First, a few questions about your book The Gilded Chamber : A Novel of Queen Esther:

[Q:] Congratulations on a terrific novel, especially impressive for a first effort. Is there a particular reason you chose the story of Esther for your first? Was this a story that you'd wanted to tell or one that appealed to you for a given reason?

Thanks! Actually, this is my fourth novel, but it is the first one published. It is my second historical novel. I chose Esther because I thought it would be fun and interesting to try to understand the story both in its real historical context and from Esther¹s point of view. I had just read a marvelous book about the political implications of the story, Yoram Hazony's The Dawn, and realized that the characters could have so much more depth than we traditionally attribute to them.

[Q:] It seems that you stayed quite true to the core of the Bible story but then fleshed it out in the margins: are there alternate contemporaneous versions or just the Book of Esther? Did you have a free hand to create a background for Esther or do we know more about her?

I was adamant about staying true to the story, since my objective was to try to imagine how it might have really happened and to fit the biblical events into the context of historical events of the time in which it is set. Several different versions of Esther exist and redaction of the story has been the subject of much scholarly work. I did my best to find the various versions but in the end I followed the most commonly accepted redaction. The differences tend to be very small and insignificant in terms of the story events.

We do not know more about Esther than the biblical account tells us. I created the back story for her with a plausible explanation for why she was orphaned and what she was doing living in the house of her older unmarried cousin (which has, historically, greatly troubled the rabbinic scholars, since it is rather improper.) Archaeological evidence tells us of a treasury official at the time of Xerxes by the name of Marduka, though that was not an uncommon name at the time. There is also a shrine in current day Iran (in the Hamadan province) known as the Tomb of Mordechai and Esther, though we have no clear evidence that they are in fact the two people buried in the spot.

[Q:] One of the most interesting choices you do make is to have Esther (then Hadassah] and Mordechai be not just cousins but betrothed, was there a certain dynamic that you thought that would give the story that it might not otherwise have?

I sought to make sense of why this young attractive orphan was living in the house of an unmarried cousin. At that time it was common, even desirable for first cousins to marry. So it made sense to me that they would have been betrothed. After I thought this through, I discovered that some of the old rabbinic texts from about the year 200 or so speculated that they were in fact betrothed when she was sent to the king.

In terms of the story, the dynamic of loss is much greater with that attachment. It also brings a sense of betrayal or perhaps weakness from the man she trusted to take care of her, which makes her realize she has to rely on herself. In the biblical story we see she is brave and thinks for herself. I wanted to provide some motivation for that. People don't talk much about Mordechai and what he would have had to give up to be a successful court Jew. I try to imagine that and then show how he goes through a change. The romantic attachment allowed for a greater motivation there, too.

[Q:] Based on the level of detail you include about life in the harem, the research you did for the book must have been prodigious. What sorts of resources did yo