Eileen Pollack asks: Would you know a terrorist if you met one?

HALLIE EPHRON: If your neighbor were a home-grown terrorist, how could you not know? Eileen Pollack thrilling new novel, "The Professor of Immortality," sets up precisely this situation. It's inspired by the true story of American terrorist, the Unabomber.


Today we're delighted to welcome Eileen to Jungle Red, and looking forward to hearing the story behind her remarkable new book.

EILEEN POLLACK: My friends in Manhattan can’t understand how people can say they knew that the guy who went on a shooting spree was stockpiling weapons and spouting racist or anti-Semitic diatribes. Given that I spent 27 years living in the Midwest, they turn to me for an explanation. Is everyone out there a white supremacist?

No. To think so is its own kind of bigotry. The vast majority of people in this country are kind, tolerant, open-hearted. But plenty of right-wing extremists live between the coasts (and on the coasts) and predicting which ones might show up at the mall with an AK-47 isn’t always easy.

I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh had attended at least one meeting of something called the Michigan Militia. He practiced building bombs on a farm two hours’ north of my new home. A locksmith at the university where I taught was suspected of being McVeigh’s accomplice.

Alarmed, I spent the next decade researching the militias. This turned out to be surprisingly easy: the militias met as openly as the Rotarians. Not only was I welcome to hang out with the local branch to celebrate “Tax Blast” by nailing a 1040 to a tree and using it as a target, the group had set out a pan of kosher hot dogs for any Jews who might be attending. The moms and dads openly carried guns, but they would have welcomed anyone who helped them defend our state from an invasion by foreign terrorists, a round-up by agents of our own government, or a horde of starving black and brown people and white urban wusses who might, if the grid went down, swarm the countryside in search of food.

Puzzled as to how the lefties I knew in Ann Arbor could coexist with neighbors who saw the world through such a radically different lens, I wrote a novel in which a liberal California couple move to a cute Michigan town, only to find that most of their neighbors belong to the militia. 

The manuscript collected nothing but rejections. After all, the editors in New York thought white supremacists had gone extinct with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s. Not until years later did Breaking and Entering find a publisher. A group of “Christian warriors” called the Hutaree were arrested near Ann Arbor for conspiring to wage war on the police. None of my buddies from the Tax Blast belonged to the Hutaree, but my son attended high school with a member’s son.

Even at the university where I taught, I might have found a terrorist among my students. The Unabomber, as it turned out, had earned a math degree at the University of Michigan in the 1960s. The more I read about his life, the more Ted Kaczynski reminded me of dozens of my brilliant but disaffected white male students. Some wrote violent, misogynistic narratives because that was what they had grown up seeing in the movies, on TV, in video games and online porn. Some had been abused. Some were showing signs of mental illness. Should I have turned them in to the authorities? Urged them to seek counseling? 

I wrote The Professor of Immortality to explore such questions. Who are the terrorists among us? How can we distinguish them from our neighbors, students, and friends with whom we merely disagree?

HALLIE: If that isn't a question for our times, I don't know what is.   As someone who tries to be accepting of differences, what would it take for me to raise an alarm? How about you?

I, for one, am hoping Eileen tell us more about the research she did for writing the book. Did she talk to his neighbors??

Eileen Pollack is a writer whose novel Breaking and Entering, about the deep divisions between blue and red America, was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection.

She also is the author of Paradise, New York, a novel, and two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, as well as a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull (made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain) and two innovative textbooks, Creative Nonfiction and Creative Composition.