‘Garden State’ of mind: an interview with gay writer Daniel Meltz

Gay writer Daniel Meltz is a New Jersey native. So was the late novelist Philip Roth. In Meltz’s debut novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State” (Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2025), a book as full of religion and sexual frustration as any of Roth’s tomes, Meltz writes as if Roth himself passed him a queer torch. The story of Andy, his dysfunctional family (including mother Bea, older sister Naomi and kid brother Toby) and the powerful religious figures in their lives that unfortunately take advantage of the most vulnerable in their orbit. A combination queer coming-of-age tale crossed (or maybe Star of David-ed) with an intense courtroom drama, “Rabbis of the Garden State” also manages to make New Jersey sound like not such a nice place to visit, after all. Meltz generously made time for an interview in advance of the book’s publication.

Gregg Shapiro: Daniel, in 2025, you have two books being published: your first poetry collection, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” and a debut novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State.” How long did it take you to write the novel?

Daniel Meltz: I wrote the novel in 18 months in the ‘90s. I found an agent back then who got the book to an editor at St. Martin’s Press, but she left the industry, and that was that. I focused on other prose and poetry in the decades after that. I worked on revisions for about six months when Rattling Good Yarns [Press] expressed interest last year.

In chapter 31 of “Rabbis of the Garden State,” protagonist Andy talks about writing poetry, which made me wonder how much of Daniel is in Andy?

Andy’s definitely got a lot of me in him. Andy’s an almost anagram for Danny, after all, which was my name when I was a kid. But Andy’s got a lot more chutzpah than I had. I would never have gotten an F in deportment like Andy gets. [laughs] I was a goody two-shoes. My partner Mike told me that in the book’s earlier incarnation, Andy was too passive, and Mike was right. I gave him a temper and lots of backtalk.

“Rabbis of the Garden State” spans an 11-year period, from 1966 to 1977, and is bursting with references to TV shows, commercials, movies and music from the time. Would you consider yourself to be a product of the pop culture of the era and that it also influenced your writing?

Yes! Pop culture was my whole environment, my default babysitter, my educational swampland while growing up. I was reading novelizations of TV shows like “Gilligan’s Island” and “Get Smart” long before I graduated to Dickens and Proust. It took me a long time to excise the brain rot of the ‘60s, but I wasn’t completely successful. And anyway, a lot of that pop culture was full of life and very funny. Not rot at all.

Speaking of movies, “Rabbis of the Garden State” is quite cinematic, including a reference to Rabbi Landy as being a “handsome 6-foot movie-star rabbi.” If there was a movie version of the novel, who do you envision as Rabbi Landy? Andy? Andy’s mom Bea? Rabbi Loobling?

Mark Eydelshteyn, who played the rich Russian brat in “Anora,” might make a good Andy in the later parts of the book. Bradley Cooper or Adrien Brody for Rabbi Landy. Bea, maybe Carey Mulligan. Rabbi Loobling, I think Timothée Chalamet.

You have an ear for dialects and dialogue. To what do you attribute that?

I love the great dialogue of old Hollywood. I love dialogue-heavy brainiac writers like Iris Murdoch and Philip Roth. I love how in real-life dialogue, people aren’t always listening to each other so that in a stream of back-and-forth, you can hear two completely different discussions going on, which I like to capture in my writing. I also have what my partner Mike calls a 1940s New York accent which makes me chew very deliberately on words, making it all very conscious. I grew up in Jersey yeshivas with all these old-time Jews talking like Myron Cohen. I love the English language, and I also love creative cursers like Mrs. Garr [Georgie’s mother].

You also have an extensive knowledge of Judaica. Did you study to be a rabbi?

I attended yeshiva from 1966 to 1974, most of grammar school and all of high school. For a few minutes, I thought of becoming a rabbi, but then I remembered I was gay. Not an option in 1974.

You mention “rabbinical love slaves” in chapter 24, and as it turns out, Andy’s mother, Bea, is not the only one obsessed with a Rabbi (Landy), as Andy shares his mother’s passion for the closeted Rabbi Loobling. Do you think this similarity is one of the reasons that Andy and Bea have such an antagonistic relationship?

That’s a satisfying observation, Gregg. I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it’s totally there. They don’t want to acknowledge in the other that which is so obvious in themselves. Both characters have father issues, and rabbis are so fatherly. These two rabbis, anyway. I don’t think the parallel is completely conscious in either of them, but Andy makes a deliberate effort to avoid talking about Rabbi Loobling with his mother because she is intrusive and horny and might try to claim the Talmud teacher for herself.

Andy’s childhood friend Georgie Garr tells him that his father said that “Hitler shoulda killed all the Jews.” With that in mind, “Rabbis of the Garden State” is being published at a time when there has been a measurable rise in antisemitism. Please say something about writing a novel with Jewish themes at this time in history.

I like that the book doesn’t traffic in the grubby stereotype of the money-hungry Jew of a lot of literature and movies. This Jewish family is pretty impoverished. I hope that makes the Judaism kind of secondary and the family more relatable to non-Jews. Everybody knows what it’s like to be madly in love with someone who’s no good for you, regardless of your faith. People have told me that Jewish literature is a hard sell, particularly in this environment. I would love to have as many people read the book as possible. If in the reading they see how corrosive Georgie’s stupidity is, how hurtful and personal, that’s a good thing. After that incident in the book, Andy has nothing more to do with Georgie.

In the latter part of the novel, it unexpectedly turns into a courtroom drama. Was that your intention from the start? If not, how did that develop? 

Yes, that was my intention from the start. In an earlier version, that part of the book was simply a transcript of the trial, but my publisher, Ian Henzel of Rattling Good Yarns Press, thought that was a mistake because it lost Andy’s first-person point of view. He was so right! I took a long time rethinking that, including finding a way to give Andy an active role in the courtroom. It was wonderfully fun to figure that out because all the pieces of that puzzle were in the story already. For example, in part one of the book, Andy discovers a shocking transcript of his mother’s therapy sessions with Rabbi Landy, who’s also a student doctor of psychoanalysis. I figured out how to reuse that scandalous discovery later on in the trial.

In your acknowledgments, you mention gay writer Felice Picano, who passed away in mid-March. Can you please say a few words about Felice?

Felice! I am brokenhearted! I met him a couple of years ago when we were on the same bill at a KGB reading in Kathleen Warnock’s “Drunken! Careening! Writers” series on East Fourth Street. I was reading poetry, had just found out that I was getting my first book of poems published, and out of nowhere, Felice came up to me after the reading and said, “I want to blurb you.” So generous! He didn’t know me. We stayed in touch. He invited me to read with him at The LGBTQ+ Center in the Village. When I told him about “Rabbis of the Garden State,” he said he wanted to blurb me again and gave me such a zing of a quote … plus told me about a hot rabbi with whom he’d had an affair in his youth. I read a lot of his books in this period and loved them all. So fluent, raunchy, groundbreaking, startling. He was so kind, hilarious, welcoming and connected. Knew everybody. And if we were at a gathering with any of these luminaries, he never hesitated to introduce me: “Come on. Let’s go say hello to Brad Gooch.”

Have you started working on or thinking about your next writing project?

Yes. I worked for many years with blind and deaf young people and am thinking about a novel that Venn-diagrams those worlds.