Richard Zimler: In search of the silenced

Richard Zimler stormed the bestseller lists in two continents with The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. Several more of his works have touched on other faces of Jewish mysticism. So audiences on his book tours can have a slightly skewed notion of their author. "People sometimes expect the Jew in the hat and the tsitses [tassels]," he says, with a laugh. "Then I arrive, and the first thing I say - partly in jest, partly because it's true - is that I'm a terrible Jew. I don't believe in any of the rules and regulations - not kosher dietary laws, not anything. I don't even believe in one of the first rules: that there's only one God, and He is the God of Israel. I'm not sure that's true."

Instead of dogma and diktat, of talking the talk, Zimler's Judaism depends on walking the walk: on being a proper mensch. "A mensch is someone who does the right thing: the generous thing, the unselfish thing, the caring thing, the world-saving thing," he says. "That's my Judaism. It's not a tribal religion for me."

Certainly, there's nothing remotely Orthodox (or orthodox) about the New York-raised writer or his progress. We're sitting in the airy duplex apartment where Zimler lives in the Portuguese city of Oporto (his home since 1990), surrounded by dramatic neo-expressionist paintings and graphics from artists such as Timothy Hyman (a friend) and Ken Kiff. His partner of more than 25 years, Alex Quintanilha, a leading scientist at the University of Porto, tiptoes out to do some internet research. A few blocks away in this pleasant seaside suburb, the Atlantic hisses and growls on a changeable day when winter feels almost ready to give in to spring. Warm and welcoming, Zimler talks ideas, books and people with unfettered enthusiasm; like someone who feels securely rooted in this modern, liberal home in modern, liberal Europe.

His mother died not long ago, after a period of growing dependency that saw Zimler shuttle back and forth across the Atlantic. Now, inevitably, his emotional ties to New York feel much fainter, while the rabid ideology of the Bush era has cast his own social-democratic principles in an extremist light. His father was a textbook American communist from an immigrant family ("a fervent supporter of Uncle Joe"), who nonetheless worked in advertising and moved the family to apathetic suburbia. "It always bothered me that my parents talked more than they did," he says, although the young Richard accompanied his elder brother on the major anti-Vietnam marches of the time.

At Duke University in North Carolina, this child of a secular but belief-driven home studied comparative religion. His fascination with mythical narrative became something of a vocation when, in his mother's house, he came across a book of Jewish manuscript illustration. He discovered in these monsters and marvels a storytelling wizardry that linked his ancestral tradition to similar strands in Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Christian belief. "It was like, Wow! There was so much more to Judaism than I had ever guessed." Then came his immersion in the works of Gershom Scholem, the reviver of kabbalastic learning and lore who, for Zimler, counts as "one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century".

So political and esoteric currents - the quest for hidden justice, and for hidden truth - merged early and deeply. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, famously, brought a forgotten massacre of 2,000 Jews in Lisbon in 1506 back to harrowing but exhilarating life. It opened a door for countless Portuguese readers onto the lost - and often spurned - treasures of the nation's Sephardic history. "Without any ego," its author says, "I'm happy to say that The Last Kabbalist participated in that."

Yet the single-meaning fundamentalists - Christian, Jewish, Muslim - still march on across the monotheistic world. For Zimler, the mysteries of kabbalistic lore serve to disprove their naive faith in a rigid truth. "The kabbalists had complete, utter disdain for the fundamentalists", he says, and "the great lesson of kabbala, for me, is that life is interpretation. The Torah is poetry, not prose."

His coup with The Last Kabbalist had a poetic, if not an occult, side. In the mid-1990s, it was rejected by 24 publishers in New York, including one who pricelessly told Zimler's agent that "I've bought my Jew book for the year." (He has the letter.) "At that, my jaw dropped open." At his wits' end, he sent it to a Lisbon publisher, wondering if a local tale might stand a chance in Portuguese - but keenly aware that this unfamiliar story of a racial massacre hardly ranked as safe patriotic fare. Finally summoned to a face-to-face meeting, he predicted that "She's going to tell me the same things that the Americans have: fascinating characters, unique story, great setting, but it ain't going to sell." Instead, Zimler - who was then still a bit unsure about his Portuguese - did a startled double-take when his future editor seemed to be saying: "So, what do you want on the cover?"

When the novel soon topped the Portuguese charts, triggering success all over Europe and (finally) in the US and UK, Zimler was knocked off balance by the experience of feast after famine. "I was extremely happy, of course, but it was also incredibly disorienting". Still, the moral of the tale remains clear to him: "If you have crazy ideas, just go with them."

The Last Kabbalist yoked its sketches of secret lore to a meaty and moving historical saga which introduced the Zarco dynasty of Portuguese Jews. Zimler never harboured plans to write a series: "Maybe if I'd had that intentionality, because of the kind of person I am - a little stubborn, a little contrary - I might not even have done it." Yet he found that the 19th-century African plot of Hunting Midnight unexpectedly led him to put his Bushman hero in contact with "a Portuguese family - and a secret Jewish family". So the Zarcos returned, first in Africa and then, battling the Inquisition, in the Goa of his Guardian of the Dawn.

Now, in The Seventh Gate (Constable, £7.99), the family takes a fourth bow, as the tailor, kabbalistic prophet and mischief-loving trickster Isaac Zarco sets out to oppose the rise of Nazism in 1930s Berlin. He achieves union - on the spiritual, political and very physical planes - with young Sophie Riedesel. In her smart and pacey narration, this feisty rebel and would-be Dietrich tells how her racily tolerant city, of sex and jokes and circuses, slowly succumbs to the "nightmare come to life" of Hitler's tyranny.

"They're not sequels," says Zimler of his interconnected books, "but anyone who opens one of them has a chance to open four." Behind them all lies an urge to rescue the lost tribes of history: "Part of my overarching mission is to talk about people whose voice has been systematically silenced." In The Seventh Gate, that buried past involves the Nazi war on disabled people. Through a single case, Zimler dramatises the little-known fate of the 200,000 victims - from autistic children to the blind, deaf and epileptic - who were sterilised, then murdered, after 1933 as a dreadful augury of things to come. "I thought it was a shame, a shande, that, as a Jew, I knew nothing about this aspect [of the Third Reich]. If this was one of the first things they did, then this was meant symbolically. This was an early warning. These people meant business."

Sophie loses her silent, beloved brother Hansi - judged "feebleminded" then, autistic now - to the Nazi killing machine. His murder darkens the mood of a remarkably high-spirited novel that John Irving fans will relish: it mingles political intrigue, erotic escapades and mystical sideshows with all the rule-busting glee of the circus performers who star in it. Sophie can read the signs, but others fail to interpret warning signals. After all, eugenics and selective breeding then enjoyed a global vogue. "It was American, and then went to Germany," Zimler explains. "Quite a number of good scientists passed this off as proper thinking."

Steeped in his discovery of the Nazi onslaught on disabled "lives unworthy of life", Zimler grew, typically, furious: "It's that anger that pushes me through a year or two of writing. Of course, it has to be controlled... But that's what keeps me going: this need for justice, this need for people to be remembered. I'm never going to build a plaque," says the writer, the seeker and (of course) the mensch. "My monument to [the victims] is Hansi and Sophie and their relationship - and that every reader who reads the book with an open mind and heart will be devastated by what happens to them both."

Biography

Born in 1956, Richard Zimler grew up on Long Island, New York, and studied at Duke and Stanford universities. He worked as a San Francisco journalist, before moving to Oporto, Portugal in 1990. His novels include Unholy Ghosts, The Angelic Darkness, The Search for Sana, and four books featuring members of the Zarco family of diaspora Portuguese Jews. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon first appeared in Portuguese in 1996, before becoming a global bestseller; it was followed by Hunting Midnight, Guardian of the Dawn and now The Seventh Gate (Constable). Richard Zimler, who also teaches journalism and literature, lives with his partner in Oporto, Portugal.

Richard Zimler appears at Jewish Book Week (Royal National Hotel, London WC1) at 12.30am on Sunday 4 March: www.jewishbookweek.com