as the grounding framework for The Orchard?
DH: The myth just blows me away, and has for a long while now. It’s eerie, it’s haunting, it pushes us to grapple with the weight we afford biblical legend and how religious practice differentiates between metaphor and belief. Plus, the story gives a peek behind the curtains at the divine machinery and at what might be called higher conceptions of justice. Most concretely, though, I think the myth touches upon how we think about holiness and worth and how we build civic identities. So, all in all, I thought Pardes served as a perfect organizing principle for the story I wanted to tell. If, growing up, one is surrounded by Talmudic study, one internalizes these types of stories, though without always stepping back to appreciate their depth, their shock value, their modern applications. The exercise—and joy—of writing this book allowed me to engage with these questions in new and clarifying light.
DJ and D: Some readers of The Orchard may observe its thematic similarities to Chaim Potok novels like The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev: in all three, a young Brooklyn Jew is confronted with the wonders––and dangers––of secular wisdom and culture. In writing The Orchard, did you consider Potok’s works to be a key influence? In what ways did you choose to incorporate or jettison his tropes and why?
DH: In all honesty—no, Potok wasn’t on my mind. Reading The Chosen, as a kid, was an enjoyable experience, but I wouldn’t say it exerted much in the way of influence. I think it’s more accurate to say that the thinkers whose work impacted my early literary development, particularly while first formulating my vision for The Orchard, include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Donna Tartt, Lawrence Durrell, Marisha Pessl, and, of course, Willy Shakespeare.
DJ and D: One critique I’ve seen of The Orchard is that its female characters occupy the backseat; the main gang is four boys, and their primary role-model, Rabbi Bloom, is also male. Was this a descriptive choice meant to reflect the reality of yeshiva high schools and the typical roles male and female students fill in them? Are these merely the characters from whose perspective you felt most comfortable writing?
DH: Part of the experience of publishing and entering the public sphere, as I’ve learned throughout this process, is embracing the reality that an author surrenders some degree of ownership once the book travels through the world and assumes a life of its own. That said, I’ll gently register my disagreement with the assessment that a character such as, say, Sophia Winter occupies a backseat. In Sophia, one finds breathtaking intelligence coupled with a complex and sophisticated interior life. Above all else, what I focused on capturing was a force of depth, a surpassing enigma, someone against whom others attempt—and fail—to measure themselves.
DJ and D: One final question: we include ourselves among the many readers who enjoyed The Orchard. Many of us are wondering will we get to read more David Hopen? What’re your authorial plans going forward? Should we expect another adventure in the same genre or was The Orchard a one off personal project?
DH: There’s more to come. Currently, when I’m not doing schoolwork, I’m developing a TV adaptation of The Orchard. And I’m also at work on my second novel, an entirely different story about which I’m very excited. So, more adventures await.
//DANIEL MEADVIN is a sophomore in Columbia College and politics editor at The Current. He can be reached at dm3517@columbia.edu.
//DJ PRESSER is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He can be reached at djp2157@columbia.edu.
Cover of The Orchard