I f you’re searching for the voice of literary Jewish Toronto, look no further than Reb- ecca Rosenblum. An acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, Rosenblum’s latest is a non-fiction work, These Days are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown. She assem- bled the book from her own pandemic-era Facebook posts, and in doing so, docu- mented what everyday life was like during a period many might wish to forget, in a living situation that was less than bucolic. If you’re thinking, Do I really want to read someone’s COVID social media posts? , the answer is yes, you do. Culture critic Lydia Perović writes that she “started this book skeptical but its voice won me over quickly: deadpan, hapless, overly invested in the minutiae, curious and anxious about the well-being of other humans.” I also devoured These Days are Num- bered, then sat with Rosenblum, 45, on a Grange Park bench, next to the Art Gallery of Ontario, amidst a pigeon or two, late this summer—a very different time to be discussing Jewish identity and antisemitism. In our identical white linen button-downs (not planned!), we talked masks, Duolingo Yiddish, and growing up Jewish in small-town Ontario. What follows is an edited and con- densed version of our conversation. Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re a fiction writer. When and how did you come up with the idea of turning your pandemic Facebook posts, about life in a Toronto apartment complex, into a non-fiction book? Rebecca Rosenblum: I never came up with the idea. I was just writing these posts for my own pleasure, and for the conversation with other people. Then a few of them said, Oh, maybe these posts could be a book, and I’m like, I don’t know about that . Eventually, Russell Smith at Dundurn Press and said, I will help you make it into a book if you want . I told him, Yes, that sounds great, because I didn’t know how to do it myself.
my emotions, a little bit of a walled garden. It’s not public in the way that Twitter is. And Twitter is dying, maybe faster. PMB: At various points I found myself wanting to tell March 2020 Rebecca Rosenblum, It’s not the surfaces! It’s the aerosols! , while of course remembering wiping down the surfaces in the Toronto apartment I lived in at the time. During the editing process, was it weird to look back at how the pandemic felt at various points, when different things were under- stood about the virus and how to avoid getting it? RR: It was, and it’s a super useful micro- cosm of how fast we all learn, and how many things were wrong about. All those ideas that we could skip a seat on the subway, and that would be fine, somehow? That was a terrible idea. Nonsense. But everyone did it. Don’t THECJN.CA 49
leading a life that didn’t necessarily seem a part of this book anymore. Which wasn’t to say that I had drawn any firm conclusions about what happened in this period. There is a sneak conclusion in the second to last entry. There’s a kind of, Here’s what I’ve got so far about this experience . That entry was organic, and then I went back and revised it and added some more stuff which wasn’t in the original entry. That’s the sneaky thing you can do when you make posts into a book. Not everything in that original post was there. I didn’t want to have a conclusion, because I’ve drawn no conclusions, but I wanted to have something. I’m smarter than I was.
PMB: How did you decide to end the diary in February 2022?
RR: People have been critical of this, be- cause I didn’t formally write a conclusion or an epilogue. That’s because the pandemic wasn’t over. In many ways, it’s not over. But it was kind of lightening up. I was getting to the point where I could go to things and not feel constantly COVID, COVID, COVID . There was room for other thoughts and other experien- ces that weren’t entirely coloured by it. I was
PMB: Are you still on Facebook?
RR: Oh, yes. I don’t think Facebook will live forever as a medium. But it’s the best thing I’ve found so far, as a kind of test kitchen of
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